My Mother Lied To Me

In the last few years, I’ve become a bit of a cook. I thought I was pretty good beforehand, but in the discovery of forbidden, impossible foods, like my mother’s pierogies, I’ve found that cooking is a creative task perfectly suited to my mind-set. Cooking encompasses planning, physics, chemistry, logic, experimentation, procedure and systems analysis. Take my mom’s signature dish, for instance.

For years, I would make a special trip to Mom’s when bribed with pierogies. This is a Polish dumpling filling with meat, potatoes, cheese, mushrooms or some combination of the aforementioned. According to Mother, making peiorgies was at least a two-day affair, from a receipe that had been handed down for generations. And, for years, I begged her to share the recipe and technique for this doughy wonder. Each time, she said, “Sure, sure.”, which in fact meant, no way, Junior. The secret dies with me!

So, now that she’s dead, there’s no reason why I can’t figure out how to make these things, right? I turned to my memory bank and research partner, Google. Searching for pierogies, I got dozens of radically different recipes, so of which made no sense whatsoever. So, I relied on a receipe from the supposedly most Polish of places in the US – Chicago, followed by Pittsburgh, the Pierogie Capital of the World, allegedly. You know what? They don’t know sh*t about pierogies.

First of all, my Mom was an original Polish peasant. If they don’t know how to make peirogies, no ones does. Second of all, if you’ve ever listened to the so-called Polish music of the so-called American Polka bands, listening to their so-called use of the Polish language, you’d also know that their is, at best, an infatuation and dilution of the real deal

But I had to start somewhere. The Pittsburgh recipe sounded likely, so I went with that, only to be rewarded with self-destructing pierogies. I tried the Chicago variant. Yeast in pierogie dough? Really? No. No, that’s just worng.

Guess what? I made Kapusta Soup, too. It was friggin’ delicious – almost like Mom’s, but, then, Mom’s is Mom’s, and like Mom, there’s no duplication. Is there?