A friend slapped a magazine on my desk and pointed at a large ad. "Can you believe that?" he asked.
I shared his amazement.
The ad was for a food product, and it showed a couple of strapping athletes -- both triathlon champions -- who endorsed the food because it pumped them with energy and made them perform better.
As the ad said: "Not a drink, not a bar. . . . But high-carbohydrate, low-fat real food."
This kind of sales pitch isn't new. Athletes have been endorsing foods for years. When I was a kid, I truly believed that all my heroes began the day by munching Wheaties. Only later did I learn that many greeted the dawn by downing a beer to cure the shakes.
But in the magazine ad, the triathlon stars were pushing a food I have eaten since I was a child. I've probably eaten several tons of it. Not once had I thought it would improve my athletic performance.
Or that it was a Yuppie food. The ad showed a Yuppie female, smiling as she prepared to plunge a fork into her meal.
And what is it? This will probably come as a shock to hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans, but the energy-filled chow that these athletes regularly chomp is . . . If I gave you 10 guesses, you wouldn't get it.
It is the humble pierogi.
For the benefit of WASPs, Southerners, Presbyterians and others who are culinarily-deprived, I'll explain what a pierogi is.
It's an Eastern European food, found mostly in Poland, Russia, Ukraine. And those American cities -- Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh -- where men drink boilermakers, cannot spell cholesterol, and proudly thump their prominent bellies.
Many countries have something like it because Marco Polo, whose real name was Marco "Stash" Polowski, brought the Polish delicacy to lesser cultures. This led to the Italian ravioli, Chinese pot stickers, Jewish kreplach, Cornish pasties. A pocket of dough with one kind of filling or another.
But that description doesn't do justice to the saliva-provoking glory of the pierogi. To do so, I'd have to get into the various fillings: cheese, potato, sauerkraut, meat or fruit. And the traditional way to prepare them: simmered in butter that is flecked with salt pork or bacon, then dipped in chilled sour cream.
To use a haute cuisine phrase, it is pig-out chow. I don't know the world team record for pierogi eating, but my family record was set by me and my kid brother when we combined to eat 57 of them. That incredible feat left us so drowsy that it was 15 minutes before we could move on to several links of kielbasa. (That, for the benefit of foreigners, is smoked sausage.)
