A Love Letter to Poland's Wild Blueberry Pierogis
When I started making return visits to Poland at age seventeen (having emigrated with my parents when I was seven), I would spend weeks each summer in a small fishing village called Chalupy, on the Baltic Sea. The empty, white-sand beaches were beautiful, rooms were rented for the season from local fishermen, and midday meals, cooked by the fishermen's wives, were consumed communally at long wooden tables around which crowded the creme de la creme of Warsaw's cultural elite–artists, writers, film directors, and their families and friends, for all of whom Chalupy, in those late Communist years, was a sort of bohemian summer paradise (complete with nudist stretches of sand). There were no menus, just the dish the cooks chose to make that day (it usually involved the morning's haul of fish). But once a week, it was pierogi with blueberries and cream. The wait for seats was notably longer on those days, I remember, the anticipation palpable.
Everyone knows pierogi. The little dumplings arrived in Poland centuries ago via cultural exchanges with the East. (Some theories: Marco Polo, Tatar invasions, ninth-century trade routes through Kievan Rus.) And they can be found anywhere there's a Polish community. Usually, of course, they are filled with meat, potatoes, mushrooms, sauerkraut, or cheese; boiled, and then sometimes fried as well, and sprinkled with fried onion bits. Usually. But not always.
Pierogi with sweet fruit filling are less if at all known outside Poland, but practically fetishized in Poland. (The country's first cookbook, Compendium Ferculorum, published in 1682, includes a recipe for pierogi filled with rose and elderflower preserves.) These days, it’s most often strawberries or blueberries. The fruit pierogi are served hot like all the others (but only boiled, not fried) and eaten in summer as the main dish of the afternoon meal, accompanied by sour cream and sugar. The strawberry ones are nice. But the blueberry ones....
The dish is called pierogi z jagodami in Polish (the ‘j” is prounced like a ‘y’). And the key thing to understand is that jagody are not, strictly speaking, blueberries, but what is sometimes called "bilberries" in English, a kind of wild blueberry.
Blueberries are cultivated. Bilberries (Vaccinium myrtillus) cannot be. Their low-growing shrubs, which can be found in profusion in the forests of northeastern Europe, flower in June and July and the berries, which grow singly or in pairs (blueberries grow in easier to handle clusters), can be picked in August and September. On summer days, along roads in the Polish countryside, you can see people emerging out of forests gently carrying small baskets with their delicate, hard-won haul back to their cars.
And what a fruit this is. Nothing, really, like the cultivated blueberry. The skin of the wild ones is so dark it appears nearly black (czarne, "black," often precedes the noun jagody); some, for added interest, exhibit a slight, rakish shade of purple. The difference is more than skin deep: The flesh of blueberries ranges from white to pale green; but the flesh of the wild berries, high in anthocyanin (the stuff that stains your tongue and fingers and is said to have great health benefits as well), is a rich, reddish-purple. And it is at once sweeter and tangier than that of blueberries, as well as softer and juicier—all qualities the berries should retain during skilled pierogi preparation, and which make the experience of eating them so divine.
The preparation of the dish is strictly less-is-more—why mess with this gorgeous bounty of the forest? The berries are gently rinsed to remove any stray stems or leaves and simply mixed with some sugar and (optional) a touch of potato starch, which can help preserve their shape. It is especially important for the pierogi dough to be firm but thin, so that the fruit inside each pocket is merely steamed once the pierogis are dropped into boiling water—not cooked into a fruit pulp. The pierogi are scooped out of the pot onto the plate with a slotted spoon as soon as they float to the top (never dumped into colander, they are too delicate for that) and topped with sour cream mixed with sugar. (I like my cream swished around with the pierogi, not just a dollop sitting on top of them.) Et voila.
You can find pierogi dough recipes online. But you can’t get fresh wild blueberries State-side (at least not to my knowledge). Certain shops specializing in Polish fare do carry frozen wild blueberries. They’ll do in a pinch.
But for the real thing, you’ll have to take that trip to Poland. I’ve traveled there often lately, but in the last two years, it's been in November—pointless, fruit-pierogi-wise. This year, I’m going to Warsaw in July, height of the czarne jagody season. And I know where I’ll be every day around 1 p.m.: at one of the sidewalk tables of my favorite restaurant, Przegryz (translation: "Have a Bite"), on Mokotowska Street. One portion is typically 12 dumplings. I’ll be having two of those.
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