My Grandchildren Can Cook — and Dance

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Molly O'Neill is our Food Editor. She is the former food columnist for The New York Times Magazine. O'Neill is the author of three cookbooks, including the best-selling New York Cookbook (Workman Publishing, 1992), A Well Seasoned Appetite (Penguin, 1997), and The Pleasure of Your Company (Viking, 1997). She was the host of the PBS series Great Food, and edited the critically acclaimed anthology American Food Writing (Library of America, 2007). Her latest work, Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball (Scribner, 2006), recounts her childhood of growing up in a Major-League baseball family.

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by Molly O'Neill

Cecylia Roznowska teaches her grandchildren about their heritage

According to Polish tradition, a prosperous marriage begins with gifts of bread, salt, and wine. But it is dancing that ensures happiness for the happy couple, and for more than two decades, Ceycilia Roznowska, 79, a Polish-born dancer and choreographer has been leading wedding dances and twirling Polish-American couples in a polonaise toward happily ever after.

Emigrating to Chicago from her native Poland in 1984, she is the founder and artistic director of the Northwest Center of Traditional Polish Dancing and the Polonia Ensemble, a youth folk-dance company that performs at celebrations, festivals, parades and, of course, weddings.

It is dancing with the troupe’s young people, including three of her own grandchildren, that makes her feel like a girl again in the Polish village of Rabka, learning the steps to the krakowiak and mazur. She can imagine that her stomach is full of her grandma’s pierogi with sauerkraut, her pigtails flying, and her embroidered skirt whipping around her legs. Today her hair is arranged in soft blond curls and her nails and lips are painted cherry-red, a bright spot of color punctuating the air as she whirls.

Next to dancing, cooking has been equally important in helping Roznowska maintain her memories of home, and when she is not dancing alongside her grandchildren, she is with them in the kitchen. She’s taught them to make paczki, doughnuts traditionally served at Lent, and potato pancakes stuffed with bacon, mushroom, and onion.

“There is a very powerful and strong connection between folk dancing and traditional foods,” Roznowska says. Teaching her American-born grandchildren the dances of her childhood in connects her past and present. Preparing foods to fill their bellies after rounds of dancing completes the circle. It also reminds her of the meals she had in her own grandmother’s country kitchen in Rabka.

Someday Roznowska hopes to give them gifts of bread, salt, and wine at their own weddings — and, of course, to kick up her heels in a polonaise.

Continue to the recipe: Potato Pancakes Stuffed With Bacon, Mushrooms, & Onion