When Ted’s uncle came for a visit recently, he noticed our plum tree was producing lots of fruit and mentioned that his mom used to make plum pierogies. I’d only had savory pierogies like potato and cheese, but the idea of a sweet pierogi was intriguing. It wasn’t mentioned again, and he left for home.

Meanwhile, I continued harvesting bowls of plums and made a couple batches of jam when we received a letter from John with the following enclosure:

an annotated copy of his mother’s recipe for German Piroghy. Neat!

I’ve never made these before and the recipe isn’t long on details, so I did a little investigation on the Web to help fill in the gaps for a novice pierogi-chef like myself:

  • For the dough
  • For the mushroom filling
  • For the plum filling
    The original recipe didn’t have any instructions for the filling, so I looked online. Most plum pierogi recipes called for either plain white sugar or a combination of sugar and cinnamon; I used a 1-to-4 ratio of cinnamon to sugar. Peel the plum, halve and remove the stone, add about a teaspoon (or less) cinnamon/sugar in the center, then roll the plum in the cinnamon/sugar mixture.

The original recipe also called for melting a stick of butter and adding 1 cup bread crumbs, cooking until slightly browned, then rolling the plum pierogi in the butter crumb mixture. We were going to try this, but Ted ended up buying Italian-style breadcrumbs and I didn’t think that would go so well with the sweet plum so we just made them plain.

They. were. Delicious. I mean, really good. The pierogies I’d had before were the frozen kind that you microwave and serve, which are great if you need a pierogi-fix quick (making them from scratch for the first time took close to three hours from start to finish — it would likely be considerably less time next time around, but still well over an hour). But these are like a completely different food. The dough is fantastic, the filling so flavorful…

Big thanks to John for sending this our way. Great recipe!! Would make again!!1!