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Today, pierogi are the most recognizable Polish food in the United States and a symbol of Polish American identity. How did this humble dish attain such lofty status?
Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann explores the surprising history of pierogi, tracing how Polish cuisine evolved in the multiethnic landscape of the United States. When Polish immigrants crossed the ocean, they brought with them their traditional cuisine, which came to signify enduring attachment to homeland, family, religion, and culture. In time, they as well as new generations and new immigrant waves gradually transformed Polish American culinary culture, reflecting food trends and changes in the United States, Poland, and the world.
Pierogi takes readers into the kitchens where Polish American families, friends, and community organizations carry on the custom of cooking and eating together. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann highlights small- and large-scale pierogi producers who adapted traditional dishes for the US market and food celebrities who mainstreamed them, and she traces the symbolic representation of pierogi in popular culture. She also shares personal stories, from her family’s resourcefulness in communist-era Poland facing near-constant food shortages to her experiences as an immigrant to the United States in the 1980s. Drawing on sources from historical and recent cookbooks to interviews with Polish American entrepreneurs and community members, this book offers new insights for anyone interested in East Central European and American foodways.
— Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
A bold book beautifully written. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann perceptively demonstrates how pierogi became a symbol of Polish American ethnicity by weaving together academic research on Polish foodways and cookbooks, interviews with culinary experts, ethnographic observations, and personal memories of cooking in communist Poland and ethnic America.
— Mary Patrice Erdmans, author of Opposite Poles: Immigrants and Ethnics in Polish Chicago, 1976–1990
We now know that pierogi have a history, deep and rich, global in its reach, a reflection of Polish history in multiple places. They should be understood as an element fundamentally embedded in the history of a people, both at home and abroad. Pierogi will occupy likewise a well-deserved place in the literature on food and migration and on particular dishes as embodiments of history and culture.
— Hasia R. Diner, author of Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration