Jewish Cheese Blintzes for Shavuot

Cheese blintzes are traditional for the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. but you definitely don’t have to be Jewish to love them. They’re easy to make and freeze just fine. You can buy them frozen, but this DIY version is better. Trust me.

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.

Though I hadn’t cooked blintzes in decades, in 2018 I updated my recipe and made them 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. It’s also addition a harvest holiday. Along with Sukkot and Passover, it is one of the Shalosh Regalim or Three Pilgrimage Festivals. In ancient days, Jews brought harvest offerings to the Temple in Jerusalem at Shavuot.  Over time, different traditions evolved. Now at Shavuot 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. 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. But there are differences. 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, with sour cream below. 

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 change is a move from farmer’s or dry cottage cheese to a combination of small curd cottage cheese and ricotta. That switch, which I made because I didn’t want to waste the ricotta in my fridge, turns out to be fortuitous. 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.

This post was first done in 2018. I updated the text, but the recipes and photos are from that original post.