Mama Pearl’s Perfect Blueberry Blintzes

How to go about making a blintz that's mostly a memory?

By Melissa Klurman | January 8, 2020

My not-so-healthy Jewish food resolution for 2020 sounds simple: Eat more blintzes. But, as with the best blintzes, it’s a little more complex than this simple statement.

My grandmother, Mama Pearl, was 99 when she passed away last February. She was my baking buddy and Crisco guru. She taught me to make apple pie when I still had to stand on a stool to reach the counter, and I’m now the keeper of her index box full of sweet recipes for everything from Passover apple fritters to pecan chocolate pie.

One thing I never learned to make, though: her blueberry blintzes.

No restaurant, diner, Jewish food emporium, or synagogue has ever served me a blintz that looked like Mama Pearl’s. The dough was so thin it was nearly transparent, and the whole blueberries in the filling — never jam — pushed up almost to the point of breaking through. Forget any tightly folded blankets of barely filled dough, these looked more like children’s sharp elbows poking up under the sheets.

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How do I remember what they look like so clearly? I’ve got the last one in my freezer. She made it as part of a batch in the summer of 2018, and I held on to it thinking I’d wait until she made more. Now I’m too emotionally attached to either eat it or throw it away. The only thing I can think to do is to master her recipe and create more to keep the “one” company, so I don’t have to continuously check to make sure no one has eaten it or defrosted my freezer in the night.

But how to go about making a blintz that’s mostly a memory?

To the recipe box I go. Only, there’s no recipe here, and I’m not really surprised. A blintz is the kind of instinctual comfort food women of her generation made simply by the memories in their hands.

So, to the internet I head, but as with my restaurant quest, I can only find “fresh blueberries” that have been cooked down into jam.

Then my mom saves the day with a recipe she wrote down by watching over my grandmother’s shoulder, and it’s exactly how I remember it.

I head back to my own kitchen and pull out my frozen keepsake, which I’ve been too emotional to do before now. The blueberries have shriveled from being in the deep freeze for two years, and there’s a layer of frost on one side that nearly brings me to tears.

In fact, everything about my New Year’s blintz project makes me verklempt. I don’t want to be the only holder of the last blintz, what I truly desire is impossible: for my grandmother to make me a cup of coffee from her 50-year-old percolator and ask me to take out the garden furniture while she fries up her sweet summer specialty.

But a funny thing happens as I pour and swirl the batter in the frying pan: My own hand memories start to kick in. I can picture mama in the kitchen, and I know I’m going too slowly. The only way to get a thin, lacy blini is to make the pan hotter, pull it away from the heat quicker, and swirl it more deftly, like she did.

In the end, my pancakes are a bit thick, but my blueberries are lemony and delicious, bursting with flavor and still whole.

The first batch was good, but there’s room for improvement. And that, I think, is the best part of having a New Year’s resolution to eat more blintzes: I still have the whole year to get it right.

Note: You can freeze these blintzes once they’ve been prepared (see Step 7). When you’re ready to eat them, defrost, then fry them on all sides in butter in a nonstick pan until golden.