Russian Roots

It started with a plea from my friend, Mrs. B. She is editing a collection of stories about learning to cook all over the world. The book is nearly done, going to print shortly for a fall release, and she needed help testing the recipes. I volunteered and, when I heard that she had a recipe for Russian pelmeni, I asked if I could take it for a test drive.

I had just tasted pelmeni for the first time, when Catherine and I had lunch at a Russian restaurant I had requested we visit. Catherine has lived in Moscow and I knew she would be a good guide through a cuisine that is unfamiliar to me. She ordered pelmeni, small dumplings filled with chicken and floating in broth, and let me taste them. They were delicious.

I have an interest in Russian food because that is where part of my family comes from. My great-grandfather immigrated from Russia to the US in the 1800s, though the details have been lost and no one seems to be very clear on where he came from. I’ve variously heard Kiev, somewhere near Chernobyl, and, most recently, Lithuania (none of which are technically in Russia).

Though I’ve not grown up with any Russian or Slavic culture, I feel a certain connection. When I visited Russia in the early 1990s I spent my days wandering around looking at people and wondering if I looked like them, if I could pass for native. My Russian great-grandfather married a woman from Vienna and I do fit in there. As long as I dress appropriately no one knows I’m American until I open my mouth and they hear my badly accented German.

It recently occurred to me that I have no family recipes, nothing passed down from woman to women over the generations—a fail-safe method for bread; a technique for the best pie crust; a way to make delicious jam. I know many people have these, little bits of domestic heritage and history entrusted to fading note cards and well-worn notebooks. In choosing the pelmeni recipe, perhaps I was trying to recreate a little bit of my own culinary history. Trying to learn about the sort of dishes I might have cooked had my great-grandfather not taken leave of his homeland so many years ago.

Pelmeni are thought to have originated in Siberia. They were originally called pelnyan or “dough-ears,” which refers to the half moon shape of the dumplings. When translated into Russian the name became pelmen, and when plural, pelmeni. It is thought that pelmeni originated in China, an offshoot of the Chinese pot sticker, and were brought to the Urals and into Eastern Europe by early Mongols. The same technique made its way down into Italy where it was transformed into ravioli and tortellini. In fact, pelmeni are sometimes called Siberian ravioli.

The standard pelmeni recipe involves ground pork and beef mixed with onion, perhaps some garlic, maybe even a bit of shredded cabbage (pretty much a potsticker filling, minus the ginger). This mixture is used to fill a dough made of egg, milk, and flour that has been rolled out and cut into rounds. Each round is stuffed with a spoonful of the filling, folded over, and sealed.



The resulting pelmeni are then boiled in water, which serves to cook the filling, and are served in a variety of ways. Sour cream is a common topping but I’ve also seen recipes that recommend ketchup, vinegar, or mayonnaise (my ancestors did not put mayo on their pelmeni, I feel sure of it). They can also be served in a broth soup.

On a recent afternoon that was really far too warm and summery to be making rib sticking Russian food, I began chopping, mixing, rolling, and cutting. The filling mixture is easy—I made two versions, one with pork and beef and the other one with ground chicken, as I did not think my friend Seren, who had been drafted into pelmeni tasting, likes red meat. The dough came together easily and soon I was spooning and sealing pelmeni. Then spooning and sealing pelmeni, and spooning and sealing some more.



The bowl of filling seemed endless and I began to get a little bored. I had read an history of the pelmeni that says they were “traditionally made by the hundreds or thousands and kept frozen over time. The process, which is a fairly tedious one of rolling, cutting, filling, folding, and pinching large quantities of dough, is a time-honored family tradition often accompanied by hours of songs, stories, and vodka.”

Clearly that was my problem. Well, two problems: lack of a large Russian family to sing and tell stories with while spending hours, days even, making hundreds of pelmeni; and not enough vodka while cooking.

Seren arrived shortly, to alleviate my boredom, and brought mixers to go along with the vodka, a large bottle we liberated from shuttered obscurity in the liquor cabinet. With hunger setting in I began boiling the pelmeni. I opted for sour cream and dill on my dumplings, while Seren went for a smorgasbord of dipping sauces to see which she liked the best—ketchup, mayonnaise, a vinegar and a soy sauce mixture.



Seren reported that the mayonnaise was actually quite tasty, but I was too busy savoring the delightful sour cream and dill, a flavor mixture I’ve always enjoyed (perhaps I am Russian after all). The pelmeni were comforting and filling, good fare to get you through a long, cold winter. With perhaps a little bit of the flavor of home as well.

RUSSIAN PELMENI
Adapted from the forthcoming anthology, The World is a Kitchen

I fussed with the recipe a bit. I found the filling a little dry—made worse by the fact that I overcooked the first batch in an attempt to make sure the meat was indeed cooked through (recovering vegetarian here). The second go I added an egg to the filling and made sure to only cook them for 8-10 minutes, which made for a more moist dumpling. Delicious—and I don't even think you need to be Russian to enjoy them.

For the dough:
2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more to flour your work surface
1 egg
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup water or skim milk, plus a wee splash more if needed

Filling
1/2 lb ground pork
1/2 lb ground beef
1 large onion, finely minced
1 egg, beaten
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon salt
1 large clove garlic
1/2 cup cabbage shredded into fine threads (optional)

For dough, mix flour, salt and egg together in a medium bowl. Add liquid, a little at a time, until dough is stiff. Knead dough for 2 to 4 minutes on a floured surface. (You will have to add more flour so that the dough doesn't stick). Roll out dough to 1/8-inch thickness with a rolling pin. Will a glass or cookie cutter, cut out rounds of dough 3 inches in diameter.

Prepare filling by mixing all ingredients together.

Put 1 tablespoon filling on one half of each circle. Moisten edges of dough with a little water. Fold dough over filling and press edges together first with your fingers, then with the tines of a fork.

Freeze to be cooked later or cook immediately by putting pelmeni in boiling salted water. Stir occasionally, cook until pelmeni rise to surface (8-10 minutes).

Serve with sour cream, mayonnaise, ketchup, melted butter, or in broth.

And for those of us without the large extended Russian family (or without the large bottle of vodka), you can now buy, direct from Russia, a pelmeni mold, to quickly turn out dumplings by the dozens. I've come to crave the little things (though happily I still have a number of them in the freezer). Perhaps I should invest in a mold. Unless I can mail order the large Russian family that should have been mine, full of songs and stories to tell, happily folding pelmeni late into the night.