Recipe for Recollection
Food helps connect us to our memories, culture, and family traditions. One second-generation Ukrainian immigrant teaches her granddaughter how to make perogies and passes down her love for cooking at the same time.
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On a bright Sunday morning, I peel myself out of bed and make the short drive to my grandparents’ house. They live near me, less than ten minutes away, and I know I should visit more than I do. I tell myself I will once life doesn’t feel so busy — if that ever happens.
My grandparents’ warm smiles greet me when I walk into the house. I call my mom’s parents Nanny and Papa. In the kitchen, Nanny has laid out two red aprons folded perfectly — one for me and one for her. We each tie on our aprons and get to work. She’s teaching me to make perogies today, just like she taught my mom years ago. She’s given me the recipe card now, a faded yellow and slightly crumpled piece of paper from the Hunky Bill perogie maker, but she doesn’t use one. She has made this recipe so many times it is stored in her head. Perogies and other Ukrainian dishes like borscht are what connect me to my Ukrainian heritage.
I’ve been meaning to learn how to make perogies for a while now, but I’ve kept putting it off with the constant excuse that I don’t have enough time. When I was younger, I knew learning to make them from her was important, but life gets busy. Time seems to be flying by now as I get older, and I have to remind myself that my Nanny and Papa are getting older, too.
“Today’s the day,” I tell myself.
The ingredients are spread out on the kitchen counter. She has an old yellow Tupperware canister filled with flour, her wooden rolling pin that my great-grandfather made, and a big bowl to mix all the ingredients in. We stand at the counter together, and she takes me through the recipe step by step; I take notes in between, and eventually, the dough is formed. She shows me how to roll out the dough into a perfect circle, and how to not have it look “like a map of Manitoba.” I stand and admire the way she rolls it out. When she hands the rolling pin to me and I try it out for myself, it’s tricky. My dough doesn’t look as perfect as hers. While I have lots of memories involving perogies and Nanny — like the smell of them on Christmas Eve — making them myself is new.
The Harvard University Press Blog discusses the ways our brain connects food and mealtime with memories. Food helps us connect to our memories and emotions. The hippocampus is the part of our brain responsible for long-term memories. It is also connected to the parts of our brain that control our emotions and sense of smell. This helps us understand how smelling a certain food can help us recall a certain moment.
Going to my grandparents’ house has always felt special. I remember arriving at my Nanny and Papa’s house when I was little. Much like now, Papa would be standing at the door, impatiently waiting for our arrival. My brother and I would run up the steps. throw the door open, and immediately be wrapped in the delicious smells from the kitchen. Nanny would be standing in the pale-yellow kitchen, excited to give us samples of what she had.
I was around them a lot when I was young. One summer we were together practically every day visiting outdoor waterparks across Manitoba and rotating through our favourites on the hot summer days until it was time for us to return to school. The days weren’t complete without Nanny’s homemade lunches.
I don’t remember every water park we visited, but I remember the delicious sandwiches she would make that filled the cooler we brought everywhere.
People have always connected through food. The saying, “to break bread together,” shows how it has been perceived that relationships can be saved and strengthened through food. To many Ukrainians, food is more than a meal on a table. To them, food holds traditional and symbolic meaning. Traditional foods were an important part of the everyday lives of Ukrainian farmers who immigrated to Canada.
From 1932-1933, The Holodomor created destruction throughout Ukraine. The name Holodomor comes from the Ukrainian words “to kill by starvation.” Soviet leader Joseph Stalin forced peasants to give up their property, land, and homes with the plan to collectivize agriculture. The collectivization policy aimed to regain economic control over the peasants who owned the farming property and forced them to work on large farms. This policy led to food shortages. Farms, villages, and towns in Ukraine were prevented from receiving any food. By 1934, 5 million people had died, including 3.9 million Ukrainians. Food trauma has had its effects on the Ukrainian community.
Nanny’s side of the family comes from a small village in Ukraine called Rivne, previously known as Rovno. Joseph and Mary had five sons and two daughters. Their daughter Olga is my great-grandmother. They moved to Canada in April 1930 when Olga was just one year old. Old documents state they moved here because of a family dispute; Joseph’s parents wouldn’t sell them a portion of their farm property.
