She pinched these shut to form half-circles and then boiled them in a giant pot of boiling water.

The end product was served with white gravy flavored with ham or sausage drippings. If there were any leftovers, they were fried in the cast iron skillet the next day.

One exhausted mother served one happy family a traditional Russian Mennonite dish.

Verenika, to me, always seemed an odd food. For decades I was certain that only Russian Mennonites-and only the most tradi- tional of them-made this dish.

But when I came to Chicago decades ago, a dish called periogi was served in every Polish restaurant. Periogi looked and tasted like verenika. The amateur historian in me jumped at the chance to establish a culinary food chain.

So I asked a Polish waitress if these were also known as verenika. She called her mother from the kitchen and translated my question into Polish.

The kitchen mother said, "Periogi! You no like? Is good periogi! Not verenika!"

All I learned from this was not to annoy with my stupid questions Polish grandmothers cooking in hot restaurant kitchens.

My quest for the roots of verenika was frustrated but not ended. I ate in Central American restaurants and get "empanada"-fat verenika, deep-fried.

The Italian restaurants served giant ravioli-verenika with tomato sauce, and the Asian restaurants served pot stickers often called "goyza."

I dipped them in soy sauce and said to dining companions, "These taste like baby verenika."

I developed friendships with two chefs. Bryan DeFehr is now in Paris, and Doug Bermudez is in Chicago. Each has given me the same lecture about my quest for verenika.

(Like most of my friends, they speak slowly when they explain things to me-with just the slightest patronizing hint in their voice, the flavor of making things simple for a child at the bottom of his class with a dose of impatience.)

They said, "Look, when primitive folks learned to grind grain fine enough to make dough, they learned to take this flavorless substance and fill it with something spicy or tasty and boil it in water or fry it in oil. This is a universal law of the culinary world. Usually women developed cereals for flour and dough and developed the fillings.

"In the history of the world, men do meat. Meat is simple: Catch it, kill it and eat it. But grains are complicated."

"OK, this is very interesting," I replied. "Now tell me, where do verenika come from?"

They both seemed irked by my tiny quest.

Quite by accident, my friend Carol Lehman and I went to the Russian Tea Room, a block from the Art Institute. Astonishingly, there was verenika on the menu. Three kinds of verenika: pumpkin, cheese and meat-flavored.

Excited, I called the waiter over. He went and fetched the owner.

"Actually, we are not really a Russian restaurant," he said. "We are all Ukrainians here. This is food like our mothers made. Verenika is a traditional Ukrainian food."

Carol's husband, John Kampen, clarified the story.

"As I recall from growing up in Manitoba, the Mennonite restaurants and the Ukrainian restaurants both served verenika, and each insisted it was their traditional native dish.

So what have I learned from my quest? The memories of the smells and tastes from your mother's kitchen are never forgotten and will always seem unique. But there are universal principles for food preparation.

And apparently, for generations, while the menfolk were out fighting wars, excommunicating each other, or wreaking havoc on neighboring villages, their womenfolk were off trading recipes.