The State Fair of Texas picks up a new vendor most years, and this year one of them is making a case for a dish Fair Park has mostly ignored. Tanya Rose runs Pierogizilla LLC, and her booth on the Funway is serving fried pierogies built around her Pennsylvania and Polish background, a food that has fed families in this country for more than a century without ever quite making it onto a State Fair menu before.
The dish drawing attention is the Texas Brisket Pierogies: fried potato and cheese pierogies topped with Texas smoked brisket, a creamy lime sauce, pickled red onions, pickled Fresno peppers and fresh cilantro. It’s not the only flavor on the menu. Rose is also running a masala barbecue version, a street corn topping and a creamy dill pickle sauce, with most items priced under 10 coupons. Rose has described herself as going from running down the Midway to running her own booth, though the Fair’s own materials don’t say more about what that means, and nothing else about her is confirmed enough to print.
The dumpling itself has a longer and stranger story than most fairgoers standing in that line will know. Pierogi are believed to trace back to dumplings that originated in Central Asia or China, carried west over centuries of trade along the Silk Road and through the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. Polish legend credits a bishop named Hyacinth with bringing the dish to Poland after learning it in Kyiv, and one version of that story has him handing out pierogi to feed people during a famine caused by a Tatar invasion in 1241. Nobody can prove any of it. What’s certain is that by the 1600s, pierogi shows up in Polish cookbooks, and the dish most Americans know today, filled with potato and farmer’s cheese, is called pierogi ruskie, a name that points to the old Ruthenian lands of what’s now western Ukraine rather than to Russia, despite how often it gets mistranslated.
Pierogi came to Pennsylvania the way most European food did in this country: with the people who needed it to survive somewhere far from home. Between 1870 and the 1920s, more than a million and a half Polish immigrants settled in the United States, and a large share of them landed in Pennsylvania’s coal and steel towns. Shenandoah, in Schuylkill County, had a population that was a quarter Polish by 1915. These were families working brutal jobs in company towns, buying flour and potatoes at the company store, and pierogi was cheap, filling, and easy to make in bulk for a house full of miners. It became a fixture of Sunday dinners and church fundraisers across the coal region, the same towns that would later give rise to Mrs. T’s Pierogies, the mass-market brand that still bases its plant in Shenandoah and produces hundreds of millions of pierogi a year.
That’s the tradition Pierogizilla is drawing from, whatever its owner’s own path turned out to be. The State Fair of Texas runs from Friday, September 25, through Sunday, October 18. Pierogizilla is located on the Funway, and a full map of this year’s new food vendors is posted at BigTex.com/NewFoods.
Read about Abel Gonzales at State Fair.
