Pierogi takes its name from an ancient Slavic word meaning feast
A pierogi is simply unleavened dough folded round a filling and boiled, but the name carries a long history. It descends from Proto-Slavic pir, feast, shares roots with the Russian word for pie, and appears in Poland's first cookbook of 1682. Where dumplings themselves came from is still argued.
Pierogi is actually a plural; one dumpling is a pieroga, or in Polish spelling a pierog. Most scholars place the ultimate origin of dumplings in China, spreading into Europe in the Middle Ages or later, but the path is contested. One story credits Marco Polo's Silk Road travels, another says Saint Hyacinth carried them from the East through Kievan Rus in the thirteenth century, and a third points to a Turkish dish called dus-vara. A newer theory even links the word itself to the Turkic bureg rather than to Slavic roots.
In Poland the dumpling climbed the social ladder. Once thought of as peasant fare, it reached noble tables, and seventeenth-century cookbooks treat it as a staple with a special variety for each holiday: a chicken-filled baked kurnik for weddings, others for wakes and for the January carolling season. The best-known Polish filling, quark with potato and fried onion, is called ruskie, meaning Ruthenian, and foreigners often mistranslate it as Russian. On Christmas Eve, Poles serve one kind stuffed with sauerkraut and dried mushrooms, plus tiny uszka floating in clear beetroot soup. Kraków's festival in 2007 got through 30,000 a day.
Neighbours insist on their own versions. Ukrainian varenyky are a related but separate dumpling, named from a word for boiling liquid, sometimes steamed, and bound in the past with soured milk rather than egg. A coin hidden in one at Christmas promises luck for the year, and folk belief once compared the half-moon shape to a young moon, with cheese varenyky left as offerings at springs. Romania has coltunasi, a name that travelled from Italian calzoni through Greek, while Hungary's jam-filled derelye is mostly wedding food now.
The method is forgiving. Dough of flour and warm water, sometimes with egg or a little mashed potato, is rolled thin and cut into squares or rounds with a glass. After filling and sealing, the dumplings simmer until they rise to the surface, and may then be fried or baked in butter. Sweet ones take fruit such as cherries or bilberries, often served with sugared sour cream.
Source: Pierogi
