A Lenten Devotion by Amy Plackowski
And all of them ate and were filled…
Matthew 15:37a
I knew what she wanted me to say, the intrepid student reporter who’d been assigned to interview me. She was working on a feature about ethnic holiday traditions related to food for the school newspaper, and I’d volunteered to talk about chrusciki. The delicate Polish fried dough dusted with powdered sugar, called “angel wings” in English and served around Christmas, I thought deserved a mention in the paper. What I didn’t know was that I was supposed to share a memory of making them with my family. She tried about three iterations of her question, searching for a story about my grandma and me in the kitchen at Christmas, speaking Polish and rolling out the dough.
The truth is, I don’t have any stories like that. I don’t speak Polish. I kept my original name, in part, because it’s one of the few connections I have to the heritage my grandparents kept in fits and starts. The first time I made chrusciki, I was 24 years old, in grad school, on the phone with my dad as he tried to describe how my grandpa used to wrap the dough around a broomstick to get the signature winged shape. And the fact is that chrusciki and placki were the only Polish foods I’d ever attempted to make on my own. Everything else was too laborious or just not to my taste, and even those take a significant commitment.
That was, until about a month ago. Asher and Myka’s school was seeking volunteers to run booths at their annual culture night. At the time, there were no Eastern European countries represented, so I volunteered to represent Poland. Parent volunteers were tasked with, among other things, bringing a sample of food popular with that culture. I decided that now was the time: I would learn to make pierogi.
Over the years, I’ve tried many kinds of New England pierogi, from the European delis in Webster to the Mrs. T’s brand in the freezer section. But nothing has ever come close to the cheese pierogi made by the ladies of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic church in Munising, Michigan. And I did have one claim to making the pierogi authentic: a red Polish cookbook, published in 1948, that my grandma gave me before she died. Treasured Polish Recipes . . . for Americans. It’s full of recipes that are so authentic as to be almost useless; the recipe for duck’s blood soup begins, “first, kill the duck.” Not exactly tailored to a modern audience. But I scoured the cookbook looking for the perfect recipe for cheese pierogi, and armed with some supplemental information from YouTube, set out to make them.
If you follow me on Facebook, you know that in our house, one of our favorite things to do together is bake. You might have even had some of Asher’s zucchini bread at coffee hour. So our one snow day this year provided the perfect time to tackle this pierogi-making thing together. We experimented with size, shape, and technique. We took breaks to build snowmen. Once we got the hang of it, Myka pretended she was on a cooking show and narrated the process to an invisible audience. And when we were done, we had almost 100 sweet, chewy, perfect pierogi that I’m convinced the Sacred Heart ladies would have approved of. I have a lot of stories about decorating cookies with my mom. I could go on about the perfection of the crust of my Southern grandma’s pecan pie. I don’t have stories about cooking Polish food with my grandparents. But thanks to a little red cookbook and an elementary school’s culture night, I have a story about cooking Polish food with my kids.
May our memories and our pierogies be sweet! Amen