Welcome to the Club: On Pierogi Sundays at the Polish Community Centre, No One Leaves Hungry

The secret to great pierogi is consistency. On a small scale, this is easy enough to achieve, but when you’re folding thousands of dumplings – as the Dom Polski kitchen hands do for the monthly Pierogi Sunday lunch – it becomes something miraculous.

The event sells out fast, largely thanks to Basia Harla’s handiwork. The Polish cook and a team of volunteers navigate the centre’s kitchen with the synchronicity of artistic swimmers, dishing up plates of her polskie (creamy potato and cheese), mięso (pork cooked with vegetables and spices) and kapusta i grzyby (sauerkraut and mushroom) dumplings as orders fly in.

“The secret is sticking to the traditional recipe and making them by hand because the dough is quite thick,” says Harla as she eases the plump pillows into large saucepans of boiling water. “When I moved to South Australia from Poland in 2001, I couldn’t find pierogi I liked so I started making them and created my business Basia’s Pierogi.”

“Pierogi used to be a peasant's meal, but it turned into something quite exquisite because it’s very labour intensive,” says club chairperson Leonard Nowak.

Outside in the main dining area, Adelaide’s Polish community gathers around large tables topped with black tablecloths and vases of bright orange flowers.

As Harla and her team fold pierogi, the volume outside the kitchen crescendos, largely thanks to a wódka bar stocked with Polish beer, Soplica vodka, Zoladkowa Gorzka (traditional Polish vodka infused with fruit and herbs) and South Australian wine.

“Żywiec is the most popular beer,” says the barman. “It’s a lager style. We've also got the Warka, which is like an amber, and the Warka Strong, which is like a dark ale.”

For the abstainers, there’s herbata, kawa and ciasto: tea, coffee and cakes.

A fundraising stall created by members of the Polish Women’s Association sells home-baked goods, among them sernik (Polish cheesecake), makowiec (poppyseed cake) and mazurek decorated with a creative kaleidoscope of slivered almonds and dried fruit, to an adoring crowd. Babka is also popular.

Dom Polski started in the late 1950s, originally serving as a meeting place for post-World War II refugees. It was then located in Woodville, but gradually outgrew its small western suburbs home. In the early ’70s, the club moved into a multi-level CBD structure on Angas Street, complete with a large ballroom upstairs that’s used for events.

“Like in any community, it’s been a rocky road but, miraculously, we survived and were able to keep the culture and the legacy alive,” says Nowak.

The majority of the club is Polish, but the Dom Polski Centre welcomes everyone.

“We say that Dom Polski is a house of welcome,” says Nowak. “Our purpose is to promote Polish culture, language, history and all those good things so that future generations can appreciate what has happened in the past, but also help to build bridges in multiculturalism.”

The pierogi lunch, for example, is very popular with Ukrainians. Their national dumplings, varenyky, are quite similar. “We've had a contingent of the Ukrainian community come here to eat them. We have a lot of synergy with Ukrainians.”

Sharing food and heritage are both deeply important to the club president. “Polish culture is exciting, passionate and emotional. If you look at Polish history and the issues that Poland has gone through over the years, it's always been the underdog and it’s always been resilient.”

Pierogi Sunday occurs most months, but it’s still a special occasion. “Not one Polish restaurant that opened in Adelaide has survived. We don't want to burn our volunteers out, that’s very important,” he says.

And no one leaves hungry.

Dom Polski Centre

230 Angas Street, Adelaide(08) 8223 3884    

dompolskicentre.org.au

basiaspierogi.com.au