Who Asked for the Ruskies?
Pierogi🔊 – pockets of unleavened dough wrapped around a savoury or sweet filling and then boiled – are among the best known Polish dishes. Some would even say that Poland’s cuisine suffers from a “pierogi problem” as foreigners often associate local cookery with the mundane, unsophisticated dumplings and little else.[1] Most people don’t seem to mind, though, and see pierogi as the nation’s perfect comfort food. The scrumptious dumplings are a staple of Polish home cooking, but can also be found anywhere from milk bars (self-service cafeterias) to upscale restaurants.
Pierogi come in multiple varieties; one of the most beloved are filled with a simple, yet mouth-watering, mixture of twaróg🔊 (farmer cheese), boiled potatoes and fried onion. In the English-speaking world they're known simply as “potato-and-cheese pierogi”, but in Poland they are called pierogi ruskie,🔊 which is often translated as “Russian pierogi”.
During the Cold War, while Poland languished inside the Soviet sphere of influence, people told a joke about a milk-bar attendant announcing that an order of pierogi was ready for pickup.
| “Who asked for the Ruskies?” asked the lady. “No one did,” replied a patron. “They came uninvited!” | ||||
— Polish-language joke, second half of the 20th century, quoted from memory
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In February 2022, when Vladimir Putin – seeking to resurrect the Soviet empire – suddenly escalated Russia’s aggression against Ukraine (which had already been ongoing for eight years), Polish outpouring of sympathy for their bravely resisting neighbours revived that old unsavoury association in the public mind. Practically overnight, pierogi ruskie vanished from restaurants, milk bars and deli counters, replaced by “Ukrainian pierogi” (pierogi ukraińskie), “Galician pierogi” (pierogi galicyjskie), “pierogi from across the eastern hedgerow” (pierogi zza wschodniej miedzy) or simply “potato-and-cheese pierogi” (pierogi z serem i ziemniakami). A similar fate befell “Russian mustard” (musztarda rosyjska,🔊 produced in Poland), which was swiftly rebranded more descriptively as “hot” or “extra hot mustard” (musztarda bardzo ostra).
Renaming food products in response to national sympathies or antipathies is nothing new. Americans have excelled at it for a long time: during the First World War, they rechristened hamburgers as “liberty sandwiches” just to spite the Germans; and in 2003, in retaliation for France’s refusal to support the U.S. aggression against Iraq, they renamed French fries to “freedom fries”. These changes proved short-lived – in both cases, the traditional names returned within a few years.
In Poland, “extra hot mustard” also turned out to be a temporary fix and “Russian mustard” has already made its way back onto store shelves. Will the same happen with “Ukrainian pierogi”? Time will tell. In the meantime, I’d like to point out one key difference: while the word “rosyjska” in the mustard’s name leaves little doubt that its recipë (at least in theory) hails from Russia, the adjective “ruskie”🔊 in the traditional name for the potato-and-cheese pierogi is far less clear-cut – because it doesn’t derive explicitly from Russia, but from some nebulous Rus.
So what exactly is – or was – this “Rus”? What does it have to do with those dumplings made from such humble ingredients as potatoes, farmer cheese and onions, and yet so delicious? And how much sense does it really make to boycott their long-established name?
The Roots of Rus
Let us begin with where the name “Rus” came from in the first place and what it actually means. The history of Rus reaches back to the 9th century CE. And who were the biggest troublemakers in 9th-century Europe? That’s right: the Vikings. The Scandinavians at the time were famous for building long, swift boats in which they sailed to various parts of the world in search of wealth. Those from what is now Denmark and Norway crossed open seas to plunder a dilapidated England or to settle the previously uninhabited Iceland, whereas the Vikings from Sweden, known as Varangians, navigated eastwards – across the Baltic and then up the rivers to find an inland route to the Black Sea and further still, all the way to Constantinople, the largest and richest city in Europe at the time. And they travelled there not just to plunder it once or twice, but to establish a regular trade route and strike trade agreements on terms favourable to themselves: we give you furs and slaves, you give us wine, spices and gold. Next, in order to secure a monopoly on that trade corridor – which went up the Volkhov and the Lovat, and then down the Dnieper – they proceeded to found new cities along the way, the most important of which were Veliky Novgorod on the Volkhov and Kyiv on the Dnieper. Soon these cities became the main centres of a whole new civilization that grew around the river route leading “from the Varangians to the Greeks”. And since the founders of this civilization were freshwater Vikings who probably rowed more often than they set sail, it came to be known as “Ros”, from the Old Norse word “róðr”,🔊 meaning “oar” (the same root gave rise to “Ruotsi”, the Finnish name for Sweden). The local Slavic population, with whom the ruling Varangians quickly assimilated, adapted this name into “Rus”.🔊 Or so one etymological hypothesis claims.
This Rus (called “Kievan” or “Kyivan” by modern historians) was ruled by the princes of the Rurikid dynasty – Vikings with Slavic names whose deeds are praised even in Icelandic sagas and who managed to create a vast, powerful state on the lowlands of eastern Europe. Vladimir the Great (Waldemar in Old Norse; reigned 980–1015) considered all the advantages and disadvantages of Judaism, Islam, Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, then chose the last of these as the state religion. Under the rule of his son, Yaroslav the Wise (Jarisleif; reigned 1016–1054), the Rus civilization reached its peak. The latter’s daughter, Princess Anna Yaroslavna, who was married off to King Henry I of France, arrived in Paris only to find it a dreadful backwater and wanted at once to return to the prosperous and beautiful Kyiv (it’s worth noting that the site of today’s Moscow was still covered by dense boreal forest at the time).
