Jewish Cheese Blintzes for Shavuot

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Cheese blintzes are traditional for the Jewish holiday of Shavuot.

Growing up, my family didn’t celebrate Shavuot and I certainly did not know what foods it was customary to eat on that holiday. But I always loved cheese blintzes. Lightly fried in butter and topped with sour cream, they are a delight. I always looked forward to them. 

Of course, in my Mad Men childhood, they always came frozen from a grocery store. At the time, that seemed quite natural. I ate grilled American cheese sandwiches on white bread and thought TV dinners were just fine. So it never occurred to me that homemade cheese blintzes would be a million times better than the packaged variety. 

Somewhere between high school and college, I found enlightenment. By the time I had my own apartment (in college), I had begun making cheese blintzes. The proof is a single sheet of looseleaf paper on which I wrote the ingredients for those blintzes. No directions, just ingredients. I don’t know how many times I made them, but I do remember the joys of making the wrappers, filling, folding, and frying them.

Although I haven’t made cheese blintzes in decades, this year I decided to update the recipe and try it again. 

Shavuot is a spring holiday known as the “Festival of the Giving of the Torah.”  It celebrates the time when Moses received the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. In addition, it is a harvest holiday. Along with Sukkot and Passover, it is one of the Shalosh Regalim or Three Pilgrimage Festivals. During ancient times, at Shavuot Jews brought harvest offerings to the Temple in Jerusalem.  Over time, different traditions evolved. Now Shavuot is a time when some celebrate by going to all-night Torah study sessions, while others mark the holiday with parades, pageants, and other celebrations featuring nature and farming.  

There are a few explanations for how dairy foods became associated with Shavuot. The one I am most familiar with is that the Song of Songs compares Torah to milk and honey. Now Ashkenazic Jews (those who trace their families to Eastern Europe) traditionally eat blintzes, kugel, and cheesecake in a nod to that “milk and honey” phrase. 

Cheese blintzes are the Ashkenazic Jewish equivalent of sweet, filled crepes. The outside pancake is slightly thicker than a crepe. Folding the pancake around a sweet cheese filling, we gently fry them until golden on the outside and warm on the inside. I like to serve cheese blintzes with fruit, either fresh or in a compote, and sour cream. 

This ingredients in this recipe are only slightly modified from the one I made in college. I only made one change and one addition. The one change is that I went from farmer’s or dry cottage cheese to a combination of small curd cottage cheese and ricotta. That switch, motivated by the ricotta in my fridge that I didn’t want to waste, turned out to be fortuitous. It turns out my local grocery doesn’t carry farmer’s or dry cottage cheese – maybe it’s out of fashion? The addition is the grated lemon zest. Because I love citrus and it adds a lovely note to the flavor of the filling.

When you read the recipe you’ll note that it has three eggs, not just two as pictured. My bad – I lost count and had already begun to cook the blintzes when I realized that my photo was one egg short. Sorry.