PNA Offering Free Polish Cooking To Save Culture
 Melissa Langenback is teaching the secrets of her family's cookbook. But, she isn't afraid to make some subtle changes to the recipes. |
The Polish National Alliance on Victory Street has started offering free Polish cooking classes in an attempt to impart the skills once learned in babci's kitchen.
"What we're trying to do is get back our Polish culture," Lisa Mendel, PNA's financial secretary who organized the classes, said last week. "We've lost a lot of our culture."
The classes have been on the PNA's radar for years but they never put it together until Mendel, a teacher at Mount Greylock Regional High School in Williamstown, got reconnected recently with her former student Melissa Langenback. Langenback teaches baking classes at Different Drummer's Kitchen on nights and weekends and keeps an ongoing baking blog.
But more importantly, she grew up cooking with her Polish family.
"I learned a lot myself. I just grew up with people cooking it," Langenback said after teaching the first class at the PNA last Sunday. "My great aunt gave me her cookbook so, I'm going to use some of those recipes."
She kicked off the monthly classes with pierogies but the class ended up being nothing like Mendel said it would be. Initially the class was intended to be for only about five people but it quickly grew. Mendel sought out interested people through Facebook but the response was exponentially greater than she expected and she just couldn't say no. Only two days before the class, it had grown to nearly 20 people.
"I thought it would be small and intimate in the kitchen like learning in your grandma's kitchen," Langenback said. "At first I was a little overwhelmed."
Instead of in the small kitchen, the PNA opened its back hall up for the 10 a.m. seminar and students lined up along a table that spanned nearly the entire width of the room. Langenback, with help from her younger sister, opened the class with stories of family debates over recipes and launched into talking the crowd through the steps.
The group of men, women, younger and older chatted and shared utensils — because the number of rolling pins and dough cutters did not match the unexpected growth of the class.
 The class was expecting to take home a dozen pierogies but ended up with about double that. |
And finally, the fun part, when Langenback boiled and fried the final product for the taste test.
"It was a fun class. We got into a groove," Langenback said after the two-hour workshop. "Everybody loves a pierogie."
With the growth of the class, the recipe grew in size as well. Class members were expecting to take home about a dozen pierogies each but ended up with about two dozen.
"Everybody loved it," Mendel said after the class. "We're certainly able to do another pierogie one if people are interested."
On Jan. 8, Langenback will return to the PNA to cook zupa grzybowa, a mushroom soup; bigos, a hunter stew, and chicken noodle soup. On Feb. 5, it will be rich jelly-doughnut-like paczki and, on March 11, the class will learn how to make babka. But if the pierogie class was any indication, anybody interested in attending should sign up by contacting Mendel at the PNA soon.
"We're trying to get back bits and pieces of our Polish traditions ... This is kind of reaching kids through generations and people seem really excited about it," Mendel said.
Adams has the highest percentage of population with Polish heritage in the state, according to U.S. Census data, most descended from immigrants who arrived to work in the textile mills in the late 19th century. Despite those deep roots, some fear the Polish culture is fading away.
The PNA has been searching for ways to bring that back, which includes Polish dancing classes and at one point even language classes. Food has always been a big hit in town and at every street fair people wait in long lines for plates of Polish food. These classes are a start to bringing that food back into local kitchens.
