Pierogi

• 1. Introduction

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  At the 2007 Pierogi Festival in Kraków, visitors ate about 30,000 pierogi every single day. Pierogi are filled dumplings. A cook wraps unleavened dough around a filling and drops the parcels into boiling water. The dish is a traditional Polish one and holds a place of real culinary importance in Poland. Yet it also turns up at Pittsburgh ballgames, on an Alberta roadside and at a Ukrainian ski resort. Who first thought of wrapping dough around potato and cheese? Why does Ukraine insist on a different name for its own version? And how did a peasant meal become a symbol of ethnic pride on two continents?

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• 2. A Name Older Than Nations

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  The Polish word pierogi is the plural of pieróg, the term for a single filled dumpling. It grows out of the Proto-Slavic pirъ, which meant 'feast'. Cousins of the word live in both the West and East Slavic languages. Russian has пирог (pirog), meaning 'pie', and пирожки (pirozhki), meaning 'small pies'. That shared root suggests a name older than the modern nation states and their standardized languages. A newer theory speculates that bierock, pierogi and pirog may all descend from the Turkic bureg.

  Ukrainians use a word of their own. Varenyky, singular varenyk, names a related but distinct dumpling, not simply a Ukrainian label for pierogi. It comes from the Ukrainian вар (var), meaning 'boiling liquid', which marks boiling as the defining method. Some regions steam them instead, calling the result parenі varenyky, a style that is not typical for pierogi.

  The vocabulary keeps branching as the dumplings travel. Mennonites write varenikie or wareniki. Canadian Doukhobors use pyrahi, pirozhki and vareniki. Romanians say colțunași, a word derived from the Greek καλτσούνι (kaltsúni), which was itself borrowed from the Italian calzoni. A similarly named relative appears as Virtiniai-koldūnai in Lithuania and as kołduny in Poland.

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• 3. Disputed Origins

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  Nobody can verify where the first pierogi came from, so the question gets argued often. Dumplings most likely began in China and spread widely across Europe during the Middle Ages or later. One story credits Marco Polo's expeditions along the Silk Road, which would tie pierogi to the Chinese mantou. Another says that in the 13th century Saint Hyacinth of Poland carried them from the Far East through what was then the Kievan Rus'.

  A third theory looks to the Turks. Their cuisine has a similar specialty called düs-vara, and on this account the territory of present-day Ukraine adopted the dish from them. Whatever the route, cooks across Central and Eastern Europe went on to invent their own preparations, ingredients and fillings.

  The firmest date comes from print. The recipe appears in Compendium ferculorum, albo Zebranie potraw, which was published in 1682 as the first cookbook in Poland. The dumpling was already on the page the first time Poland put its cooking into a book.

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• 4. Dough and Filling

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  Flour and warm water make the basic dough, and some cooks add an egg. After rolling it flat, the cook cuts squares with a knife or circles with a cup or drinking glass. Mashed potato in the dough gives a smoother texture. Slovakia has a variation made from flour and curd, with eggs, salt and water. Sour cream stirred into the dough adds flavor and tends to lighten it.

  The filling goes in the middle, and the dough folds over into a half circle. Square cuts give rectangles or triangles. Pressing the seams shut keeps the filling inside during cooking. The pierogi simmer until they float, then get drained. Many cooks finish them by frying or baking in butter, and leftovers are often fried.

  The fillings are the real playground. Savory choices include mashed potatoes, fried onions, quark or farmer cheese, cabbage, sauerkraut, ground meat, mushrooms and spinach. Sweet versions use sweetened quark or fruit such as cherry, strawberry, raspberry, bilberry, blueberry, apple or plum. Stoned prunes and jam appear too. Toppings range from melted butter and sour cream to fried bacon, onions and mushrooms, while dessert types may wear apple sauce, jam or varenye.

  Cooks in a hurry can skip the pocket entirely. Lazy pierogi, called leniwe pierogi in Polish, blend curd cheese with egg and flour into a quick dough. The dough is rolled into a sausage about 2 cm thick and cut diagonally into gnocchi-shaped pieces. After a short boil, the whole meal takes only 10 to 15 minutes.

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• 5. Poland's Table

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  In 17th-century Poland, cookbooks describe pierogi as a staple of the national diet, with each holiday getting its own kind. Weddings had pierogi kurniki, a baked pie filled with chicken. Other pierogi were made for mournings and wakes, and some for the caroling season in January. In the east, baked pierogi are a favorite Christmas dish, stuffed with potatoes, cheese, cabbage, mushrooms, buckwheat or millet. The most famous are the Biłgoraj pierogi, filled with buckwheat, potatoes and cheese and baked in the oven.