After Yaroslav’s death the realm fragmented into several principalities, as was quite common in that era. For over a hundred years various Rus principalities existed side by side until, one after another, they were conquered by pagan barbarians: the eastern part of Rus fell under Mongol-Tatar rule and the western part was soon taken by the Lithuanians. Exceptions remained: the Novgorodian Republic in the far north managed to maintain relative independence and its assembly-based democracy, while the Principality of Halych in the southwest was contested by the Catholic kingdoms of Hungary and Poland. Catholic officials writing in Latin used Latinized names for Halychian Rus: the Hungarians called it Galicia, and for the Poles it was Russia or Ruthenia. In everyday speech it was known as “Red Rus” (alongside “Black Rus” and “White Rus” further north) or simply “Rus”. In the 14th century the Poles ultimately prevailed over the Hungarians, and the “Russian” Palatinate (Palatinatus Russiæ, Województwo Ruskie) became part of the Kingdom of Poland. From then on, for several centuries, the Polish adjective “ruskie” referred specifically to this Polish-held fragment of the former Kyivan Rus, located in what is now western Ukraine and southwestern Poland.[2] And if you look at early modern Latin-language maps of Europe, you’re going to find a “Russia” centred around Lviv, not Moscow.
A Doughy Empire
Source: Michał Kuźmiński: Lepienie świata, in: Tygodnik Powszechny, No. 51–52, Kraków: 13 December 2021; based on: Rachel Laudan: Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, University of California Press, 2013, p. 145
Let us return for a moment to those invaders from the east. According to Ms. Rachel Laudan – who wrote a book on the influence of large civilizations on regional cuisines – stuffed dumplings were a Chinese invention, the recipë for which the armies of Chinghis Khan and his descendants spread across the entire Mongol Empire. As evidence she plotted the places where various dumpling traditions exist today onto a map of the 13th‑century Mongol realm, which at the height of its territorial expansion stretched from Rus to Korea and from Siberia to Iran.[3]
Are you convinced by this map? I am not, because – first of all – there are countries that were never under Mongol rule and yet have their own varieties of stuffed dumplings. You can see this partly on the map itself, where Italian ravioli are marked, even though Italy was never conquered by the Mongols. The same goes for Polish pierogi, because although the Mongol hordes did, indeed, reach Poland several times, they never established any lasting rule over it.
Someone might say that Polish and Italian merchants – beginning with Benedict of Poland and Marco Polo – travelled to Mongol territories and could have brought back a recipë for something that later evolved into Polish pierogi and Italian ravioli. But here we run into another problem: the dumplings on the map differ not only in that they have different names in different languages. They also differ in their filling (raw or cooked meat, vegetables, cheese), shape (circles, half‑moons, triangles, squares, little ears, pouches), method of cooking (boiling, steaming) and serving style (topped with melted fat, smothered with sauce, drowned in soup and so on). Ultimately all they have in common is the fact that something has been wrapped in unleavened dough and then cooked. And that idea is so generic and simple that cooks in different places and times could easily have come up with it independently. There is no reason to assume that all the world’s kołduny, vareniki, pelmeni, kreplachs, ravioli, manty, khinkali, momos, samosas, sambosaks, chuchvaras or gyozas descend from one common proto‑dumpling. Anyone with wheat flour to hand could have invented, without copying from anyone else, the idea of wrapping a bit of food in dough and dropping it into boiling water. And that, in turn, would explain such enormous dumpling diversity.
That Polish pierogi and Ukrainian vareniki descend from a common ancestor I am far more inclined to believe, because the two differ essentially in name only. If we trust the legend I wrote about in my first post on this blog, pierogi were brought from Rus to Poland by the Dominican missionary Saint Hyacinth. And that was still a decade before the first Mongol invasion of Poland. So if he imported the dumplings from Rus, does it already mean that they were pierogi ruskie?
Encrusted Power
In the 14th century, the northeastern Rus principalities in Zalesia, or Lands Beyond the Forests, began to rebel ever more effectively against their Mongol-Tatar overlords. The Grand Duchy of Muscovy (centred around Moscow) proved the most successful in this endeavour and began conquering its neighbouring principalities as soon as it had thrown off the Mongol-Tatar yoke. This came to pass under the last three grand princes of Muscovy from the Rurikid dynasty, namely: Ivan III, the Great (r. 1462–1505), Vasily III (r. 1505–1533) and Ivan IV, the Terrible (r. 1533–1547). The first of them already provided an appropriate ideology for this expansion. Firstly, with Constantinople captured by the Ottoman Turks, Moscow was to become the “Third Rome”: the successor of Roman civilization, especially the Eastern Roman one – or Greek in practice. Just as Catholics used Latinized forms of “Rus” (Russia, Ruthenia), so Orthodox officials Hellenized it as “Ρωσσία” (Rhōssía🔊), and from there it was only a short step to the new Muscovite name of Rus: “Россия” (Rossiya🔊) – which to this day is the Russian word for what we now know as “Russia”. Secondly, the rulers of Muscovy wished to unite all possible fragments of the old Rus under their boot, so they began styling themselves “Tsars of All Russia”.
Ivan the Terrible accelerated this expansion in every geographical direction, also attempting to extend his rule over those Rus lands that still remained under Lithuanian control. Sigismund Augustus, Grand Duke of Lithuania (r. 1548–1572), knew that Lithuanians would be unable to defend these territories against the Muscovites without Poland’s help. But as luck would have it, Sigismund Augustus was also simultaneously King of Poland, and so he decided to unite Poland and Lithuania into a single powerful state capable of resisting the Muscovite onslaught. It turned out, however, that Lithuanian boyars (nobles) were not so easily persuaded. Therefore Sigismund Augustus convened a joint Polish-Lithuanian assembly in Lublin, during which, wearing his Lithuanian grand-ducal cap, he began detaching pieces of Lithuanian Rus – only to put on his Polish crown and add them, one by one, to the Kingdom of Poland. This way he enlarged Poland with the regions of Podlachia, Volynia, Podolia, the Dnieper Ukraine… And only then did the boyars realize that at this rate the whole of Lithuania might soon be absorbed into Poland, so they finally agreed to the political union. And thus, in 1569, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was born, with the Polish part now including vast, fertile and sparsely populated territories stretching as far as Chernihiv and Zaporizhia (which quickly became an area of Polish colonization), while the smaller, northern section of the Rus lands – mainly forests and marshes – remained in the Lithuanian part. The East Slavic populations on the two sides of this new internal border would gradually evolve into two separate nations: Ukrainians in the Polish part of the Commonwealth and Belarusians (White Rusians) in the Lithuanian part.
