How peremech connects generations in a Queens family

WNYC News

The taste of a particular dish can bring back a flood of warm memories. WNYC's Community Partnerships Desk is asking New Yorkers to share what comes to mind when thinking about a favorite recipe. We talked to Meral Agish as part of a collaboration with the Queens Memory Project. Agish lives in Kew Gardens.

The transcript of Meral Agish's story has been lightly edited for clarity.

Meral Agish:

I'm 41 and live in Kew Gardens. My family arrived in Queens in the '60s and '70s from Turkey.

One of the recipes that always reminds me of family is peremech. It's a very simple, fried dough and meat patty dish that is part of my Tatar culture. My family had a complicated journey coming to the U.S. My particular extended community, they traveled from villages within Russia to the northern region of China, then to Turkey, and then to the U.S., and I just always imagined through all of that journey over the last, you know, 120, 130 years peremech was always part of people's meals. It's a really comforting dish because it's so simple and because it was just a part of the regular rotation. My grandmas would always make it. My mom makes it pretty frequently, especially now that she has grandchildren who really love to eat it.

When there's a holiday, when there's a special event, peremech is on the table. It's a recipe that I learned from my mom. She learned from her mother, and often at our family events, our community events, there will be like platters of peremech, and each person has their own spin on it. There's a way that you pinch the dough around the opening of the meat can be really artistic, and sometimes it's very simple. That's the way that I do it because I haven't refined my own pinching practice, but some others, particularly the women in our community, have created beautiful patterns in this really simple pinching motion. It becomes almost a trademark. My daughter, she practices the pinching motion with Play-Doh, and my grandmas aren't around to see that, but that's something that connects me to my daughter, connects me to my mother, connects me to the women in the earlier generations, this very simple pinching.