Pass the Pierogis
By Lindsay Sterling
The last
time I attempted to make Polish dumplings was a disaster. I was at our family’s
Christmas Eve party. Thirty people were dipping pretzels into honey mustard, shrimp
into cocktail sauce, and getting drinks from the bar. My mom was running the
kitchen. The white fish was in baking dishes ready to be put in the oven. The
ends of the beans were picked; the sauerkraut was bubbling. For the last
seventy years my grandma had shown up to a party on Christmas Eve with pierogis,
but that year dementia had set in and she was too frail cook. My mother handed
me a recipe that my grandmother had dictated. “Can you make them?” I followed
the recipe and ended up, horrified, with a soup of a raw egg and flour. I slipped
out the back door, found some wonton wrappers at the store, sealed some cheese
inside, and boiled them. At least they looked like pierogis. They weren’t bad.
They served a function. Their presence softened the blow that Grandma was
leaving us. But then two winters ago, Grandma left us for good.
At a
farmer’s market this fall, I was in line to get Spring Day Creamery’s awesome Evangeline
cheese when I heard another customer talking in an accent. I introduced myself.
I said I’m a writer who asks immigrants for cooking lessons and reports on what
happens. Her name was Izabela Lutostanska. She’d come to
the United States in the early nineties on a whim, traveling with a
Polish boyfriend. The boyfriend didn’t work out, but the United States did. She
fell in love in particular with the clarity of American medical textbooks and
continued her medical training here. She became a doctor, married an American
pharmacist, and had a family. I asked her if she’d teach me how to cook a
Polish dish. “Sure I would,” she said, “What would you like to learn?”
In her kitchen a couple weeks later,
Izabela, her 85-year-old mother, Jadwiga, and teenage daughter, Ania, showed
me how they make pierogis. Izabela mixed warm milk, egg, and flour
together with her hands until it came together in a wet, rough mass. She
transferred it from the bowl to the floured counter. Jadwiga took over and kneaded
the dough for fifteen minutes until it became as smooth and as soft as a baby’s
bottom. Then each of them grabbed a chunk, rolled it into a snake shape,
chopped it into little nuggets, and used a rolling pin to turn the nuggets into
discs. Each disc received a teaspoon of filling before being folded and pinched
into a pretty half-moon shape with a decorated edge. Izabela boiled some for us
to eat for lunch and froze the rest for another day. Their pierogis were
beautiful: slippery, wobbly, with that slightly awkward charm of handmade
things. The potato-onion filling was my favorite. The sweet cheese version
tasted like the ones my grandma made for Christmas.
At home, I tested the recipe I’d
written at Izabela’s house. Staring at my fingers clodded with wet dough, it seemed
far-fetched that I would be able to transform the messy blob into a hundred
pretty half moons. My heart soared when I did it.
Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2016
