greeting your ancestors at the kitchen table

food is the tie that binds

I made pierogi from scratch last weekend, for the first time ever, by myself. I have participated in the making of them before - I’d helped make them at a friend’s house as a kid. Her mom was of Polish descent, and she had us help her fold pierogi one afternoon while I was there for a sleepover. They were delicious.

But for all of my love for pierogi, I was fully 30 years old before it ever occurred to me to make them myself, from scratch. Pierogi have been a large part of my life, and an always comfort food, but mostly I’ve gone to M&M’s and grabbed several bags. It’s the kind we bought at home, it was the kind my cousins had, it was the kind another friend whose parents were Polish immigrants bought when they didn’t make their own.

When I lived in Halifax, I didn’t buy the M&M’s ones briefly, mostly because it was hard to get to a shop from my Quinpool apartment, and also because I got my fill at the market, where a vendor sold fresh homemade ones. Delicious! I adored them, I would go regularly to the market on Sundays and get a plate, eating them on the steps inside, feeling full and warm and happy.

Pierogi were a communal food, something we cooked for a crowd. My father is the youngest of seven; I have many, many cousins. And even a visit of two siblings, their spouses, and assorted children meant we needed a lot of food. Passing the mixing bowl of pan-fried pierogi, drained on paper towels, raucous conversation as we ate the cheese and potato filled dumplings. It was these moments I recalled, wrapping them around me like a blanket, when I would prepare pierogi for myself after a long day, or a hard week.

But M&M’s discontinued theirs, and so the easy, frozen, prepared pierogi I always had on hand is no more. There is a gaping hole in the centre of my culinary life, made more tragic because I had so little access to them over the last two years. I used to have to buy them in Moncton when I went home, but the pandemic changed the frequency of that.

So I made my own pierogi. I used a recipe from Half Baked Harvest’s latest cookbook, which called for sweet potato and Parmesan, a taste combination I raised my eyebrow at but committed to - if I didn’t like them, oh well, I tried, I reasoned. Except they did turn out very well and I loved them.

My family is vaguely Hungarian. We do not speak Hungarian, our last name was anglicized, the relatives who were labelled ethnically Hungarian on official documents all long dead. My grandfather, who I barely remember, spoke Hungarian to his parents and siblings, but didn’t pass it onto his children. While my face has lingering traces of some Eastern European heritage, I have no knowledge of the family or the language or even the journey that led them to Cape Breton, to work and die by the steel plant. The last link I have with this part of my family is through eating Eastern European food, with really no discrimination about what part of Eastern Europe it comes from; a holdover from their days in Whitney Pier.

As I folded my pierogi, I thought about how making these, even if I have no idea whether my own family made them, is the way I reach back across time to the family I don’t remember. And my thoughts drifted to other foods which have been so pivotal to my life: my dad’s biscuits, which he started making as a kid; my maternal grandmother’s eggnog, which I haven’t drank in 27 years but I still see the plastic Tweety cup full, the summer my mom had mono; the rolls my cousin made us the summer another cousin and I flew out for a visit. The chocolate cakes my mother makes for every birthday, and the dip our neighbour would make for a night of card playing at the family cottage. The food that comforted me, that nourished me, that served as the tie for crowded night around a table with my people.

I’ve been rereading Small Bodies of Water by Nina Mingya Powles lately, just a chapter before bed every night, and I love the way Powles writes about food. She is very in tune with food as conduit for our memories and the way we connect to far-flung relatives as well as enjoying the beauty of food. Her collection of essays on eating in Shanghai, Tiny Moons, is also a very good representation of the magic and spirituality of food.

The other major work on food and family I’ve read in the last year or so is Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, with the oft-quoted line, “Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left in my life to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?” Zauner writes beautifully about her relationship with her mother in the memoir, but the food descriptions! I was immediately there with them, revelling in the celebration of eating food which connects us. And I thought about that line, because no, I don’t consider myself Hungarian, which might be disappointing to my paternal grandfather. I didn’t have anyone to call to ask how we made pierogi.

I regret this break in the connection from one generation to the next. It’s no one’s fault: people die, assimilation happens, you cast off the pieces that your granddaughter will someday long to know about but can’t ask. I can spend the rest of my life wondering, and I’m sure I will, but I can also take the few pieces I do know and spin them into something I can make use of, something which makes me feel closer to the lost parts of myself. I’ll pull some of my pierogi from the freezer, fry them in butter, and say a silent toast to my family: no, I didn’t make the food exactly the way you would have, but I tried. And it made me think of you anyway.