Greetings and welcome to another little bit of fluff from your fuzzy-headed friend, Marko the Werelynx. This week I’m keeping things simple with a diary about a family food tradition.
Once upon a time, Mrs. the Werelynx’s engineer grandfather travelled the world building radio and television towers. While working in Siberia he was introduced to a local speciality called “pelmeni.” When he worked in China his cook made it for him and his family. His wife learned to cook pelmeni from their Chinese cook and eventually the engineer and his family returned to Prague and cooked pelmeni for themselves and their relatives.
Traditionally pelmeni is a filled pasta dish similar to wonton or tortellini or ravioli. Little blobs of ground meat, mixed with a bit of minced onion, are set in the middle of small squares of thin pasta dough which are then folded in half to contain the meat. The edges are pressed to seal it and the two narrow ends of the resulting triangle are brought together over the top and pinched together.
The pelmeni are then boiled or they can be frozen raw and kept for later.
As far as I know, pelmeni is normally served with sour cream— and a shot of ice cold vodka. But the recipe that travelled half way around the world before it was taught to this fuzzy-headed American calls for pelmeni to be served in a bowl of strong meaty broth mixed with a fat dollop of mustard, crushed garlic, black pepper and Maggi.
Mrs. the Werelynx’s grandmother would roll out and fold hundreds of pelmeni at least once every year. Her son would bring the mustard and garlic. Aunts and cousins would meet at grandmother’s apartment for Sunday lunch and eat pelmeni together. We learned from them and now that they’ve gone we continue the tradition. For many years we would just make it for ourselves to eat on New Year’s Day. It was a lovely, warming dish to help our stomachs recover from the evils of bubbly wine. It became #1 Son’s favorite dish, so occasionally we’d make it for his birthday too. For many, many years we’d also make a couple dozen cheese pelmeni because #2 Son couldn’t stand the taste of onion. He has since befriended the pungent bulb.
We share the labor; I always make and roll out all the dough and Mrs. the Werelynx prepares the meat, cuts the dough into squares and distributes the little blobs— then it’s a team effort to do the folding.
The last few years Mrs. the Werelynx has decided to make sure her cousins and aunt, my son’s cousins, all of us, can again enjoy this food tradition many of us remember from when grandma cooked it. So, we no longer make a couple hundred pelmeni and eat them ourselves on New Year’s Day, we wait until a convenient weekend after New Year’s and make several hundred pelmeni and invite the whole family.
This year we made 668.
Counting them is also a tradition.
This year we brought back the vodka.
We like to speculate, because nobody knows anymore, whether grandpa had discovered a corner of Siberia where pelmeni was served with broth instead of sour cream or whether the broth and garlic mustard were additions made by the person who cooked it for him in China. At any rate, the tradition continues while it grows and changes.
Thanks for stopping by.
This is an open thread.