Potato Pierogi Are the Best Pierogi

But however you fill or cook them, these Polish dumplings are little bites of comfort

Pierogi can be simply boiled, or boiled first, then pan-fried in butter and served with sour cream or fried shallots or onions. Sentelia/Shutterstock

Despite having grown up eating these Polish dumplings, especially around Christmas, I had to re-learn how to say their name as an adult. Two generations removed from speaking Slovak at home, we kids had transformed “pierogi” to “padokee.” And as with another popular Polish food, paczki, the word pierogi is already plural (who could eat just one?) from pieróg. So the anglicized “pierogies” is a bit redundant.

But the recipe didn’t deviate, I thought: boiled dumplings with potato and cheese filling. We’d confronted the occasional sauerkraut-stuffed pillows, but as kids we stared those down and relegated them to the far side of our plates. Potatoes or nothing, Mom.

Sweet, Savory, Holy?

We kids thought kraut was a bridge too far, but the oldest recorded recipe, from a 1682 Polish cookbook, called for kidney, veal fat, greens, and nutmeg. In fact, potatoes didn’t get to Europe until the Spanish and English brought them from the New World, from the Incas in present-day Peru.