Grumpkies, Galumpkis, Gowumpkies, Gołąbki, or Something Like That

What is this recipe called? My great-grandmother wrote it and she or one of her daughters tucked it within the pages of her 1908 Lowney's Cook Book.  I think it is or it is supposed to be Grumpkies. Maybe Gumpkies. Something like that.

A while back, I posted this recipe to my facebook page in hopes that someone would know of it. Susan, a childhood friend who now makes beautiful cakes for a living, recognized it as galumpkis. She wrote that her sister often makes them.

At that point, I figured my great-grandmother just couldn't spell galumpkis. But after talking to my mother, I think she was trying to spell grumpkies. Maybe.

In February, I was sitting in a car at a traffic light with my mother when she mentioned that she's had really good "grumpkies" at Patti's Pierogies, a restaurant in Fall River, Massachusetts. 


"Grumpkies?" I asked my mother.


"Grumpkies," she said.  "It's hamburg wrapped in cabbage."


"I thought it was galumpkis."


She gave me a puzzled look.


"I say grumpkies," she informed me.  (She hates it when she suspects that I'm challenging her Taunton accent.)


"I think I have your grandmother's recipe for grumpkies."


"Oh, yes, my grandmother made great grumpkies." 


Mystery solved. If my mother calls it grumpkies, then my great-grandmother probably did the same. But then I did a little more digging.

The newspaper article in the link on Patti's indicates that the staff there pronounces it gowumpky or gowumpkies. Is my great-grandmother's recipe supposed to be titled gumpkies? It looks kind of like gumpkies. Maybe I need a Polish language class. 


However you say it, after seeing this video about Patti's pierogies, I think I need to make a trip to Fall River. This restaurant looks like a lot of fun. Mom's been holding out on me. 

Some of you might know galumpkis or grumpkies in the Polish form, gołąbki. You can find recipes for galumpkies or gołąbki on the internet, including ones from celebrity chefs Tyler Florence (who also can't pronounce the dish) and (Fall River's own) Emeril Lagasse. 

Grumpkies is a bit more obscure, or it least that's how it looks from a Google search. I found that at least two people have posted their recipes for grumpkies. I don't know if this word is specific to the Northeast, but my mother is clearly not the only one who uses it. A woman named Cara writing on the web posted her recipe on facebook and discovered that her friends had the same names and more for these little pockets of cabbage, beef, and rice. 

Whether you say galumpkis, grumpkies, gowumpkies, or gołąbki, I think we're all talking about basically the same dish.

Then I wondered how my Irish-American great-grandmother came to make "great grumpkies."

From what I could piece together from my mother, it has something to do with the Polish population of Taunton, Massachusetts. As a kid my mother had lots of Polish classmates and ate grumpkies at their homes after school quite often. She wasn't the only one with Polish pals. I don't know if my great-grandmother had Polish friends, but her daughter, my great-aunt, used to attend the "quick mass" at Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Church on Bay St. in Taunton, which had loyal Polish-American parishioners. She also loved Holy Rosary's annual Polish festival with the wonderful food made by the Polish-American women of the parish. Grumpkies was one of their dishes.

Perhaps my great-grandmother was inspired by these women to make grumpkies for her own family. Holy Rosary is not far from what was my great-grandmother's more Irish-American parish, St. Mary's, located near Broadway in St. Mary's Square. So, perhaps she visited the festival. Or, maybe her daughter went to the festival and begged her mother to make grumpkies. It could have been that some of the older women making food at the festival were my great-grandmother's friends, as members of both parishes probably lived in the overlapping neighborhoods around Broadway and Bay Street. Hard to say, but I think the short distance between St. Mary's Church and Holy Rosary had something to do with her acquiring this recipe.

The festival used to take place at a pavilion in "Cabbage Hill," which later became the site of the former Pepper Pot restaurant. Cabbage Hill was the name of the Polish neighborhood, but my mother remembers that the wooded area around the pavilion was called Cabbage Hill and that members of Holy Rosary and others would gather there to polka and to eat Polish food during the festival.


It's really nice to be able to put this recipe into some local contexts.  It also reminds me of something that I recently learned about how people from the South Coast region of Massachusetts, including myself, talk about ground beef. I recently picked up a great cookbook by Brooke Dojny called New England Home Cooking. It references a May 1997 South Coast Insider article that notes South Coasters' tendencies to refer to ground beef not as "hamburger" but as "hamburg." My great-grandmother did the same in the recipe.  Not all of Taunton is part of the South Coast, but close enough. 


I'd never thought about it before, but I rarely use the word hamburger.  "I'll have a hamburg." "Pick up some hamburg for dinner." My mother and I speak the same language after all. 

Pass the pierogies, folks, because I haven't even wrapped the hamburg in cabbage yet. This post's a long one.  