In 1896, Canada started promoting Canadian farm lands as “Land Best West.” They hoped to attract Eastern European farmers here to occupy farmlands to grow food that would feed eastern Canada and Europe. Their hope was to attract skilled farmers with the promise of cheap land, a good climate, and freedom. Many immigrants dispersed from Winnipeg to farmlands because of the large railway system. Winnipeg quickly became home to the largest Ukrainian population in Canada.
My ancestors immigrated to a farm in Duck River, Manitoba. It is about four and a half hours from Winnipeg, just north of Winnipegosis. When my family lived there, my Nanny remembers it being home to only 70 people. There was a post office in the basement of someone’s house, a church that her grandfather pushed to build, and a small store attached to the front of a house.
Bill Tycholoz, my great-grandfather, took over their family farm with my great-grandmother. Bill was born in 1928 and attended Duck River School. When he finished school, he helped his family on the farm. There’s a picture of Nanny standing in front of the farmhouse in a floral dress. She is barely as high as the first window. Her arms are pressed firmly on her side, and her hair sits on the sides of her cheeks. Behind her stands the house. The wooden, two-story home, with rectangular windows painted white. Inside the home, it was insulated with a mixture of wood, clay, straw, and vinegar. The walls were thick, keeping my family warm in the winter and cool in the summer. In the winter, their home was heated using a wood stove.
A weaving, beaten-down path led the journey from the house to the summer kitchen. So many footsteps have gone back and forth from the house that the grass has been worn away. This is where they cooked when the days were long and hot. Nanny remembers making highbush cranberry jam here. She calls it “Stinky Sock Jam.” It got its name because of the smell. She and her siblings would walk through the tall bushes and pick wild cranberries. When they returned to the summer kitchen, they cleaned and boiled the berries until they turned soft, then mixed them with sugar until it thickened to a jam. She told me she would have to stand at the hot stove mixing constantly to make sure it didn’t burn, all while flies swarmed her.
My grandparents and I would go berry-picking often when I was younger, not for wild cranberries, but for strawberries and saskatoons instead. We would take our clear ice cream pails down a row of bright red strawberries and kneel for what felt like hours, picking berries. I remember them teasing me, saying the farmers would weigh me before we left to see if I had snuck any strawberries. As a kid, thinking you might get caught certainly stopped me from sneaking them. Nanny would take the fresh berries and make perogies and jams. This past summer, I saw they had strawberries for sale at St. Norbert Farmers Market. I bought a case and made some strawberry jam, then gave Nanny one of the jars.
In Duck River, Nanny remembers growing lots of vegetables during the summer — potatoes, corn, beets, carrots, onions, garlic, and cabbage. They would thinly slice fresh cabbage and place into large wooden barrels to sit and ferment, eventually turning into sauerkraut. Things like sauerkraut were important to have because they have a long shelf life and could be saved to eat year-round. Nanny remembers storing heads of cabbage to make cabbage rolls. They are made up of rice and beef, with a tomato-like sauce, rolled up tightly with a cabbage leaf. Cabbage rolls are a dish we have often. Nanny serves them on Easter and Christmas Day, but not Christmas Eve.
Since I was little, I have gone to my Nanny’s for dinner every Christmas Eve. My family’s traditional meal includes lots of perogies (saskatoon, strawberry, blueberry, potato) and fried pickerel. It’s simple but delicious and holds so many memories.
Although as a kid, my Nanny’s family grew most of their food, there were some things they had to get from the store. She remembers travelling from Duck River to Pine River to buy flour, sugar, oatmeal, and salt. The flour and sugar both came in large, 100-pound bags. She told me she remembers when the large bag of sugar went up in price and cost them $7.
The book Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History talks about mothers’ roles in providing for their families. They cooked while also incorporating cultural practices and traditions. Traditions that were then passed down to their children and their children’s children. Food gives people memories and acts as a connection to the culture. Women relied on foods they could grow themselves by planting gardens, tending to animals, and occasionally visiting the store for things they could not grow, like sugar and salt. They also relied on the wild berries growing around their farms and homes.
