The Dish I'm Dreaming of this Christmas
For many of us, Christmas is a vehicle for overindulgence. But with a festive season on the horizon unlike any that we’ve experienced before, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of food to conjure up memories of the people that we might not get to celebrate with this year.
With the weather getting colder, I continue in vain to eat my five-a-day, but my soul is calling out for something warmer and more homely. My grandma’s piping hot mushroom soup, salty and glistening with golden oil; plump potato dumplings swimming in snowy sour cream.
My mum moved to the UK from Slovakia in the late 80s and, growing up, we used to spend all of our school holidays in the village where she was raised. Little known for its culinary delights, I reveled in the homely indulgence of it all: my grandparents’ cellar full of fruit compote that I would eat by the jar, shelling walnuts with my granddad in the garden, making myself sick from eating too many sour cherries. No visit to a family friend’s house was complete without a renaissance-esque platter of cakes and biscuits, or a freshly-sliced watermelon to cool us all down in the Summer.
But for me, nothing brings back those nostalgic memories quite like dumplings. Specifically, Slovak pirohy. Stodgy, potato-y, fatty dumplings that hug me from the inside and make me feel like everything’s going to be okay.
Almost every country around the world has its own riff on these, and their origins are widely contested. Pheasant and lovage dumplings featured in an ancient Roman cookbook by Apicus in the 1st century, and lamb Jiaozi dumplings were conceived during the Han Dynasty in China by a medical practitioner in order to cure people of their frostbitten ears. Dumplings cropped up independently around the world in their different forms, in order to bulk up meat dishes, making meals stretch further with the incorporation of just a few basic ingredients.
In England, they’re known best as the herby little clouds that swim in hearty stews; Scotland’s clootie dumpling is more akin to a steamed pudding, laced with currants and treacle; Ghanaian fufu are sticky dumplings made from cassava and plantain to mop up soups and stews. Lest we forget the heady delights of Japanese gyoza or, even, Italian ravioli. Some time in the 12th century, ours made the arduous journey from East Asia, via Russia, to the kitchen of every Eastern-European grandparent. And, depending on which Central or Eastern European country you’re in, you might know them as pirohy, pierogi or varenyky.
It’s a simple dough: made from flour, water and potato and shaped into podgy little crescents before being stuffed with a filling of potato and onion or, my favourite, bryndza: a soft and salty sheep’s cheese. Eastern European dumplings have been shared around like folklore, evolving over generations and keeping entire populations going when there was little money for ingredients.
There’s an old Slovak folk story that I love, about a King who asks his daughters how much they love him in order to decide how to split his kingdom amongst them. The first two daughters say they love him as much as the universe, as much as gold. But when the third daughter declares that she loves him as much as salt, the King is enraged; he sends her away, and banishes all of the salt from the kingdom. It is only later, when he is served an unseasoned meal, that he realises the importance of this magical substance, and the generosity of his daughter's love.
Though I’m not a royalist, I do believe in the transformative power of simple ingredients. For me, there’s nothing better than a soft potato parcel that oozes with herby, salty filling. Better yet, the same dough can be made sweet. Perhaps a filling of plum jam (a huge tub of this sweet, tar-like substance was a stalwart of my grandparents’ fridge for as long as I can remember), topped with melted butter and nutty poppy seeds, or a slice of apricot that turns to liquid gold as the dumplings cook.
For many of us this year, cooking has provided some reprieve from the perpetual misery of news cycles. So this Christmas, in a year like no other, I’m forgetting lavish traditions in favour of something more personal, that reminds me of home.
Written by Katya Spiers
Katya is a final-year student from Edinburgh at the University of Bristol. She is the digital film & TV editor at Epigram and also organises weekly online life drawing sessions with Helicon Magazine. You can follow her on Twitter at @katya8263718.