The Story of the Other Cheese Cakes

Cafeteria food. I hear people talk about Tater Tots, square pizza and fruit cups in American schools. Peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, maybe? But in Russia, school food was a mixed blessing.

In second grade, my teacher made everyone go to the cafeteria and eat omelets for lunch. I got food poisoning and I refused to eat eggs for 10 years. But my best friend Ilya taught me to crumble hamburger into mashed potatoes. That was delicious — maybe because I was three years old.

Soviet pre-school food is very different from American food. Three hot meals a day, with soups, and snacks, and meat, fish, and dairy. In theory, it’s better for the growing body, but totally worse for the growing soul. In practice, our totalitarian regime starts with pressuring toddlers to drink milk with skins, eat semolina porridge with lumps, and other things that thousands of my contemporaries unload in therapy. My worst memory is this ordinary supper: pickled herring with vinaigrette salad (boiled beets, potatoes, carrots, pickles, peas, raw onions, sauerkraut, and vegetable oil), together with sweet tea with milk. Herring and beets and milk?. Who thought of this intricate combination? I shiver and gag 35 years after eating this meal. Needless to say, I refused to eat any of those dishes the moment I finished pre-school, and to write this, I had to look up the ingredients for the salad. The horrible flavor came back to my memory immediately.

Not my pre-school, but close enough. My era, based on the teacher’s perm

But! There were a few things from my school menu I love and crave and cook to this day. One of them is “syrniki”. Fun fact: in America, farmer’s cheese, the product used for syrniki, is rare. People eat mostly cottage cheese or ricotta. And they are not exactly the same. In Russian, this dairy product doesn’t have “cheese” in its name. It’s called “tvorog” or curds, and the name reflects the process of milk curdling to make the cheese flakes. Regular “yellow” cheese is called “syr”. In Ukraine and some southern regions the same word (syr) is used for both. Which is accurate, since the technology of all curdled dairy products is very similar. So, it is funny to me that the farmers cheese patties I’m describing here are made from tvorog but called syrniki — cheese cakes. They got the name from the southern dialect. But in English, cheesecake is something completely different!

Getting farmers cheese is a quest of its own. You can make it from scratch, it’s rather simple, but “ain’t nobody got time for that!” Serious research showed that it has been sold in our supermarket in the dairy section next to ricotta all along, the common “Friendship” brand!

Magic! It exists, who would have known? Kosher too!

So when my husband was dispatched to procure the much anticipated farmers cheese, the store clerk literally cornered him, to find out what the hell we do with it. In all his years of work, he had never seen people buying it, and was always perplexed as to what exotic dish necessitates such an exotic ingredient. Lemme tell ya! Russians eat it as is with sour cream or jam, or with dried fruit and nuts. It is one of the first baby foods, and popular snacks. My parents eat it often for breakfast. You can make soufflés and cakes with it. I do not care for farmers cheese à la naturelle much, but syrniki is a completely different story.

The problem is, syrniki have been my Mount Everest for many years. I have a few of those dishes I just can’t conquer. They would always stick, or fall apart. My Mom didn’t cook them much, so she couldn’t help. My mother-in-law has been our syrniki expert. She would cook them, and I would indulge. Proper syrniki are made with raisins, have vanilla scent, and are served with sour cream or (very preschool style) condensed milk or jam. But I gave up on trying to make them. Another outcome of being raised in a country of perpetual deficit is neuroticism around “wasting food’! That is, till one day the power of the Internet brought me a recipe in which regular flour is substituted for a rice one, et voila! Perfect, light and fluffy, yet crispy on the outside syrniki. Every. single. time! Since that mountain has been conquered, I’m making them almost weekly, and now so can you!

Russian Cheese Cakes

The Magic Ingredients

• 2 packages Friendship farmers cheese (7.5 oz each)
• 1 egg
• 1 pinch salt
• 1 dash vanilla flavor
• 1 tbs sweetener (I use stevia)
• 4 tbsp rice flour (plus more for rolling)
• raisins (optional)
• vegetable oil & butter for frying
• sour cream, sweetened condensed milk, jams, fresh berries to serve

The Method

• To a large bowl add salt, sweetener, egg, and farmers cheese. Crumble all with the fork.
• If you like raisins, put them in a small bowl and cover with boiling water (or rum) to plump up.

• Once the ingredients are mixed up, add 4 tablespoons of rice flour. It really makes all the difference, and I found that four is the right amount for this much cheese.
• Form a ball, cover the bowl and refrigerate for 15–20 minutes. I never tried it overnight, because of eggs, but a few hours only made the “dough” better.

• Mix the raisins in, and transfer to a surface dusted with more rice flour.

• Roll a sausage type a shape, like you did with play-dough in above mentioned pre-school, the mixture holds the shape really well.
• Out of this amount of cheese I make about 12 patties, you can make more of the smaller ones, just don’t make them too tall, or they will not bake through.

The glass method

• To shape a perfect syrnik, either shape by hand, it’s pretty easy, or put a larger sized glass, and roll it around. It will form the perfect cake.

Syrnik perfection!

• Heat a large pan, I like the mixture of vegetable oil & butter, you can use one or the other. Medium high is perfect.
• Place the patties into the pan, and cook with lid closed for 4–5 minutes.

Give them space not to stick to one another

• The cheese melts, but the egg & rice flour help the cheese cakes hold their shape.
• After 5 minutes, flip carefully over, and cook for another five minutes, reducing the heat, if the cakes brown up too quickly.

They smell divine, and very homey too!

• Serve while hot with sour cream, or whipped cream, or jams, or berries. The perfect, most authentic combination for me is with the sweetened condensed milk.
• They refrigerate well, but I find it to be the right amount for a breakfast for two, or one if you are really hungry!