Pierogi: An Atavistic Delight Coming to a School Near You

My local newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, ran feature story on pierogi in its Wednesday food section recently, Pierogi, it said, are traditional stuffed Polish dumplings, and a staple of Milwaukee’s Polish immigrant community years ago. It also said making them was an almost day long job involving the whole family – an ethnic tradition. [Full Text] Though I suspect, the article chronicled more of an atavistic and not entirely accurate recreation of an ethnic tradition.

Dumpling stuffed with sauerkraut or mashed potatoes are not the stuff of ethnic high cuisine. Instead it’s peasant food. Originally, pierogi come for the cookbook entitled “What Can I make with what’s at Hand.” (It’s out of print.) A Polish farmer would always have flour, eggs, potatoes and sauerkraut on hand. Rita grew up with the Ukrainian version of the dish – varenyky.

Now it seems our school lunches are going retrograde traditional peasant and serving up mashed potato filled ravioli. This of course would be in Washington D.C., ground zero in the First Lady’s school lunch crusade.  [Full Text] (And I would note the First Lady's ravioli school lunch seems way tall on carbs and way short on protein. A simple PB&J sandwich might be a better bet.)

The kids have got to love that. It is possible to make good mashed potato stuffed ravioli. Just, think of pasta encasing good double baked potato mix, with bacon and cheese, sautéed in a garlic butter sauce and then topped with parmesan.

But that probably not what the kids are getting. They are more likely getting factory made ravioli stuffed with instant mashed potatoes and topped with a nasty tomato sauce. You can be sure there wasn’t an extended Polish family hidden in that school kitchen cooking up a huge batch of pierogi for those kids.

More true to peasant form Rita’s mother, Olga, typically stuffed these with either cherry pie filling or farmer’s cheese and served sour cream to top them.

Blintzes were a variation on this theme. Essentially they were crepes stuffed with the same. But give the same thin pancakes a haughty French name – Crepe Suzette – fold them four ways and top them with ice cream and a liqueur glaze and they become the shining star on the dessert menu of a upscale restaurant.

It seems with increased prosperity these simple and rather drab ethnic dishes evolve into culinary delights. They’ve become comfort foods with a hint of ethnic authenticity.

In that regard Italian cuisine shines brightly. (Ethnically I’m Norwegian. Lutefisk on the other hand can never evolve into a culinary delight. It’s an ethnic dish to be endured in small portions, at ethnic gatherings in Minnesota and the Dakotas, from time to time. And in that time to time, should years pass it would not be too long.)

But back to the subject at hand, the similarity between the Polish pierogi and my Italian ravioli.

From the photos with the Journal-Sentinel article, they looked like homemade ravioli, a dish I make regularly. It’s not a whole day job and does not involve an army of extended family. To feed a dinner party of ten doesn’t take much more than an hour and a half. To feed a table of four it can be pulled off in about an hour.

In fact the pierogi dough used to enclose the stuffing was virtually identical to my pasta dough. But the recommended fillings were not things I would think of for ravioli – sauerkraut, mashed potato, spinach, cherry or parsnip?

This of course picked my curiosity on the common culinary lineage of ravioli and pierogi. For research like this Wikipedia is good. Look up either dish and a long list of similar dishes reveals that this is an almost universal passant meal served though out much of the old world from Italy to China. [Full Text]

Across this huge swath of geography the stuffing changes as does the presentation. But the concept remains the same – stuffed dumplings. My ravioli are stuffed with either Ricotta cheese and Italian sausage stuffing or a spinach and cheese stuffing. They are served with a tomato sauce and are topped with Parmesan.

But these beauties have so much more potential both in presentation and stuffing mixes. I am thinking of a pork sausage cabbage stuffing in a dumpling which after its boiled is fried in butter, garlic and onions. I wonder how to stuff them and what size to make them if they were to be served in a bowl of rich chicken broth.

So it seems I make pierogi but call them ravioli. This is how I make them to serve two to four.

The dough

1 Egg

1 Tbs Water

1 Tbs  Olive Oil

½ tsp salt

¾ Cup Flour (1/2 general purpose, ½ semolina)

Start with the water, olive oil and salt. Thoroughly whisk together then whisk in the egg. Gradually mix in flour to make a firm dough. Let the dough rest for a half hour. While the dough rests mix the following together for the filling. 

The Filling

1 Box frozen Chopped Spinach, thawed and thoroughly drained

½ Cup Ricotta Cheese

½ Cup Grated Mozzarella 

1 Tbs Minced Garlic

To make ravioli for four, divide the dough into four portions then divide each portion into thee. Roll each of these into balls. They will be somewhat smaller than a golf ball. Roll these flat with a rolling pin.  Mound about tablespoon of filling in the center of rolled out pasta, fold over and crimp the edges with a fork.

Boil the ravioli gently for 20 minutes until cooked al dente.

For the sauce, combine:

1  14.5 oz. Can of Diced Tomatoes (no salt added)

1  8 oz. Can of Tomato Sauce (no salt added)

2 Tbs Italian seasoning

¼ Cup Dry Red Wine

Tomato Paste as need, Salt and Pepper to taste

Bring the combined ingredients to a boil then reduce heat and simmer for about one hour. To finish either add water or tomato paste to achieve a consistency where the sauce will nicely coat a spoon.

To finish the dish, transfer the ravioli to a casserole, top first the tomato sauce and then grated mozzarella cheese. Cover and bake in a 350^o oven for twenty minutes. Serve, with a side salad and garlic bread this this recipe will amply serve four.

