Pierogi in Curitiba: what Polish settlement put on the plate

Overview

Pierogi are half-moon dumplings of unleavened wheat dough, filled, sealed by hand along a crimped edge, boiled, and very often finished in butter with onion until the outside blisters. The standard fillings are potato with fresh curd cheese, sauerkraut with mushroom, minced meat, and — sweet, and eaten as a course of their own — soft fruit or curd with sugar.

Their presence here is not a restaurant importation but a demographic fact. Polish settlers arrived in this part of Paraná from 1871, and the colonies founded around the young city — Abranches, Santa Cândida and their neighbours in the north — are today ordinary city districts with Polish street names, wooden churches and family recipes that never stopped being cooked. The community that grew out of that settlement is among the largest of its kind anywhere outside Poland, and it is one of the reasons Curitiba’s food is a set of immigrant kitchens rather than a single cuisine.

So the honest label is regional in an unusual direction: the dish is not from this region, but its presence here is a hundred and fifty years old, which is longer than a great many things that get called traditional. It has also changed. The local version is generally larger than the central-European one, more often served as a plated main course with sour cream than as one element of a long meal, and the curd cheese used in the potato filling is the fresh local ricota or homemade curd rather than the imported article. Some kitchens fry them from raw rather than boiling first, which produces something crisper and heavier than the original.

The name is spelled several ways on signs and menus here — the plural has been through a century and a half of a language that does not have the same sounds — so do not expect consistency, and do not correct anyone.

What to order

The fillings are the whole decision, and the way they are named locally is usually descriptive rather than by the Polish term:

• Potato and curd cheese — the default, mild, and the one most kitchens make best.
• Sauerkraut and mushroom — sharper, darker, and the traditional meat-free filling for the Christmas table.
• Meat — minced beef or pork, more often found in the city than in the old colonies.
• Sweet, with fruit or sweetened curd — a separate course, dusted with sugar, sometimes with cream. Ask whether they are on the menu; they are frequently made only at weekends.

The finish matters as much as the filling. Boiled and buttered is the traditional service, with softened onion and sometimes crisped bacon scattered over; fried means they have been browned in a pan afterwards, which is what most restaurants do here. Sour cream on the side is standard and is not optional in practice — the dough is plain and the cream is the seasoning.

Portions are counted, usually six to ten pieces, and six is a starter while ten is a full plate.

Where to look is a geography question rather than a list of names. The northern districts founded by the colonies still have their community halls and church kitchens, and those are where the dumplings are made by hand in quantity. The city’s covered market is the reliable central option. The Sunday craft market in the old town has stalls selling them by the portion.

What to avoid

The frozen commercial pierogi is widespread here, sold in supermarkets in bags and served in plenty of restaurants, and it is identifiable on the plate: uniform size, a machine-pressed edge with a regular ribbed pattern, and a thick dough that stays pale and slightly rubbery even after frying. Handmade ones are irregular, the crimp is uneven, and some of them leak.

The second thing to watch is dough thickness. A good pierogi has dough thin enough that the filling shapes it from the inside — you can see the bulge. Where the dough is padded out, the kitchen is stretching an expensive filling with a cheap one, and the result eats like a bread roll.

Third, the buffet. Pierogi appear on the all-you-can-eat tables at the big cantinas out on the north-western edge of the city and at various tourist-facing spreads, sitting in a warming tray. Boiled dumplings held for an hour absorb water, split and slump. This is a dish that has to go from pan to plate.

And be careful of “Polish night” set menus aimed at visitors, which typically pair a small portion of frozen dumplings with a large bill. The community’s own events — parish festivals, folk-dance evenings, the church fêtes that run through the year in the northern districts — serve the real thing at a fraction of the price, cooked by people making their grandmother’s version.

Practicalities

Reckon on roughly 35 to 60 reais for a plated portion in a restaurant, less at a market stall or a community event, and considerably more where they arrive as part of a set menu with folkloric accompaniment. A bag of good handmade frozen ones from a market stall is the cheapest way to eat well, if you have a kitchen.

They are lunch and dinner both, and the practical timing note is about the weekend rather than the hour: handmade pierogi are labour, so the kitchens that make their own tend to make them on Fridays and Saturdays and run out. A restaurant that has them on a Tuesday evening in unlimited quantity is not making them itself.

The season is real and it is the cold one. Curitiba sits on a plateau and is genuinely cold in winter by the standards of this country, with temperatures near freezing on the worst mornings, and that is when the community kitchens and the church halls are busiest. The other fixed moment is Wigilia, the meat-free supper on the night before Christmas, where the sauerkraut-and-mushroom filling is traditional and where a good many households in this city still eat them once a year without thinking of it as anything foreign.

Cards work everywhere in the city, including market stalls; carry a little cash for a parish festival, which is likely to be run out of a folding table. If you are buying them to cook later, ask for them raw and frozen rather than cooked — they boil from frozen in a few minutes and that is how every household here keeps them.