Let us return to the court of Ivan the Terrible. One of his advisers, Archpriest Silvester, wrote a household‑and‑moral handbook entitled Domostroy (Domestic Order). It’s in this book that the earliest mentions of pierogi – or rather of pirogi – can be found. Except that they bore little resemblance to what the Polish language calls “pierogi” today: a pirog was a large four‑sided loaf of baked dough with a meat, vegetable or sweet filling. If one were to seek an analogy in Italian cuisine, then it was more like calzone than ravioli.
| And when they are baking bread, one should take some of the same dough and make pirogi: […] on non-fasting days with whatever rich filling happens to be at hand, and on fasting days with buckwheat or with peas, or fruit juice, or turnip, or mushrooms, or saffron milk caps, or cabbage – whatever God provides will make the household happy. | ||||
— Домострой, in: Электронные публикации Института русской литературы, Институт русской литературы (Пушкинский Дом) РАН, own translation
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It must have been this very kind of pirogi that the Slovenian-born Austrian diplomat Sigismund Herberstein sampled in Moscow during the reign of Vasily III. Yet when describing this local delicacy in the first extensive account of the Muscovite state to be read in Europe, he didn’t use the word “pirog” at all, but simply called it “bread”. He didn’t miss the opportunity, however, to comment on the despotic political system that prevailed in Moscow – then as now.
| I may, moreover, state that the loaves, which are made in the form of a horse’s collar, seem in my opinion to serve as emblems of the hard yoke and perpetual servitude of those who eat them. | ||||||
— Sigismund von Herberstein: Notes Upon Russia, vol. 2, London: Hakluyt Society, 1852, p. 128
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It was only the Polish chronicler Marcin Bielski🔊 who, when translating Herberstein’s Latin account into Polish in the 1560s, identified the Muscovite “bread” as a pirog and used precisely that word in his rendering. Evidently the term must already have been familiar in Poland at the time. It also happens to be the earliest surviving instance of this word in the Polish language.
| [The Grand Duke of Muscovy] sent us from his table a four-sided pirog (Herberstein writes that it resembled the cushion that lies at the breast of a horse where the harness sits) […] | ||||
— Marcin Bielski: Kronika, to jest Historia świata, Kraków: Mateusz Siebeneicher, 1564, p. 435, own translation
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Putting the Pie in Pierogi
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By Pieter Claesz (1627)
The type of dish in which a filling is enclosed in baked dough – or a pie, to put it simply – is hardly an invention unique to Russia. In Poland, the word “pirog” seems to have been used for the kind of pies prepared in the east, but western-style pies – known as “pasztety” – were not only familiar but very much in vogue.
The word “pasztet”🔊 itself comes from the German “Pastete”, which in turn derives from the Old French “pasté” (modern French “pâté”). Both “pâté” and “pasztet” would eventually evolve to mean the filling alone, with the crust becoming merely optional (“pasztecik”, on the other hand, has retained its original meaning of small, hand-held pie; a notable exception being pasztecik szczeciński,🔊 which is more like a savoury doughnut).
Back in early modern Poland, pastrycooks – preferably French – who specialized in the demanding art of baking pies and tarts were highly valued and often paid more than regular master chefs. While the Polish nobility used “pasztet” to refer to this refined work of culinary art, the term “pirog” was applied to what was essentially the same dish, only in its folk version, associated mostly with the eastern parts of the Commonwealth. Which doesn’t mean that recipës for pierogi and the smaller pierożki🔊 did not appear (alongside recipës for pasztety) in noble cookbooks. They did, however, quickly diversify into an entire range of flour‑based dishes – with a surprising variety of both doughs and fillings. Old Polish sources provide a wide array, from baked yeast-dough pierogi to puff-pastry pierogi, fried yeast pierogi and pierogi made from unleavened dough that were either fried or boiled in water or in milk. As for the fillings, they could already be either savoury or sweet. The savoury ones could be meat‑based, often with offal, or meatless – for example with beetroot. Sweet pierogi might be filled with fruit preserves or a poppy‑and‑almond mixture, with farmer cheese being the most common filling.
For example, in Compendium Ferculorum, a 1682 cookbook by Stanisław Czerniecki,🔊 small offal-filled pierożki appear not as a dish in their own right but rather as a garnish to roast meat.
| Dish with pierożki […] Make the pierożki as follows: take eggs and flour, knead the dough and roll it out. Chop a veal kidney with suet very finely, adding herbs, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Fill the pierożki, fold them up, and boil them in water. And when you serve a capon or whatever you are cooking to accompany the pierożki, first place the meat in the dish, arrange the pierożki around it, pour broth over the whole and send it hot to the table. | ||||
— Stanisław Czerniecki: Compendium ferculorum albo Zebranie potraw, ed. Jarosław Dumanowski, Magdalena Spychaj, Warszawa: Muzeum Pałac w Wilanowie, 2012, p. 111, own translation
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In a manuscript cookbook from the same period we can find several recipës for pierogi filled with farmer cheese. At first glance, these “boiled pierogi with twaróg“ might seem like the ancestors of today’s pierogi ruskie – after all, they were boiled pierogi made from unleavened dough and filled with a cheese mixture – but they still contained no salt, no onion and certainly no potatoes. The latter were still entirely unknown in 17th‑century Poland. They were in fact closer to modern sweet cheese pierogi; they contained no sugar, but the delicate flavour of fresh curd and wheat flour could easily have been perceived by early modern diners, who were far less accustomed to an overabundance of sweetening agents than we are, as sweet in and of itself.
| Boiled pierogi with fresh cheese Take fresh cheese and grind it. Add four egg yolks, making sure not to make the cheese too thin. Take fine flour, add a spoon or two of butter, a couple of eggs with the whites and a little water or cream. Work this into a dough, roll it out and make small rounds. Put some cheese on each, then fold them up. When you are ready to serve, set good water on the fire; when it comes to the boil, put in the pierogi and let them cook. Lay them out on a dish, pour melted butter on top and send them to the table. | ||||
— Moda bardzo dobra smażenia różnych konfektów, ed. Jarosław Dumanowski, Rafał Jankowski, Warszawa: Muzeum Pałac w Wilanowie, 2011, p. 153–154, own translation
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Early modern sources prior to the Partitions of Poland (late 18th century) make no mention whatsoever of a dish called pierogi ruskie. The only pierogi from that period with a geographical designation in their name that I’ve been able to find are pierogi kurlandzkie, or Courlandic pierogi (Courland was a Polish fief where the nobility spoke German and the peasantry Latvian). The recipë, however, says nothing about the filling for these pierogi; it only notes that they were pies or loaves made from yeast dough and baked in an oven.
| Courlandic pierogi Set milk on the fire to boil. Take buckwheat flour and divide it into two parts. Mix one half with the hot milk to a thick consistency, as for porridge, cover it and let it cool for two hours or so. Then loosen it with warm milk, add the other half of the flour and some yeast. When it rises, weave small baskets from tree bark, line the bottom of each with a leaf, pour in the dough and put them in the oven. | ||||
— Various poems and notes from the turn of 17th/18th centuries, manuscript 1125, Biblioteka Kórnicka Polskiej Akademii Nauk, folio 85, quoted in:
Staropolskie przepisy kulinarne: Receptury rozporoszone z XVI–XVIII w.: Źródła rękopiśmienne, ed. Jarosław Dumanowski, Dorota Dias-Lewandowska, Marta Sikorska, Warszawa: Muzeum Pałacu Króla Jana III w Wilanowie, 2017, p. 121, own translation
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By Joseph Chabord (1810)
All these various pierogi must also have come in diverse shapes. Already in pre‑partition times the four‑sided horse‑collar form seems to have begun giving way to the half‑moon shape created by folding a round sheet of dough in half. And the best evidence for this is the fact that the bicorne, a two‑cornered military hat popular throughout Napoleonic-era Europe, was dubbed “pieróg” in Poland.
Polish-Lithuanian Dumplings
The first half of the nineteenth century brings mentions of various filled dumplings – similar to modern pierogi, but called different names. One of them was kołduny.🔊 These were small dumplings filled with raw meat and then boiled, served in the broth in which they were cooked. Their name was borrowed from Lithuanian “koldūnai”, which in turn probably derives from the Tatar “kundum” with a similar sense of boiled meat dumplings. But whether this means that the Tatars taught the Lithuanians how to make their koldūnai, or that the Lithuanians adopted only a Tatar name for a dish they had already known, is impossible to say.
In Lithuanian Polish, dumplings with a sweet filling were known under the name “szołtonosy”.🔊 They differed from kołduny in both filling and serving style, but they shared the same half‑moon shape with a crimped edge and the same type of dough – unleavened and boiled in water. Szołtonosy are best known from the account of Edward Odyniec, who accompanied Adam Mickiewicz,🔊 the great romantic-era poet, on his journey through Italy and left the following colourful anecdote:
| My first teacher [of the Italian language] was indeed a ragazza, but alas, not very bella; and though her name was Angelica, by reason of her excessive plumpness she resembled more the cherubs of Rubens. She was a serving girl in the inn at the first Italian hamlet, Campodolcino, to which we had descended. “Avete qualche cosa da mangiare?” (“have you anything to eat?”) was my first question, which, as a prudent man, I had first learned from Adam. “Niente,” that is, “nothing,” was the first ominous word of reply; happily she soon added: “oltre (except) di ravioli.” But what are these ravioli? Since surely they were not rats or cats (for though Italians are said to eat such things, it was Friday after all), we asked for ravioli. Then the doors of the kitchen open, and there appears a huge tin dish closed with a matching cover, which by its two great handles Angelica carries before her. She sets it upon the table – I uncover it – and what a surprise! – these are none other than our very own szołtonosy!
A half‑moon shape, frilled like kołduny, Adam blushed with joy – ten years, he said, since he had last seen szołtonosy! He grew animated and began recalling where he had last sampled them. From the [fellow diner] Englishman’s face I guessed that this sudden excitement took him somewhat aback. I explained the cause to him. Adam too joined in the conversation. And since this dish was unknown in England, the conclusion was that it must have been Queen Bona who brought it to us along with her Italian vegetables. As for the etymology of the name “szołtonosy”, Adam suggested I compose a ballad, the content of which he himself supplied: Lady Palatiness, a friend of Queen Bona’s, arrives at her country estate and gives a great dinner for her neighbours. The dishes include those which Her Ladyship’s cook had learned from the Queen’s own master chef. At one point, ravioli are served; the lady herself pronounces their name. Suddenly, Lord Underpantler, a facetious old fellow, cries out: “But surely, my gracious lady, these are Tatars’ yellow noses [żółtonosy]!” | ||||
— Edward Odyniec: Listy z podróży Antoniego Edwarda Odyńca, vol. II: Z Warszawy do Rzymu, Warszawa: Gebethner i Wolff, 1875, p. 76–78, own translation
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Mickiewicz was mistaken, however, about the etymology of “szołtonosy”. They had nothing to do with the yellow noses of the Tatars. “Šalta nosis” is simply Lithuanian for “cold nose”. The name probably referred originally to dumplings filled with bilberries, which can indeed resemble noses turned blue from cold; in time the meaning expanded to other kinds of dumplings with sweet fillings, including fresh cheese.
But whereas the small dumplings known as kołduny are still a thing today, the name szołtonosy has fallen almost completely out of use.
Pierogi Ruskie: Cabbage or Fruit Filling?
Let us focus back on pierogi ruskie. This is all the more justified at this point as in the 19th century we finally encounter the first source references to a dish of that name. The oldest example of the expression “pierogi ruskie” in Polish that I’ve been able to find comes from a novel published in 1827:
| A supper was served which, it being Friday, included stockfish in the Capuchin style, pierogi ruskie, carp with honey-cake sauce and plain croutons with olive oil and beer, which made up all of the fasting host’s supper that day. | ||||
— Elżbieta Jaraczewska: Zofia i Emilia: powieść narodowa, vol. I, Warszawa: w drukarni przy Mazowieckiej ulicy nr 1352, 1827, p. 125–126, own translation
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From this quotation alone we still can’t tell whether these were in fact the same pierogi ruskie as the ones we know today. All we see is that they were regarded as a fasting dish. We can learn some more from advertisements placed in newspapers of the time by Warsaw restaurants; below is a selection of such notices from the early 1830s.
| Tonight at Lorenc’s, No. 538, Chapter Street, for supper: pierogi ruskie with cheese and plum butter at 20 pence per serving. And tomorrow for breakfast: tripe, Lithuanian kołduny, roast beef from the spit, hussar‑style and veal roasts, pork loin at 15 pence per serving. Beefsteak and veal cutlets at 20 pence per serving. One can also obtain dinner for 1 zloty. Monthly, the same for 24 pence apiece. | ||||
— Kurier Warszawski, No. 37, Warszawa: Ludwik Adam Dmuszewski, 8 February 1830, p. 178, own translation
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| At No. 625, Goat Street, next to the post office, at Dębicki’s Restaurant, five-course dinners are served for 2 zlotys apiece, or monthly for 50 zlotys. Breakfasts and suppers of various dishes are also available at the most moderate prices. On Sundays and Thursdays puff-pastry pies, on Saturdays pierogi ruskie topped with genuine country cream, and every day fish lovers may have various kinds at any time, cold or hot, at 1 zloty 10 pence per serving. | ||||
— Kurier Warszawski, No. 58, Warszawa: Ludwik Adam Dmuszewski, 29 February 1832, p. 295–296, own translation
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| The undersigned has the honour to inform esteemed lovers of fine dining that beginning tomorrow, next to his shop at Cooper Street […] he will be serving breakfasts composed each day of different dishes, well prepared, at the most moderate price, that is, 15 pence. At this price tripe will be served on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, as well as stuffed fish, which last year received much praise. Oven-baked pierogi ruskie will be served on Fridays and Saturdays. | ||||
— Kurier Warszawski, No. 273, Warszawa: Ludwik Adam Dmuszewski, 10 October 1832, p. 1444, own translation
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And now that’s a real surprise! For while the fact that pierogi ruskie were served with cream is hardly unexpected, the detail that they were sweet – filled with cheese and plum butter – and moreover baked in the oven, runs completely counter to our modern idea of what pierogi ruskie should be.
Yet this understanding of the term is confirmed by 19th‑century cookbooks. The Polish Court Cook (Nadworny kucharz polski) of 1847, in its recipë for pierogi ruskie, instructs the reader to “take the dough, flatten it, mark the centre with cheese or plum butter, then wrap it in paper, and when it has risen, slide it on baking sheets into the oven.”[4] The Culinary Guide (Poradnik kucharski) from the same year gives similar advice: “butter a quarter‑sheet of paper, spoon some dough onto it, fill it with plum butter or cheese, set it on a baking sheet, let it rise a little, then put it in a slow oven.”[5]
In later years the range of possible fillings expands considerably and it becomes clear that pierogi ruskie do not have to be sweet after all.
| Pierogi ruskie In a small pan scald a cup of wheat flour with half a quart of boiling fresh milk, away from the fire, as the flour will thicken from the boiling milk alone. Mix well and set in a cool place. When the dough has cooled, add half a cup of good yeast, move it to a warm place, mix and let it rise. Meanwhile beat vigorously 6 whole eggs and 4 yolks. When the leavened dough begins to rise, pour in the eggs, salt it, add enough flour to make a dough that is not too thick, add a couple of spoonfuls of clarified butter, mix well and let it rise again. Grease quarter‑sheets of clean paper. Taking a little of the dough, flatten it on the paper to the thickness of a finger, place on it fruit preserves, plum butter, marmalade, cheese as for pierogi, likewise rice, or even mushrooms, fried fish, salmon or cooked cabbage, fresh or sour. Fold the edges of the dough, then of the paper, and having set them on a baking sheet, slide them into a medium‑fire oven for a short half‑hour. Then remove them, discard the paper and serve the pierogi on a platter with clarified butter, fruit juice or cream. | ||||
— Bronisława L[eśniew]ska: Kucharz polski jaki być powinien, Warszawa: S.H. Merzbach, 1856, p. 272–273, own translation
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Lucyna Ćwierczakiewiczowa,🔊 the most famous Polish cookbook writer of the 19th century, is no less expansive, giving recipës for pierogi ruskie filled with plum butter, fruit preserves or farmer cheese mixed with egg yolks, sugar and raisins,[6] but also with roast beef, with raw or fried fish, with fresh cabbage, with sauerkraut and mushrooms, with rice or with buckwheat groats (she also advises adding chopped hard‑boiled eggs to any of the savoury fillings).[7]
So if pierogi ruskie could be made with practically anything, then what exactly distinguished them from other kinds of pierogi? Let’s see if the definitions given by 19th‑century dictionaries and encyclopaedias offer any clarity.
| Our common folk uses the word pierogi for any kind of yeast-raised baked goods. Old Polish cookery divided them into several kinds. There were those made of rolled‑out dough, in which cheese or minced cooked meat was enclosed; among the latter, the Tatar kołduny were famous, in which raw minced mutton with a piece of suet was wrapped in raw dough and cooked so skilfully that the meat inside became properly done while the unbroken dough held within the filling, the meat juices and the melted suet. There were also lazy pierogi made of cheese and flour with little raisins, without any dough casing. Great renown was enjoyed by pierogi ruskie, where yeast dough of an oblong shape, nearly a quarter of an ell long, had inside a filling of plum butter or cheese, as well as the Lithuanian pierogi, filled with sauerkraut instead. Pierogi in all these varieties belong to modern Polish cuisine. | ||||
— Kazimierz Władysław Wójcicki: Pieróg, in: Encyklopedyja powszechna, vol. XX, Warszawa: Samuel Orgelbrand, 1863, p. 670, own translation
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And here’s another definition from the same period:
| Pirog, pierog, pirożek, pierożek 1. A large bread roll of wheat flour. | ||||
— Aleksander Zdanowicz: Pirog, in: Słownik języka polskiego, vol. I, Warszawa: Maurycy Orgelbrand, 1861, p. 1012, own translation
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It would follow that pierogi ruskie were simply small baked pies made from yeast dough, with a filling that could be practically anything. In other words, they most closely resembled the original pirogi we know from the Grand Duchy of Moscow. It goes to show that the word “ruskie” in “pierogi ruskie” should indeed be translated as “Russian”. But this is only true for the pierogi ruskie in the 19th-century sense. What about the ones we know today?
