Cooking with sweet cottage cheese is one of the best traditions of Eastern European cuisine. These little sweet cottage cheese patties, known as syrniki, from the Slavic word syr for (cottage) cheese, make up the bulk of happy childhood memories for so many. I was always sure that this cooking idea was distinctly Eastern European in origin, but then, of course, there is no such thing as ‘authentic’ or ‘distinct’ when it comes to a phenomenon so intricate as cooking.

I think I actually said ‘No!’ out loud when I came across a passage, in Leah Koenig’s brilliant encyclopaedia of Jewish cooking, which explained that sweet cottage cheese fritters entered Eastern Europe via Italian Jews, whose cuisine had a staple of ricotta and honey fritters from the 15th century onwards. I often substitute Eastern European twaróg with ricotta when cooking syrniki in the UK, and previously thought it second best, but, as it turns out, it’s in fact the ancestral ingredient! It goes without saying that you can replace twaróg with ricotta here.

(Twaróg can be found in some major supermarkets – read more about it here.)

Method: