Dough first. Three cups of flour, one egg, a good pinch of salt, a tablespoon of oil, and about a cup of warm water added slowly until it comes together into something soft and a little tacky — then knead it a few minutes till it’s smooth, cover it, and walk away for half an hour, because the rest is not optional and the dough will fight you if you skip it. Filling, the classic: mashed potato, still warm, folded with sharp cheddar until it melts in, plus an onion fried soft in butter, salt and pepper. Roll the dough thin, cut rounds with a glass, put a spoon of filling on each, fold, and pinch the edge sealed — really sealed, a firm crimp, or they’ll burst and break your heart in the pot. Boil in batches until they float and then a minute more. Fry the boiled ones in butter and onions to finish. Freeze the rest raw on a tray, then bag them. That’s varenyky. It’s a simple recipe, and it is completely impossible to make alone, and I mean that as the actual subject.
Not impossible in the sense that you can’t physically do it. You can. I’ve stood at the counter and made perogies by myself and it works and it is one of the loneliest things I know, and the loneliness is information — it’s the dish telling you it was never designed for one set of hands.
Look at the shape of the labour. It’s four completely separate jobs — someone rolls, someone cuts, someone fills, someone pinches — and they run at different speeds and they hand off to each other, and the whole thing only flows if there are bodies at each station keeping the line fed. One person doing it does all four jobs in series, badly, the dough drying out while you fill, the filling cooling while you roll, every step sabotaging the next because you can’t be in four places. The recipe isn’t inefficient when you’re alone. It’s correctly efficient for the number of people it assumes, which is more than one, which is the number of people who used to be in a kitchen and increasingly aren’t.
This is the thing I’ve come to see in the old labour-heavy foods: some of them are secretly social technologies wearing an apron. The perogy bee — a table of aunts and neighbours and roped-in kids, a thousand perogies in an afternoon, everyone talking, the freezer filling up for winter — that’s not a quaint delivery mechanism for dumplings. The dumplings are the delivery mechanism for the afternoon. The food is the excuse the gathering needs to happen; nobody knows how to say “come sit at a table with me for four hours and talk about nothing,” so instead they say “come help with the perogies,” and it means the same thing, and everyone knows it means the same thing, and that’s why it works. The pinch you can’t teach over the phone, the rhythm that only clicks when four people find it together — those aren’t bugs in the recipe. They’re the recipe recruiting a community it can’t function without.
Which is why the frozen tray at the end matters more than it looks. You make far more than you’ll eat, always, because half the point is the stocking — the future winter nights when you pull a bag from the freezer and there’s an afternoon’s worth of many hands ready in twenty minutes. A bag of homemade perogies in the freezer is stored company. It’s an afternoon you already spent, kept cold, waiting to feed a version of you who might be tired or sad or alone and who will boil eight of them and taste, in the pinch of each one, that a table full of people once made this so that this exact night would be easier. That’s a strange and beautiful thing for a potato to carry, and it carries it.
So if you want to make perogies, my real advice isn’t about the dough. It’s: don’t do it alone. Text three people. Assign the stations. Make triple what you need and send everyone home with a bag. The dish will be better, but that’s not why — it’ll be better because you finally made it the way it was built to be made, which is as an excuse to keep four people at one table long enough that they forget they needed an excuse.