friday flashback - the one with all the perogies

I come from a family of great cooks. My Mom's a great cook. She's an army cook, as in, cooks-enough-for, but it's always incredibly yummy and there's never a shortage of leftovers to take home. Both of my Grandmother's were great cooks, albeit very different ones. My paternal Grandma B was an incredible baker. Her cookies at Christmas time were amazing and I have yet to meet the person who can make a belgian cookie like she could. (Mmmmm cookies) Now my maternal Grandmother K wasn't much for baking really with the exception of hot cross buns which she cranked out dozens upon dozens at a time. Now Grandma B was English to the core and as a cook was probably more refined than Grandma K who was Polish. I can't say that I really remember cooking with my Grandma B, certainly not in the same way I cooked with Grandma K, but that I see as being a cultural difference more than anything. Those Polish ladies like to cook with an army, not surprising when you consider how labour intensive some of our dishes are.

Like the perogy. I'm sure most of you are aware of what a perogy is. They've made huge strides in popularity since I was a kid. Back then if I mentioned eating perogies very few people even knew what I was talking about. For the uninitiated, they are cheese and potato filled dumplings. For one person they are a lot of work to make and that would be where the army comes in. It was all female hands on deck, Grandma was in desperate need of pinchers and we would all be called upon to pinch the dough closed. Don't think about touching the dough. Oh no, my friend, the dough was 100% Grandma's department.

Now conventional wisdom would tell you that to make perogies you need to roll out a sheet of dough and using a round cutter, cut out circles of dough. And if you believe that I'm going to have to stop you there because you're already making them wrong. For the record though, that's how my Mom would make them which is precisely the reason Grandma never let us touch the dough. According to my Grandma the 'only' way to deal with the dough for the perogies was to fashion it into mangeable balls. Then, one ball at a time, roll them into long ropes. Then using a knife, slice the rope onto equal size portions. I can't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure these were around an inch or so. Now roll the tiny slices into balls. And then, with a rolling pin, roll each ball into a perfect little circle. These circle would be lined up along the table as she went, just waiting for a 'pincher' to pick it up, deposit a spoonful of potato and cheddar mixture in the center, fold it in half and very firmly pinch the open edges together to seal the filling inside. After we were a few dozen ahead, we would boil them in small batches.

Not surprisingly this was an activity that took most of the day, but it was always fun and it always ended in a perogy feast at the end of the day. I must admit these days I just buy a bag of frozen perogies something that would likely horrify my Grandma. The frozen ones are okay. I find the biggest difference to be in the dough and I'm thinking it's more a texture thing than a taste issue. Naleway are the ones that are closet to my Grandma's, but you can't find them everywhere.

It's unfortunate that the days of perogy making stopped when my Grandma died. To my knowledge no one has her dough recipe because it's quite possible it only existed in her head. When Abby was a baby, Mom and I were visiting at Dave's and some how we ended up making them there with an recipe we found on the internet, but we've never done it again. I wish I had pictures to show you the table lined with endless little half moons. Or my Grandma with her rolling pin, hunched over an impossibly small circle she was rolling out, but I don't think there are any of those either.