I spent a week in Warsaw and ate more pierogi than I could shake a stick at.
These beloved traditional Polish dumplings come filled with potatoes, cheese, meat, mushrooms and even fruit. Boiled or fried, they may look familiar to anyone acquainted with jiaozi, the Chinese dumpling, although their flavours are distinctly Polish.
This is not to suggest that dumplings travelled directly from China to Poland. One theory posits that dumpling-like foods – from Nepalese momo and Central Asian and Turkish manti to Georgian khinkali – spread westwards from their origin in East Asia through Central and South Asia, the Middle East and, eventually, Europe. Another posits that filled dumplings emerged in multiple places independently rather than from a single source.