When my great-grandparents got older and could no longer tend to the farm they moved to Swan River, Manitoba, where their home had a large garden too. I remember visiting them in the summer as a young child and walking through the tall corn and the bright sunflowers. When I was little, I would try to pull up the beets. I pulled with all my might until this weirdly shaped red lump covered in dirt came out of the ground. The beets were mainly used to make borscht, a bright pink soup made of veggies. My Nanny serves it with or without fresh cream. I grew up on this dish. There are photos of me as a baby covered in pink soup. Now, when I have it, I like to add a dollop of sour cream and fresh dill and tuck a piece of paper towel into the top of my shirt. “It’ll stain your clothes,” Nanny always told me when I was little. Historical records state that Ukrainians have been making and adapting different borscht recipes for over 1200 years.
Food is so central to Ukrainian cultural identity that Alberta and Saskatchewan have seven sculptures of Ukrainian food dishes. Built between 1973 and 2001, they symbolize the role of food in Ukrainian culture and the hard work Ukrainian women do to provide for their families. Babi, known as “peasant grandmothers,” are the heart of Ukrainian culture. They helped farm the land and passed down cooking traditions, recipes, and preservation techniques to the following generations. But they are rarely talked about in Ukrainian History. The Lesia in Canora, Saskatchewan, is a sculpture of a woman dressed in traditional peasant clothing, holding the sacramental cloth, salt, and braided bread, which is a sign of welcome for everyone who passes.
When looking at old photos with my Nanny, a photo of my great-grandmother in front of a row of bread loaves jumps out at me. In the summer, my great-grandmother would bake bread in her large outdoor oven, fifteen loaves at a time, as Nanny remembers. Eventually, the outdoor oven started to cave in, and my great-grandfather didn’t want to fix it.
To Ukrainians, bread is sacred. It is considered the holiest of gifts. The word grain in Ukrainian is zbizhzhia, meaning the totality of divinity. Ukrainian events for both the living and the dead are celebrated with bread. Bread is used to celebrate couples on their wedding, the birth of a child, and purchasing a new home. Grains are also added to the coffins of the deceased. The bread’s shape is usually circular and braided, symbolizing eternity. To be presented with a loaf of bread and salt is sacred. Nanny likes to bake. One of my favourite things she makes is bread wrapped in beet leaves. She uses the same beets to make borscht. The leaves are then taken and wrapped around bread dough and baked. The bread wrapped in beet leaves is resourceful and, most importantly, delicious.
Growing up, my brother and I did a lot of baking with Nanny. Making gingerbread cookies with her is one of my favourite memories. Every year around Christmas, we would go over to their house and decorate cookies. She would pre-make the dough before we arrived, and I would watch in awe as she rolled the gingerbread dough into a perfect rectangle. Taking turns, we would each press the cookie cutters into the dough and decorate them with M&M’s, sneaking bites of cookie dough any chance we got. My brother and I would both leave with containers of cookies and good memories. I don’t remember the last time we made those cookies together; it was something we stopped doing as we got older.
When I cook or bake, I often feel calm. I follow each direction, line by line. The goal is always to make something delicious or make something better than I made it the last time. Nanny didn’t just pass down her love for cooking. She’s passed down her recipes to me, too. The handwritten recipe cards stick out when I flip through my recipe card holder. They’re recipes of things she used to make me as a kid. To me, they are memories. They’re times spent around the dinner table, standing at the kitchen counter with her, and sitting in the strawberry fields searching for ripe berries. The people sitting around the table will change over time, but the recipes are the memories passed down from generation to generation. To me, the recipes are how I feel connected to my culture through cooking and baking, and they are what I hope to pass down to children of my own eventually.
As we make perogies, we take turns cutting out circles of dough with a cookie cutter, making sure the circles are as close together as possible to prevent the dough from being wasted. One by one, we add a small scoop of the potato mixture, fold the dough to cover the mixture, and pinch them closed to form the perogy shape. Once all the perogies are made, she examines my work and points out the ones I didn’t pinch hard enough. Nanny tells me if you don’t pinch them hard enough, they’ll open up when they boil. I brush her comment off and think to myself it will be fine.
That same evening, I pick up onions, sour cream, and sausage to have with the perogies we made together. I didn’t tell her that almost every perogy I made opened up slightly when I cooked it. While my first batch wasn’t perfect, learning to make perogies was a step toward being able to carry on the food traditions my family has had for generations. Next time, I’ll know to press harder.