So, I after I made the rice, I started by prepping the cabbage head.  I parboiled it, cooled it, and peeled off leaves one by one.  Then it was time to cut pieces of salt pork and to create the hamburg, rice, onion, and egg mixture.

 
With everything ready, I filled each leaf with about a quarter cup or so of the hamburg mixture and a piece of salt pork.  (The salt pork in the photo is probably twice larger than necessary.) I folded the leaf over the mixture, making sure to tuck in the bits of leaf from the sides.

All told I put about 19 pieces in the oven.

The results were excellent. Next time, however, I will cover the dish in the oven with foil to prevent the leaves from drying out. I was surprised that I didn't have to add pepper or another spice. The salt pork was enough.  

We ate out little cabbage pockets with sour cream, although most have them with a tomato sauce.  My great-grandmother really did make great grumpkies . . . or galumpkis, or gowumpkies, or gołąbki.  Something like that.

The Great Chow Mein Famine of ‘09

When I was a student at South School in Somerset, Massachusetts, we engaged in a daily ritual that we imagined common to children across the United States. In the lunch line, we placed on our trays a plastic knife and spork, a carton of coffee milk, a giant sticky roll for dessert and, if we were lucky, a chow mein sandwich.

The woman working the line would give you a styrofoam tray with distinct sections (only on chow-mein-sandwich day were we treated to styrofoam) filled with brown sauce, two slices of white bread, and a brown wax-paper bag full of crispy fried noodles.

Chow-mein-sandwich day was the most important day of the week. I preferred to axe the gravy and the white bread and just eat the noodles out of the bag. But I can still remember the grin on the face of one of my classmates, a sweet kid named Tony who spoke English with a slight Portuguese accent, as he gently rushed his chow mein sandwich to his seat in the cafegymatorium.

What chicken tikka masala is to London or bagels are to New York City, the chow mein sandwich is to greater Fall River.

Yet for much of 2009 the world, or the world that is southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, has been deprived of chow mein sandwiches.

In June fire struck the Oriental Chow Mein Company, founded by Frederick Wong. For decades, this Fall River business has supplied local schools, restaurants, and stores with its distinctive, crunchy chow mein noodles. As of mid November the Wong family, which still owns the company, was trying to re-open at the same time that it warded off incessant phone calls with demands for noodles. Since the 1930s the sandwich has been listed on the menus of both Chinese and American restaurants and the Oriental Chow Mein Company has been and remains the region’s sole noodle distributor.

Could chow mein sandwiches become a bygone food?

If you have missed Emeril Lagasse’s expressions of love for chow mein sandwiches or did not grow up with him in Fall River, you might not know what a chow mein sandwich looks like or how to make one yourself. It’s not pretty, but it is tasty. Basically, it consists of crispy fried noodles covered in a brown sauce, which likely contains pork and only sometimes celery and other vegetables, placed on a hamburger roll or between two slices of square white bread. You may order it unstrained, with celery and other vegetables, or strained, without celery and other vegetables.

You can also, or once could, make it at home with the packaged version that the Oriental Chow Mein Company has distributed to grocery stores. Coveted boxes of Hoo-Mee Chow Mein are rumored to be selling for upwards of fifty dollars each since the fire.

The box, while reproduced until recently, is obviously of an earlier era; it contains a message explaining that Hoo-Mee Chow Mein is best made by housewives. Perhaps this marketing strategy helped to bring what was once an “exotic” food served outside the home into local kitchens.

But why chow mein sandwiches and why Fall River?

Fall River was once booming with textile factories and immigrants from Ireland, England, and Quebec to fill them. The story goes that chow mein sandwiches took off during the Great Depression of the 1930s, because a sandwich was cheaper to buy than a full portion of chow mein. Order a sandwich and you purchased less chow mein, but you at least had the bread to fill you.

The Depression hit Fall River hard and it never really recovered. I do not know if it can withstand the loss of chow mein sandwiches.

The chow mein sandwiches made possible by the Oriental Chow Mein Company are a testament to southeastern Massachusetts’ unique population and immigration history. Chinese-immigrant cooks, no matter where they settled, tailored their foods to the pre-existing culinary propensities of customers. The brown sauce of the chow mein sandwich reflects the tastes of Fall River’s established Yankee, Irish, and English populations of the 1920s and 1930s. The sauce and its contents are cooked for a long period of time or boiled, producing soft vegetables. Given the popularity of boiled foods in New England and among British and Irish immigrants, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese-American cooks like those in the Wong family probably tailored the sauce to their expectations. This, I venture, helps to explain why the soupy sandwich took off in Fall River in particular.

It remains beloved by many, including those of French-Canadian descent.

I would love to know what exactly happened when someone first asked a Chinese-American cook (Frederick Wong?) for a chow mein sandwich. Or did the cook take the initiative in first offering it to customers?

Most of all, I wonder, was that moment strained or unstrained?