Russians Great and Little
In the Russian Empire, the lands acquired during the Partitions of Poland (1772–1795) were known semi-officially as the “Western Territory”, while name “Vistula Territory” was applied to the lands of the former Congress Kingdom of Poland annexed in 1832.
| West Slavic languages | East Slavic languages |
cs – Czech | be – Belarusian |
csb – Cassubian | ru – Russian |
pl – Polish | rue – Carpatho-Rusyn |
sk – Slovak | uk – Ukrainian |
szl – Silesian | |
| Baltic languages | Germanic languages |
lt – Lithuanian | de – German |
lv – Latvian | sv – Swedish |
| Romance languages | Uralic languages |
ro – Romanian | hu – Hungarian |
By the end of the 18th century, in the event known as the Partitions of Poland, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was carved up among its neighbours: Russia, Prussia and Austria. As a result, most of the lands of historical Rus which had still remained under Polish-Lithuanian rule, finally found themselves within the borders of the Russian Empire. The sole exception was that part of the Rus lands which fell into Austrian hands and which the Habsburgs, reviving medieval Hungarian claims to the area, named Galicia (even though this “Galicia” also included non-Rus lands south of the Vistula). In 1815, at the Congress of Vienna, which reorganized Europe’s borders in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, Russia additionally received a portion of non-Rus, ethnically Polish territory, dubbed the “Congress Kingdom”; later, as its autonomy was gradually curtailed, it was renamed “Vistula Territory”.
Ever since 1721, when Tsar Peter the Great of Muscovy rebranded himself as Emperor of Russia, the Russian language has had two different adjectives, both meaning “Russian”. On the one hand there’s “русское” (“russkoye”🔊), which refers to anything connected with Russians as an ethnic group, including the Russian language itself. And on the other hand, there’s “российское” (“rossiyskoye”🔊) which applies to “Rossiya”, the entire multi‑ethnic Russian state. Authorities in the Russian-held parts of Poland tried to make the Poles adopt the same dichotomy in their own language. However, inconsistent application of this policy coupled with defiance of the Polish population resulted in the Polish words “ruskie” and “rosyjskie” being used quite interchangeably. Eventually, “rosyjskie” became the official adjective meaning “Russian” in both the ethnic and political sense, while “ruskie” evolved into an ethnic slur.
In the Austrian partition things were entirely different. Here Polish speakers used the adjective “ruskie” in relation to the Ruthenians, or the native inhabitants of eastern Galicia. In Russia, members of the same ethnic group were officially known as “Little Russians” and effectively treated as an inferior subset of ethnic Russians, or “Great Russians”. In the 19th century the Ruthenians and Little Russians on both sides of the Austro-Russian border began to develop a shared ethnic identity and to call themselves “Ukrainians” (after “the Ukraine”, an old name for the vast borderlands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). Yet at least until the First World War this terminology remained considerably fluid. Eliza Orzeszkowa,🔊 a Polish writer living in Russian Poland who was fascinated by Ukrainian literature, corresponded with Ivan Franko, a Ukrainian poet living in Galicia; what’s striking in her letters is that, despite all her affinity for Ukrainians, she had no idea what to call them – Ruthenians, Little Russians or Ukrainians – and eventually had to ask Franko himself which option she ought to choose.[8]
Thus, throughout the long 19th century, we find a situation in which the same Polish word – “ruskie” – referred to Russians in the Russian part of Poland and to Ukrainians in the Austrian part. And this raises the question: were pierogi ruskie in the Ukrainian sense in any way different from pierogi ruskie in the Russian sense?
Potato Vareniki
In an 18th-century Russian-language description of the Kharkiv Governorate (an area now cut by the front line of the Russo-Ukrainian war), we can read the following account of the local population’s culinary habits:
| In the evening they usually prepare a kind of piroshki, called “vareniki”, which have a casing made of wheat or buckwheat flour and a filling of fresh cheese, which they call “syr”. And these are not baked, but boiled in water, from which they received their name. | ||||
— Топографичний опис Харківського намісництва 1785 р., in: Описи Харківського намісництва кінця XVIII ст., red. П.С. Сохань, В.А. Смолій, Ф.П. Шевченко, Г.Б. Боряк, Київ: Наукова Думка, 1991, p. 68, own translation
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These vareniki (вареники,🔊 from Ukrainian vareni, варені, meaning “boiled”) are exactly the same thing as modern Polish unleavened, boiled pierogi, only under a Ukrainian name. As we can see in the quotation above, Ukrainian peasants were already filling their vareniki with farmer cheese more than two hundred years ago – but not yet with potatoes. Source evidence for vareniki filled with both farmer cheese and potatoes only begins to appear a century later. Here’s one example – from a Polish-language ethnographic work about the lives of the inhabitants of a Galician village near Drohobych:
| For this [wedding] feast they serve borscht, broth, cabbage, buckwheat and millet or barley groats (or rice in wealthier homes), stewed meat and aspics, and sometimes also buckwheat pierogi filled with potatoes and cheese, topped with sour cream. | ||||
— Michalina Tomaszewska: Obrzędy weselne ludu ruskiego we wsi Winnikach powiatu drohobyckiego, Kraków: Drukarnia Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 1887, p. 14, own translation
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The following example from Lviv also dates back to the same period:
| Pierogi with cheese and potatoes are tastier than with spuds alone. | ||||
— Sprawy gospodarskie, in: Niedziela: pismo tygodniowe dla ludu, ed. Albert Wilczyński, No 5, Lwów: nakładem redaktora, 3 February 1884, p. 47, own translation
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By the end of the 19th century, the idea of saving on the cheese by extending it with boiled potatoes had begun to spread from the Ukrainian countryside into the bourgeois cookbooks of western Galicia.
