From a tangy post in Tablet Magazine, “The Joy of Sour Cream”, by Carol Ungar, I pulled this line, “So enjoy sour cream, but in moderation. Don’t turn it into a food group.”
I miss that food group. Sour cream and blocks of Philly Cream Cheese I could eat by the brick or container. I could dip any veg in there or to the horror of my sister, cut off thick wedges of cream cheese and just eat. With nothing else.
Sour cream, too, is that perfect item to top over soup like gazpacho or a thick mushroom barley. You need the dollop of sour to break up and compliment the base.
From Packaging of the World.com
I lived my glory days basking in huge tubs of Breakstone’s brand sour cream. Every day was my Shavuot, the Jewish festival when we mark the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, the Torah, our soul’s very basic and sweet sustenance. Like milk!
We have the verse from "Like honey and milk (the Torah) lies under your tongue" (From the poetic and sensual Song of Songs 4:11). There is this pure, basic need for the Torah to which rabbis and generations upon generations have likened to how a baby needs milk. There is a pull and a deep, transcendent lure to it.
Some cravings are about cultural and spiritual heritage. Even survival.
Growing up, my family celebrated Shavuot in a very minor way—from what I recall. Also, I was allergic to dairy. My parents didn’t believe in my dairy, either. I craved it all the more. My body rebelled. We are talking sneezes with mucus that dropped to the floor. It was horrific. How can I even write this? And yet, I wanted dairy! Somehow I grew out of it.
Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash
My Grandma kept containers of the cottage cheese and sour cream at the ready for blintzes and noodle kugel. All of our grandparents did, right? That was a fairly-regular thing, to stuff and top a variety of dishes. I didn’t know then that I ought to time-travel with the stuff.
In Japan, where I live, there aren’t many cows.
It’s just a small group of cows up north in Hokkaido, where all the dairy for the nation happens. It’s dairy-city. (Of course there are the Kobe, marbled beef varieties, but we’re talking dairy now, not brisket). And the Japanese people, as a culture, have never been big on dairy. Cow milk is thought to have come about with US soldiers, post-war, in 1946/1947, in the form of powdered skim milk. My Japanese husband grew up in the US thinking that Kraft or other brands of sliced cheese was real cheese (bless him). He realized the truth later as he worked at and then managed an incredible Jewish bagel deli in high school.
So, big vats of sour cream are not on anyone’s priority list here. To my chagrin. Cheap, processed cheese is an option, I suppose, but not viable sour cream. No noodle kugel, but I have adapted by buying yogurt and the VERY small, very expensive, tease-of-a-sour-cream-container and whisking that in to try and imbue the thicker, more lacto-sour taste into yoghurt. Picture me trying to get the best out of a Dixie-cup amount of sour cream and willing the thimble-full to grow.
This Shavuot, my son will pantomime Moses, mountain climbing and fasting for 40-days in a robe, in order to meet with G-d, while my daughters flicker the lights and make booming sounds to mimic the lighting and thunder on Mount Sinai when Moses was given the Commandments.
We’ll eat dairy as Jews around the world also do, but in Japan, we will be limited. Once I made a Shavuot cheesecake that basically cost me $80 in cream cheese (considering import fees and conversion. And that was years ago. This month, the yen crashed. You know what I wonder? If it’s worth it to buy the amount of cream cheese I need). My last cheesecake wasn’t even very good.
And still, my sour cream dreams are out of control. I want it over borsht, over beets, over latkes/potato pancakes, and not by cobbled version using the yoghurt. To be Jewish is maybe to crave sour cream, but then, that’s mostly if you are Ashkenazi as I am, originally dispersed from the Middle East/Israel to the Rhineland valley/the region of Germany and France before migrating east to Slavic lands (e.g., Poland, Lithuania, Russia) after the Crusades (11th–13th Century) and living in those Eastern European nations. Places with milk and cream.
If you know Jewish Delis in America, you’re mostly picturing Ashkenazi food—the matzah balls, the Reuben sandwich, the vats of sour, garlicky pickles and so on.
We were made to obsess over sour cream and cream cheese. I was made to want blueberry and sour cream blintzes. It’s in my blood.
Cheese cake is the one dish, probably, that my maternal grandmother is known for. You can’t imitate cream cheese with almond milk or silken tufu. It takes dairy. The other dish she’s known for? California salad. What does that use? Ahem, cottage cheese.
Do Sephardic recipes, foods belonging to the Jewish community of the Iberian Peninsula—that is Spain and Portugal, use sour cream? How about the Jewish communities in Ethiopia? I’m researching! I’ve got a few hits so far! Certainly Israel knows cheese and all of the range of cream—you’ve got a whole region famous for labneh, laban, feta, goat cheese. I mean, it’s the land of milk and honey. One of the select non-biblical Hebrew words I can remember is “glida”—ice cream.
Do Jewish granddaughters in other Asian countries get all dramatic like this?
Anyone, in any cultural diaspora, would whine for the memory and chance to make what they crave.
So how do I quell my own longing for dairy year-round and especially at Shavuot? Shall I…
a) buy cheesecake?
b) try and make it again?
c)give tofu another shot and pretend it’s dairy?
d) pour extra milk into my coffee and yell at everyone on Instagram posting their gorgeous Shavuot dairy?
I feel ya Sista - oh for a gorgeous, garlic pickle! I wonder if adding vinegar to milk makes buttermilk, is there not something you can add to cream to make it sour cream? Maybe lemon?
I love this. I'm not Jewish but have eastern European roots and life experience. Sour cream all the way, baby! And feeling the pain about its cost in Japan :(