Tonight’s Dinner

Louis Golding tells in his newest book of short stories, “This Wanderer,” the touching tale of Hyman Lipshin, who in Doomington dreams of the wonders of the far world; but when he inherits riches and can travel all over the earth and dine luxuriously at the most expensive restaurants, Doomington calls him back and he thinks with nostalgic tenderness of the “varrenikas” his mother used to make.

In case you wonder, in reading this story, how one makes these “varrenikas” of which poor Hyman Lipshin thinks with such poignant longing, I am offering you here two recipes for them. Cheese “varrenikas” for a dairy meal and Buckwheat or Kasha “varrenikas” for the usual supper table. For both of them you roll out your dough—the same dough you use for home-made noodles— rather thinly and cut into square pieces. These pieces you fill then either with a mixture consisting of about one pound of home made cheese well beaten with two or three eggs, a tablespoonful of butter, sugar to taste, a dash of salt, and—if you wish—some raisins; or you mix buckwheat with a generous amount of chicken fat in which onions have been browned, add pepper and salt to taste and stir the whole mixture well so that buckwheat, fat and onions become one malleable and adhering mass.

Either of these two fillings you put in the proper amount on your little squares of dough, close these latter carefully at the ends — European women use a little instrument shaped like a tiny wheel with which they make corrugated edges to their “varrenikas,” but a fork pressed down on the dough serves as well—cook them in boiling, slightly salted water for about twenty minutes and serve them as a special dish or as a side dish to meat.

Aaron Ibn Hayyim, the Younger, was one of the victims of the earthquake which occurred in Smyrna in July, 1688.