| Potato pierogi Knead the dough as usual, roll out thinly and fill with little heaps of potatoes – previously mashed with a quarter of a pound of butter, a quarter of a pound of good bryndza [mature sheep’s-milk cheese], pepper and salt. Drop into boiling water. Once they float to the top, remove with a slotted spoon, arrange on a platter, drizzle with browned butter and serve with sour cream. | ||||
— Maria Gruszecka: Kucharz krakowski dla oszczędnych gospodyń, Kraków: J.M. Himmelblau, [1892], p. 239, own translation
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But so far, we’ve got no example of such boiled pierogi with a cheese-and-potato filling being called “pierogi ruskie”. We’ve traced the evolution of both the dish itself and its name – but at what point did these two evolutionary lines finally converge, uniting the dish with the word? Quite recently, as it turns out! The earliest printed sources in which I have found recipës for pierogi ruskie as we know them today date back only to the Second World War.
Here’s a recipë from a cookbook published in Cracow under German occupation:
| Pierogi ruskie Pass cooked potatoes through a meat grinder and add a little cow’s-milk cheese. Brown a sliced onion in 100 g of butter, mix with the potatoes and cheese, add one egg and season with salt and pepper to taste. Prepare the dumpling dough as usual, roll it out, cut out the pockets with an upturned glass and shape them into dumplings. Cook them in salted water and drizzle with melted butter or rendered lard. | ||||
— H. F.: Gotuj tanio, szybko i zdrowo, Kraków: Gebethner i Wolff, 1940, p. 41–42, own translation
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The following quotation comes from a dietary handbook from the same period. It’s clear that its author already took it for granted that pierogi ruskie were filled with a cheese-and-potato mixture.
| Proteins are also found in cheaper plant-based products, especially legumes, potatoes, flour and groats. These proteins are of inferior quality, less readily absorbed by the human body. We should therefore compose dishes that supplement the low-quality plant proteins with full-value animal proteins, such as pierogi ruskie, in which the inferior potato protein is supplemented with the superior cheese protein. | ||||
— Jadłodajnia przy spółdzielni, in: Informator dla spółdzielni spożywców, ed. Tadeusz Janczyk, 2/4, Warszawa: „Społem” Związek Spółdzielni Spożywców, 25 February 1941, p. 7, own translation
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Meanwhile, Polish-Ukrainian-Russian relations had become significantly complicated – to put it mildly. As a result of the First World War, Russia went through two revolutions in one year, while the Poles and the Ukrainians each declared their independence. In 1920, Poland and Bolshevik Russia fought a war that ended with a joint partition of Ukraine and Belarus. The Soviet Union was then created from Russia and the eastern parts of Ukraine and Belarus it had seized. The Second World War, which began with a joint German-Soviet aggression against Poland, brought about mutual Polish-Ukrainian ethnic cleansing and ended with shifting borders, forced resettlements and the descent of the Iron Curtain across Europe. Poland found itself in the Soviet sphere of influence, while Ukraine and Belarus – now in their entirety – within the Soviet Union itself. Ivan III’s dream of uniting all of the Rus lands under Moscow’s control had finally come true. Under these new circumstances, the word “ruskie” had essentially only one meaning in colloquial Polish: it became a negative term for all Soviet citizens – and for the Soviet government and military in particular. It didn’t matter whether they were ethnic Russians, Ukrainians or even Kalmyks. What did matter was that Poland was effectively under their control, even though no one really wanted them here.
And yet, despite that negative connotation, pierogi ruskie became a staple of Polish cuisine for good.
Can We Sub Lazies for the Ruskies?
Pierogi are delicious, but producing them is quite time-consuming. They take hours to make, yet are eaten in a matter of minutes. It’s no wonder that some cooks have long preferred to take shortcuts: why bother wrapping cheese in a pocket of dough when you can simply work the cheese into the dough? Such simple dumplings can then be baked, fried or boiled without fear of the casing opening and the filling leaking out. Recipës for this type of dish date back as far as the late 17th century, such as the one below – in this case, for sweet baked “pirożki” with sheep’s-milk cheese.
| Take fresh sheep’s-milk cheese, grind it as fine as possible, add eggs, mix in just enough flour so that it doesn’t stick to your hands, add cinnamon, sugar and small raisins, then grease a pan or baking sheet with butter, spread the dough flat in it, baste with eggs, put it in the oven and bake. | ||||
— Jarosław Dumanowski, Rafał Jankowski (eds.): Moda bardzo dobra smażenia różnych konfektów, Warszawa: Muzeum Pałac w Wilanowie, 2011, p. 196, own translation
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From the second half of the 18th century we already have evidence that this lazy version of cheese pierogi was simply called “pierogi leniwe”,🔊 or “lazy pierogi”. When Wojciech Wielądko🔊 translated the French cookbook La cuisinière bourgeoise (The City Cook) into Polish, he decided to supplement it with a glossary of Polish culinary terms. It includes the following definition of pierogi:
| Pierogi are made in diverse ways: lazy pierogi from sweet cheese; others wrapped in dough and baked in the oven, filled with pork or fatty beef, finely chopped and well seasoned. | ||||
— Słownik kuchenny i spiżarniany, in: Wojciech Wielądko: Kucharz doskonały pożyteczny dla zatrudniających się gospodarstwem, ed. Jarosław Dumanowski, Aleksandra Kleśta-Nawrocka, Warszawa: Muzeum Pałac w Wilanowie, 2012, p. 295, own translation
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In the 19th century, lazy pierogi had even made their way into belles‑lettres, as in this deliciously dreamy poem about an “island of every felicity”:
Almost as fair and lovely as Adam’s paradise, | ||||
— Wyspa wszelkiej pomyślności, in: [Fortunat Żółkowski]: Momus, No. 2, Warszawa: 10 June 1820, p. 12–15, own translation
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By Józefa Wnukowa (1954)
After the Second World War, pierogi leniwe rivalled pierogi ruskie in popularity. Together they became fixed points on the menus of canteens and milk bars across the country, brightening – if only a little – the drabness of everyday life in the People’s Republic of Poland.