  On Christmas Eve, known as Wigilia, Poles traditionally serve two kinds. One is filled with sauerkraut and dried mushrooms. The other is small uszka, filled only with dried wild mushrooms and served in clear barszcz. The most common everyday filling is fresh quark with boiled mashed potatoes and fried onions. Poles call these pierogi ruskie, meaning 'Ruthenian pierogi', and foreigners often mistake the name for 'Russian'. Sweet pierogi arrive with sour cream mixed with sugar, while savory ones get bacon fat and bacon bits.

  Pierogi even have a patron saint, Hyacinth of Poland, a monk. Poles sometimes call on him as 'Święty Jacek z pierogami', meaning St. Hyacinth with his pierogi. The custom is tied to the baked pierogi of St. Hyacinth made in Nockowa in Subcarpathia. The same phrase doubles as an old Polish exclamation of surprise, roughly like 'good grief' or 'holy smokes'. Nobody knows where that usage began.

  In the medieval ages, tradition says, the rich treated pierogi as a high-class delicacy. Affordability and versatility then carried them to festivals and religious holidays, where families served them as a symbol of unity. They came to stand for ethnic pride and helped unite Poles through hard times. Because the preparation takes so much labor, the dish also symbolizes the tenacity of the Polish people. Entire communities often gathered to spend a day making pierogi together.

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• 6. Varenyky in Ukraine

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  On Christmas Eve, the Ukrainian Свята Вечеря table carries meatless varenyky, in keeping with the fast. The fillings are cabbage, mushrooms, potatoes or poppy seeds. Varenyky are also an everyday meal, and in Carpathian Ruthenia and Galicia the words varenyky and pyrohy can name the same dish. Ukrainian cooks often skip pan-frying, and they once bound the dough with soured milk or ryazhanka. Today eggs usually do that job.

  Fillings run from curd cheese, potato, boiled beans and cabbage to mushy peas, plum, currants, sour cherries, meat, fish and buckwheat. Toppings include sour cream (сметана), butter, fried onions and fried pieces of salo called шкварки. Central Ukraine is known for stranger fillings. Poltava makes dumplings stuffed with flour, lard and fried bacon, and hempseed varenyky come from Polissia and Galicia.

  These dumplings run through Ukrainian folk songs, literature and humor, where they stand for abundance, comfort and everyday joy. At Christmas Eve, a coin hidden in one dumpling promises good fortune and wealth in the coming year to whoever finds it. Older customs were stranger. People likened a varenyk to a young moon because of its shape and used it in pagan and sacrificial rituals. Cheese varenyky were offered near water springs, and farmers carried homemade ones into the fields to bring a rich harvest.

  The dumpling also carried politics. In the 1858 poem Varenyky-Varenyky by Stepan Rudansky, a Russian soldier asks a Ukrainian countrywoman to cook varenyky for him. He cannot think of the word, and she pretends not to understand. Writers used the scene to stress Ukrainian distinctness from Russian.

  Monuments followed. In September 2006, Cherkasy unveiled a monument at a hotel entrance showing the Cossack Mamay eating varenyky from an earthenware pot, with a huge crescent-shaped varenyk behind him. Taras Shevchenko and Nikolay Gogol both wrote of this folklore hero's fondness for the dish. A yearly varenyky festival is held at the Carpathian ski resort of Bukovel, where a snow monument made in 2013 was submitted to the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest snow varenyk in the world.

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• 7. Cousins Across Europe

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  In German, Pirogge is the catch-all word for Eastern European filled dumplings and buns, from pierogi to pirozhkis and pirogs. Germans who lived in Eastern Europe and the Baltic ate boiled and baked kinds, and their descendants still cook them. Baltic Germans know the baked pīrādziņi as Kurländer Speckkuchen, or Courland bacon pies. Schlutzkrapfen look much like pierogi and are common in Tirol and in German-speaking South Tyrol. The usual filling is spinach with quark (Topfen) or ricotta. Austria adds Kärntner Nudel, which are filled with anything from meat and potato to apples, pears or mint.