Two Roads Diverged in a Wood

Gus was discharged from the army in December 1945 and intended return to California and maybe get back into the hay bailing business. In any case, when he joined the army, he had become firmly established there. His cousins Glen and Ray were like brothers. His best prospects were In California.

But there was no hurry, he thought he would take his time and visit friends along the way. The mood of the nation as GIs were discharged and returned home must have been something of an ongoing celebration. It was an atmosphere a single guy could soak in for a while before returning to an everyday life of a job and responsibility.  His itinerary included Milwaukee. As it turned out he became waylaid there. These things happen.

Pictures they say can tell a thousand words. There is one where a story is written plain. It was taken in Milwaukee at the time, and is a picture of Gus and an attractive young woman, Herta Hintz, It’s a picture that fully captures the portrait of couple in love.

His brother Harry confirmed the romance. “Ya, I know it. They were sweethearts.”

No matter what a person’s best plans might be life sometimes intervenes. Romantic love waylaid Gus in Milwaukee and familial love anchored him there. While in Milwaukee he received a letter from his mother. He hadn’t heard from her in more than a decade and his plans changed. Everything changed in unexpected ways.

He had just returned from the war torn rubble of Germany and had firsthand experience with the misery of the displaced persons camps and more so of refugees who were shoehorned into one or two rooms in the home of a reluctant host. His mother, half-brother Harry and half-sister Irene were locked in a post war purgatory. This was misery he could relieve. His priorities changed. Sponsoring them for immigration necessitated a job and a place to put them up. To that end, Milwaukee was expedient and made sense.

Milwaukee, historically, was significantly shaped by German immigrants. Within that context there remained groups close to their ethnic ties. Bethany Baptist Church, a North American Baptist Conference congregation, was one of those. The Evangelical Christian denomination was founded in the 1840s to serve German immigrants in the United States and Canada. In 1919 it wanted to shed its image as an ethnic German denomination and began encouraging the use of English as the primary language for its church services. Like so many things German, that change came stubbornly slow.

The church history claims the vision of a predominately English language church was realized in the 1940s. But that self-assessment is more hopeful than true, at least at Bethany. History intervened.

The wake of World War Two included a large wave of immigration of Europeans to North America. This wasn’t an immediate humanitarian tsunami, but rather unfolded gradually. Gus didn’t have any problems in securing immigration visas for his mother, Harry and Irene. They were blood relatives after all. They fit neatly into U.S. immigration law that was in effect at the close of the war.

The Mail Order Bride Act of 1946

The Immigration Act of 1921, variously known as the Immigration restriction act and the Johnson Quota Act, the more restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 assigned more than 50,000 immigration slots to Germans. Both acts highly limited immigration slots and were hugely favorable to Northern Europeans by tying the quotas to the existing ethnic balance as reflected by the 1910 census. By contrast Italian immigrants competed for 4,000 slots. Immigrants with blood relatives in the United States were given priority for immigration visas. Gus quickly snatched his mother from the Bavarian farm where she was quartered. Harry and Irene quickly followed.

When he went to pick Irene up from the Milwaukee train station, though never having met her, he said she wasn’t too hard to recognize. “She was the only woman getting off that train who looked confused, and she was the only one who didn’t speak English.”

Gus didn’t know it then but in one way or another, the scene would play out again and again.

Meanwhile, U.S. immigration law was in a state of flux, slowly trending toward opening hundreds of thousands of immigration slots to displaced persons who remained in Germany and ethnic German refugees, who were kicked out of Eastern Europe and beyond, who fled in advance of the from the Red Army.

But with regard to adopting U.S. immigration policy to the post war reality there were certain issues that weighed more heavily on lawmakers than the plight of displaced persons and refugees – war brides and their children. President Truman signed the War Brides Act into law on December 28, 1945. It granted an unlimited number of slots to non-Asian women who married American GIs during the war.  (This restriction was temporarily lifted with amendments in 1947, and done away with entirely in 1952 while the United States was engaged in the Korean War.)

The new immigration law became significantly more robust with the passage of the Fiancés Act in June 1946.

Enter Olga.

If our lawmakers were more honest in naming bills they would have more truthfully called it the Mail Order Bride Act of 1946.

Under its provisions an American who served overseas could apply for a three month visa for their “fiancés.” They had to make the travel arrangements for their future brides and if they were not married within three months, they had to send the women back or pay for deportation. Nevertheless, it opened the door to all sorts of marriages of convenience. Between the “War Bride” and “War Fiancé” acts as many as 500,000, mostly British and European, women were granted immigration visas into the United States.

I Know Such A Fine Girl for You

Gus’s mother arrived in the United States in 1947. Her son was a bachelor. Once settled in she remarked, “I know such a fine young girl for you from the old country. We were neighbors.”

Gus’s mother somehow cajoled her son into an “arranged marriage” and correspondence courtship. Gus became a married man on January 29, 1949.  And it worked, on November 24 of that same year he was a father. Things changed.

His previous sweetheart Herta married Art Hintz. As it turned out, Gus built his first house next door to them. He might have looked back once or twice, or more likely over the fence between the two yards. At the time he might have said:

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Sometimes ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

Took the least travel by,

And that has made all the difference.”

 

Robert Frost penned those lines sometime around 1920. With only a few lines, he captured the treble and the tenor of a time and it resonated for decades and still today. Those few words might have been a man’s theme song – from Ukraine to Canada, to the United States and then back to Europe and finally marriage to a refugee mail order bride. With every step along that way “two diverged in a wood.”