The buzz and bustle of big-city life: | ||||
— Wojciech Młynarski, Światowe życie (1966)[9], own translation
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In 1978, the joke I quoted at the beginning was told on Polish television. Except that the character in the satirical show Olga Lipińska’s Cabaret (Kabaret Olgi Lipińskiej) who was meant to tell it made a very visible last-minute substitution: he swapped pierogi ruskie for pierogi leniwe. Of course, the punchline – “Who asked for the lazies?” “No one did. They came uninvited!” – no longer made any sense. But the joke landed anyway, as the audience instantly recognized this act of self-censorship. Unfortunately, the Soviet embassy recognized it just as well and, as a result, the show was taken off the air for half a year.[10]
My Grandma’s Pierogi
I wrote above that the earliest printed recipës I’ve been able to track down in which pierogi called “ruskie” already match the pierogi ruskie we know today date only from the Second World War. But what about handwritten recipës? As it turns out, I’ve found only one manuscript recipë for pierogi ruskie in the modern sense that predates the war – and, to my surprise, it surfaced in my own family archive.
They’re notes my Grandma Zosia made when she was nineteen, while attending a course for young housewives, around 1935. She was born in Jaworzno, in the Austrian partition – but about as far from the Rus lands as one could be while still living within the borders of Galicia. Which suggests that already in the 1930s the word “ruskie” in “pierogi ruskie“ referred – at least across former Galicia – to the Ukrainian, not the Russian, way of filling and shaping pierogi.
When I compare Grandma Zosia’s handwritten recipës with what I remember from watching her cook, I can see how faithfully she kept to the techniques she learned as a young woman. Her recipë for pierogi ruskie is given below. The photographs show each stage of making the pierogi with my Mom’s hands – she learned these very techniques from my Grandmother, her mother‑in‑law.
| Make the pierogi dough, roll it out, spoon on the filling, cut out the shapes and seal the edges. Filling: boil the potatoes in their skins, then peel and grind them in a meat grinder. Add 250 g of ground farmer cheese (per 1 kg of potatoes), an onion browned in fat, salt and pepper to taste, one or two eggs, and a little grated nutmeg. After shaping the pierogi, cook them in boiling salted water, and once lifted out, drizzle with browned lard. | ||||
— Zofia Palion: handwritten recipës, Jaworzno: ca. 1935, family archive, own translation
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-
Kneading -
Rolling -
Cutting out the pockets of dough -
Grinding farmer cheese and potatoes -
Filling -
Sealing -
Boiling -
Sautéing (optional)
Bibliography
- Naomi Guttman, Franklin Sciacca: The Magic of Dumplings: Bringing Pierogi into the (New) World, in: Mark McWilliams: Wrapped & Stuffed Foods: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2012, Prospect Books, 2013, p. 188–198
- Володимир Михайлович Гнатюк: Народня пожива і спосіб її приправи у східній Галичині, in: Матеріали до українсько-руської етнольоґії, ed. Хведір Кіндратович Вовк, vol. I, Львів: Друкарня Наукового товариства ім. Шевченка, 1899, p. 96–110
- Michał Kuźmiński: Lepienie świata, in: Tygodnik Powszechny, No. 51–52, Kraków: 13 December 2021
- Rachel Laudan: Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, University of California Press, 2013
- Leszek Moczulski: Geopolityka, Warszawa: Bellona, 2010
- Kazimierz Nitsch: O nazwy naszych słowiańskich sąsiadów: I. Rusini czy Ukraińcy?, in: Język Polski, XII, vol. 3, Kraków: Drukarnia Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, May–June 1927, p. 65–72
- Вареники, in: Євген Дометійович Онацький: Українська Мала Енциклопедія, vol. 2, Буенос-Айрес: Адміністратура Української автокефальної православної церкви в Аргентині, 1967, p. 128
- Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine, Yale Courses, 2022 – series of lectures available on Youtube and Spotify
- Timothy Snyder: The Reconstruction of Nations, Yale University Press, 2003
- Hanna Szymanderska: Pierogi świata, Warszawa: Hachette Polska, 2009
References
- ↑ Fabio Parasecoli, Agata Bachórz, Mateusz Halawa: The Pierogi Problem: Cosmopolitan Appetites and the Reinvention of Polish Food, Oakland: University of California Press, 2025, p. 7
- ↑ Zygmunt Gloger: Geografia historyczna ziem dawnej Polski, Kraków: Spółka Wydawnicza Polska, 1900, p. 211–223
- ↑ Rachel Laudan: Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, University of California Press, 2013, p. 145
- ↑ Nadworny kuchmistrz polski, Warszawa: Henryk Hirszel, 1847, p. 187–188
- ↑ A. D.: Poradnik kucharski, Warszawa: Stanisław Strąbski, 1847, p. 71
- ↑ Lucyna Ćwierczakiewiczowa: 365 obiadów za pięć złotych, Warszawa: self-published, 1866, p. 196–197
- ↑ Idem., p. 124–128
- ↑ Eliza Orzeszkowa: List do Iwana Franki, in: Wikiźródła, Grodno: 8 April 1886
- ↑ Jerzy Wiśniewski: Polacy przy jedzeniu i za stołem w piosenkach Wojciecha Młynarskiego, in: Acta Universitatis Lodziensis: Folia Litteraria Polonica, 13, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2010, p. 273
- ↑ Justyna Bryczkowska: Kobuszewski rzucił żart o pierogach: Sześć słów wystarczyło, by ruszyła lawina, in: Gazeta.pl, 5 July 2025
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