  In Hungary, the derelye is a pasta pocket filled with jam, cottage cheese or sometimes meat. It is mostly a festive food, served at weddings. Romania and Moldova have regional names for their colțunași, including piroști in Transylvania and Bukovina and chiroște in Moldavia. Sweet ones hold plum jam, sour cherries or cottage cheese. Savory ones hold dill-seasoned telemea or urdă cheese, potatoes or chopped meat. Native Romanian families traditionally serve them as colțunași cu smântână, topped with sour cream.

  In Russia, vareniki became especially popular during the Soviet period, when they joined the menu of public catering. Pelmeni are a different dish, smaller and usually filled with ground meat such as pork, lamb, beef or fish. Russian pirozhki always mean baked dough with filling. Belarus sits between Poland, Ukraine and Russia, and its kalduny blend all three and are among the most recognizable foods of the country.

  Slovakia's bryndzové pirohy are semicircular dumplings filled with salty bryndza cheese and mashed potatoes. They come with more bryndza thinned with milk or sour cream as a dip, plus bacon or fried onion. Along with bryndzové halušky, they rank among the national dishes. In Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, klepe are filled with minced meat and topped with sour cream, garlic and paprika. Slovenia has ajdovi krapi, literally 'buckwheat carps', made from buckwheat flour and filled with skuta cottage cheese, millet and fried onions. Together with žganci and štruklji they form a trio of buckwheat dishes. Anatolia has piruhi, which also appeared in Ottoman court cuisine. Cooks fill it with Tulum cheese, parsley and onion and serve it with walnuts toasted in butter.

  The Russian Mennonites carried their version around the world. After centuries of close community and mass migration through the Netherlands, northern Prussia, the Russian Empire and the Americas, they developed a cuisine of their own. They call the dumplings vereniki, fill them almost always with cottage cheese and serve them in a thick white cream gravy called schmaunt fat. Farmer sausage (formavorscht) or ham often sits alongside. The style has faded in Poland, Russia and Ukraine. It remains very common in the Canadian prairies, Chihuahua in Mexico, Paraguay and Bolivia.

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• 8. Pierogi in North America

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  In 1928, the Marton House Tavern in Cleveland, Ohio, made the first documented sale of pierogi in America. Central and Eastern European immigrants had brought the dish with them. It began as a family food and a restaurant item in places with large Polish or Ukrainian populations, including Alberta, Pittsburgh, Chicago and New York City. In New York the East Village and Greenpoint in Brooklyn are known for it, along with the New Jersey suburbs. After World War II, freshly cooked pierogi became a staple of fundraisers held by ethnic churches. By the 1960s, frozen pierogi filled supermarket aisles across much of the United States and Canada.

  Mrs. T's, the largest American pierogi maker, is based in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. The company describes a 'Pierogi Pocket' that includes New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Chicago, Detroit, parts of the northern Midwest and southern New England. That region accounts for 68 percent of annual US pierogi sales and eating. American grocery brands often use non-traditional fillings such as spinach, jalapeño and chicken.

  In 1989, Paula Newby-Fraser chose pierogi as her food for the biking portion of the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon. For more than a decade afterward, Mrs. T's sponsored triathlons, some professional triathletes and fun runs. Many triathletes saw pierogi as an alternative to pasta for boosting their carbohydrates.

  Canada, where the dish is spelled perogies, has the second-largest market after the United States. Ukrainians are especially concentrated in the Prairie provinces. Frozen versions dominate and usually imitate ruskie pierogi, with potato plus cheddar, onion, bacon or cottage cheese. Home cooks fill them with mashed potato, sauerkraut or fruit such as saskatoon berry. Chain restaurants have joined in. Boston Pizza sells a sandwich and a pizza flavored like pierogies, and Smitty's serves them deep-fried as an appetizer with salsa. In Britain, pierogi are a symbol of the Polish community and a fairly well-known dish.

  Towns celebrate the dumpling. Whiting, Indiana, holds its Pierogi Fest every July. Cleveland hosts the Slavic Village Pierogi Dash and the Parma Run-Walk for Pierogies. At every home game of the Pittsburgh Pirates, six runners in giant pierogi costumes race between innings. They are Potato Pete in a blue hat, Jalapeño Hannah in green, Cheese Chester in yellow, Sauerkraut Saul in red, Oliver Onion in purple and Bacon Burt in orange.

  Some communities went bigger. In the early 1990s, the village of Glendon, Alberta, raised a roadside tribute, a 27 ft fiberglass perogy on a fork, using the local spelling. In January 2010, a pierogi statue was proposed for Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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