German American Food: Germans from Russia

Although German immigration has been continuous, a third distinctive group began coming to the United States in the 1870s. These immigrants were Germans who had relocated to Russia in the eighteenth century. Many had left the same parts of Germany for some of the same reasons as the Pennsylvania Dutch but had acquired different dialects and foods over their 120 years in various parts of Russia. These Germans were invited by Catherine the Great in the 1750s and were encouraged to form distinctive German-speaking colonies along the Volga River and around the Black Sea. In the 1870s, however, Russian reform governments began repressing these Germans, and the process accelerated with the Russian Revolution in 1917. In the United States, Germans from Russia did not initially connect closely with either of the previous German American populations but set up their own settlements in the prairie states, becoming the largest ethnic minority in North Dakota. They kept to their religious and Russian regional identities, thus Black Sea Mennonites had a concentration in central Kansas. The most typical dish of Germans from Russia has been stuffed breads, known as either bierocks (a Germanized version of “pierogi”) or kraut runza (German for “cabbage bun”). Their cookbooks include a number of recipes for stirrum, a scrambled pancake known as schman or shmorran in other German American communities but served with greens among Germans from Russia. The Mennonite church groups were among the channels of connection with other German Americans.