Pierogi: An American Story of Polish Food

How did pierogi become the most recognizable Polish food in the United States and, eventually, a symbol of Polish American identity? Historian Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann uses that question to tell a much larger story about immigration, assimilation, and the ways food carries ideas of home and belonging across generations. 

Pierogi follows Polish cuisine from the immigrant kitchens into cookbooks, community organizations, restaurants, commercial production, and popular culture. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann shows how traditional foods changed in response to American tastes and new waves of immigration, even as making and eating pierogi continued to connect families and communities to Poland. 

Her sources range from menus, memoirs, and historical cookbooks to interviews with Polish American cooks, entrepreneurs, and community members. She looks at the businesses and personalities that helped bring pierogi to a wider American audience, as well as the transformation of a once humble family food into an enduring emblem of ethnicity. 

Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann also brings her own experience to the history, recalling food shortages during her childhood in communist-era Poland and her arrival in the United States in the 1980s. The result is a history of one dish and a study of how food traditions survive, adapt, and acquire new meanings far from where they began.

Hardcover. Black-and-white photographs.