Varenyky Period COrigin theory CVerified

Varenyky are made by wrapping a filling in thinly rolled wheat dough and boiling the parcels in water. In the Ukrainian countryside they are loved both as home cooking and as a dish that brightens the festive table. The fillings vary: cottage cheese, fruit such as sour cherries, potato and more. Sweet and savory fillings alike go by the same name, varenyky, so the dish can serve as a meal or as a dessert.

Their emergence is placed somewhere between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, roughly the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. The wheat of the dough was a local crop, grown here as a main crop from early on. Wrapping a filling in a thin skin and dropping it into boiling water is a plain handiwork that needs no special tools. Because the ingredient was at hand so early and the craft was a plain one, it is hard to pin down the moment when varenyky came together as one dish.

The cast of fillings has changed over time. One firmly dated clue is Compendium ferculorum, published in Kraków in 1682 and the earliest known cookbook published originally in Polish. The pierogi it describes, members of the same family, come in two kinds: a savory one, in which chopped veal kidney seasoned with herbs, salt, pepper and nutmeg is wrapped and boiled, and one that wraps rose or elder preserved in sugar. Potato is not among the fillings of those pierogi. In literature set in Ukraine, varenyky with sour cream appear in "The Fair at Sorochyntsi" (1831), one of Gogol's Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, and "Christmas Eve" (1832) has varenyky that are not Lenten fare, dipped in sour cream before eating. Neither story says what is wrapped inside. Today's standard potato filling was added only after potatoes, brought from the New World, spread through the region from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries onward, which makes it a relatively recent variant.

One anecdote about where varenyky came from has been told on food blogs and elsewhere. It holds that Ukrainians took the name of dushvara, a Turkic boiled dumpling, reshaped it into varenyky, and swapped the filling for local ingredients. The name itself, in other words, was borrowed from abroad.

But the claim of a borrowing turns up only on food blogs and the like, and no study of the history of the words has been found to back it. Separately, a family of boiled-dumpling names, joshpara and shishbarak among them, spreads across Eurasia. Their first half comes from the Persian josh (to boil); what the second half, para, means is uncertain. The name shishbarak appears once in a thirteenth-century cookbook from Aleppo, Kitab al-Wusla ila l-habib, but only as "the shishbarak mould," used to cut rolled dough into rounds for a fried sweet; the book gives no recipe for boiled dumplings. What it shows is that the name and the round shape were known in the thirteenth century. Beyond that, a view credited to the food historian Charles Perry traces the family from Central Asia through the Finno-Ugric "ear bread" (pelnan) to the pelmeni of seventeenth-century Russia. Either way, no trace has been found of the family passing directly into the name varenyky. That the names share the sense of "to boil" is not, by itself, evidence of borrowing.

The name has a more straightforward explanation. Varenyky is built from the Old East Slavic varyty (Proto-Slavic *variti), "to boil, to cook," plus a noun ending: the act of boiling became the name of the dish.

Even so, the story does not close as the achievement of Ukraine alone. The origin of pierogi and varenyky themselves has not been established and has often been debated, with one view holding that they were common to the Slavs from long ago and another that the idea of the dumpling was taken from the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. Varenyky belong to a wide world of boiled dumplings that stretches from the East Slavs across Eurasia, and they stand to pelmeni, which wrap minced meat, as equal sisters within that world. The small tale of a borrowed name falls apart, yet the wide kinship the dish carries stands out all the more clearly.