Pirozhki Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Pirozhki are small pies of dough wrapped around a filling and shaped by hand, then baked in the oven or fried in oil. The large form is called a pirog; pirozhki are its smaller kin. The fillings run wide: meat, cabbage, fish, buckwheat.

The wheat and rye at the heart of them are old grains in Eastern Europe and Russia. Wheat was rooted here by around the 5th century BCE, rye by the 11th or 12th. The raw materials were on hand early, and the dough was at first usually made from rye. In time a wheat dough spread and the pie moved toward the form we know today.

Baking in the oven and frying in oil were both everyday skills in pre-modern Russia. Baked in home kitchens, set on festive tables, present from the peasant house to the court, the pie appears across every part of daily life. It was not the food of any one class or faith but a pie woven into the very life of the East Slavs, with a long history behind it.

Two assumptions cling to pirozhki.

The first concerns the name. The claim runs that pirog (пирог) was borrowed from the Turkic böräk (a meat pie), or else that it came from the Old Slavic пира (a bag) and meant 'bread for the road.' Plausible as they sound, Max Vasmer's Russian Etymological Dictionary rejects both as 'unlikely' (Невероятно). Had the word been borrowed from böräk, cognates should show up in the South Slavic languages, and they do not. The пира account rests on a Greek borrowing with a limited range. The word was formed inside Slavic: пиръ, meaning 'feast', with the suffix -огъ, built the same way as творог (curd cheese), and it originally meant 'bread for a feast.' The name is recorded at the medieval feasts of Kyiv, and by the 16th century the household manual Domostroi lists stuffed pies of meat, cabbage, fish, and buckwheat.

The second is the modern reflex that pirozhki means potato-filled. But the New World potato only spread to the tables of Russia and Ukraine in the 19th century. It reached Ukraine around 1840, and after the failed harvests of 1838 and 1839 and the peasant unrest of the 1840s, it became a staple only in the latter half of the century. The potato pirozhok came after all of this, a newer dish. The old fillings were meat, cabbage, fish, and buckwheat; the potato joined them later. Not mistaking the age of the genre for the age of one particular filling is the key to reading this dish's history.