Seattle's Top 5 Pierogie/Piroshky/Pel'Mani

I pity the fool who settles for these pierogies!

Made of simple and cheap ingredients, pierogies are a true peasant food. There are numerous spellings, pronunciations and variations of this Eastern European classic, but they all boil down to the same basics: If you have milk, flour, eggs, salt, potatoes or cabbage and onions you have the makings of a meal.

I grew up on pierogies. My orthodox grandma's version was always written on recipe cards in Ukrainian, but pronounced ped-da-heh. Every fall she would spend an entire day making a couple hundred tiny, perfectly hand-pinched dumplings to freeze for holiday dinners in three primary varieties. The first was unleavened dough filled with sauerkraut, boiled, and served with salt & pepper and sour cream. The most popular version was the same dough stuffed with seasoned potatoes, boiled, then fried with onions (and occasionally bacon) and, again, topped with sour cream. The third was (the still personally inedible version) stuffed with, it pains me to say, prunes. At her house, piroshky was served as an appetizer. Grandma's were small, dinner roll-sized balls of bread dough stuffed with potatoes that had been combined with butter and fried onions then set to bake in a pool of even more butter, onions and garlic. Though by some miracle none of us suffer from heart disease, this may explain the condition bemoaned by female family members as "Duma Thighs".

Alas, there are only a handful of places that serve pierogies and their bready brethren, piroshkys, in Seattle. That's just fine, because like grandmas everywhere, they each do it with a signature style, making the choice of five favorites deliciously easy. Here are the top five: