“It Comes with Practice”: Pierogi-Making as Preserving and Imagining Polonia

Abstract:Pierogi-making is an everyday performance that is both an act of preservation and an active force that shapes the very heritage from which it draws. During participant observation that I engaged in with members of the Women’s Circle at a Polish Canadian cultural centre in Brantford, Ontario—referred to by its members as “the Hall”—in the summer of 2016, I was taught, through apprenticeship, how to make pierogi. The women under whom I apprenticed imagine the pierogi they make as being traditional in that they believe the recipe is drawn from an archive formed collectively by Polish Canadians. However, pierogi-makers also incorporate their own imaginings of what constitutes a traditional pierogi based on their individual experiences, lived realities, and desires for the future. While there is a passing down of what members of the Women’s Circle imagine as being the heritage of Polonia, those images are also rearticulated through an everyday performance that both conforms to and defies an imagined heritage that, like the act of making pierogi, “comes with practice.” Polish Canadians embody a quintessential migrant reality that exists between past, present, and future, between there and here, as formed by the experiences, performances, and imagination of its members. If Polonia is an imaginary, then pierogi are a punctum from which people of Polish descent draw their heritage. I argue that pierogi function as a kind of imagistic landscape on and through which the nation of Polonia is imagined and performed by its members.