A Fifth Generation Thanksgiving Kreplach Tradition

Shared by Becca Gallick-Mitchell
Recipe Roots: Kozienice, Poland > Lodz, Poland > Marburg, Germany > Topeka, Detroit > Morris County, New Jersey and Miami, Florida

Every Thanksgiving, Becca Gallick-Mitchell says she is tempted to carve the turkey poorly, leaving more meat on the bones. In her family, what’s left on the bird after the holiday dinner is the key to a five-generation strong recipe for kreplach, the classic Ashkenazi dumpling traditionally plunged into broth or fried with onions. 

In the central Polish town of Lodz, where the family lived before the Holocaust, Becca’s great-grandmother Esther often made her mother’s kreplach recipe for Shabbat dinner. A mother of seven children, Esther went into labor on a Friday in the early 1930s. The family was deeply religious, “so there was no option that Shabbat wasn’t going to happen,” Becca says. Mala, the third of Esther and Yoil’s children and Becca’s grandmother, was just seven- or eight-years-old at the time, but she had watched her mother make the kreplach enough times to know how to fill the dough with meat and carefully seal the pockets. She stepped in and made the family recipe on her own for the first time. 

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When the war broke out in 1939, the family scattered in the hopes of keeping everyone safe. Mala was sent to her grandmother who ran a bakery, but it had already been seized by the Nazis. Her younger brothers were taken by an uncle, while two sisters stayed with her mother. “At 15 [Mala] had to basically fend for herself,” explains Becca, who is a Holocaust educator. In Kozienice, a town west of Lodz, where Mala had spent time as a child, she found friends who became a family, living together in the ghetto there from 1939 to 1942. She assumed her parents and siblings had died, adds Becca. “She had no communication, no understanding of what was becoming of them.”

In 1942, while at a hospital for appendicitis, Mala overheard nurses saying the ghetto was going to be liquidated. Still groggy from anesthesia, she left the hospital and attempted to flee, making her way to a barn, still inside the ghetto, where her friends found her. Together, they were sent to a labor camp to make ammunition where Mala’s wound from her surgery became infected. To her shock, her supervisor, a Nazi named Gertrude Hoffman, agreed to help Mala, taking her home, cleaning her wound, and even offering to help her escape.  

“My grandmother said ‘No,’” Becca tells. “She didn’t really know what would become of her. She wanted to stay with her group of friends,” in solidarity. Gertrude stayed with the group of Mala’s friends throughout the war, insisting they be transferred when she was. (After the war, Mala testified on Gertrude’s behalf in a trial where she was exonerated.)

In 1945, Mala was liberated and returned to Lodz where she ran into Henry, whom she had met once before the war, at a survivor’s bulletin board. “It was hard to find people you knew, so it was that little spark that ultimately got them together,” says Becca. They married a few months later and in time, Mala learned that much of her family perished in the war, including her parents, but her sisters Rosa and Franka had survived. After seven years apart, she finally reunited with them.

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They all immigrated to the U.S., where Becca remembers her grandmother and great-aunts cooking together, with Mala always in charge of the kreplach. She made them for High Holidays and with the leftovers from Thanksgiving, a holiday Mala and Henry adopted with fervor. “They really had such a patriotism,” Becca explains. “They loved everything about America.”  

For Becca, growing up, the kreplach was a dish she adored, but “I didn’t really know or appreciate the history behind them until much much later,” she says. It’s only in recent years that she asked her grandmother what her favorite recipe that survived the war is. As she replied kreplach, she shared the story of how she made them on the night her mother went into labor. “It’s amazing how if you don’t ask your grandparents...what they lived through you don’t hear all these stories. I never heard this story growing up,” Becca explains.  

By sharing the recipe, Becca adds, Mala, who is 97, feels it honors her mother Esther. It’s “a way to bring her back to life through other people’s kitchens...it’s giving someone who had their life taken away their life back.”

Grandma Mala's Turkey Kreplach

Photos by Armando Rafael, Food Styling by Victoria Granof

Time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Makes: 35 kreplach

Ingredients
For the dough:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 eggs
2 tablespoons water

For the filling and assembly:
1 tablespoon schmaltz or vegetable oil
½ medium onion, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
½ teaspoon kosher salt
1 ½ cups leftover cooked chicken or turkey meat without bones, ideally a mixture of light and dark meat
¼ cup packed fresh dill, chopped (optional), plus more for serving
2 quarts turkey or chicken broth

Directions
1. Make the dough: In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour and salt. Add in the eggs and water and incorporate with a fork (or, to avoid cleaning another bowl, you can do this on the countertop by creating a mound with the flour and then making a well for the wet ingredients). Once the dough forms into a ball, knead for about 5 minutes, or until the dough has become soft and elastic. Form it into a smooth ball, and rest under a damp cloth for 30 minutes.

2. Make the filling: Heat the schmaltz in a skillet over medium heat. When it's rippling, add the onion, garlic, and salt, and cook until translucent, 5 minutes. Remove from the heat.

3. In a food processor, combine the turkey or chicken with the onion mixture, making sure to include as much schmaltz as possible. Pulse until well combined. Transfer to a mixing bowl and add the chopped dill, if using, and mix well until fully combined. Cover and chill until ready to assemble.

4. When the dough has rested, begin assembly: divide the dough ball into 4 equal portions. Roll each portion into a ball, keeping the others covered with a towel while you work. Working one at a time, create a hole in the dough ball with your thumbs so that it looks like a bagel. Begin stretching it out the loop of dough until the width of the dough is about  ¾-inch thick. Cover the piece of dough with a kitchen towel and repeat this process with the other 3 pieces of dough.

5. Take each dough loop, and cut the loop at two opposite ends so that each dough loop forms two straight logs. Roll each log out with your hands until it is ½ inch thick (width). Cut each log into inch-long pieces and cover with a towel, repeating with all 4 loops.

6. Working one small piece of dough at a time, roll it into a small ball. Using your hands first, then a rolling pin, flatten the dough until it's round and thin, about 2 inches in diameter.

7. Take about ½ teaspoon of the filling and place in the center of each dough circle and fold it in half, pinching the edges to seal them well so no filling escapes when they're cooking.

8. Bring the corners of the half-moons together, overlap them a bit and pinch to seal. Repeat with the rest of the dough pieces. Cover and chill until ready to cook.

9. To cook the kreplach, bring a medium saucepan full of salted water to a boil. Drop in your kreplach and stir so that they don't stick to the bottom. Cook for about 3 minutes (or 5 minutes if frozen) until they're al dente.

10. Serve in hot chicken broth with and garnish with more dill (optional).

Cook’s Note: If you are freezing the kreplach, in step #8, transfer the shaped kreplach onto a parchment lined plate and chill for 10 minutes. Then transfer to a bag or container and freeze for up to one month.