Grinding onions for Elaine Luschas’s family’s traditional Lithuanian recipe can bring one to tears.

In the kitchen of her Columbia County home, Luschas tears up for another reason. She explains why, after all these decades, she still makes kugelis once or twice a year.

“Why?” she asks, pausing to collect herself. “I guess you just feel closer to your family. The family isn’t here anymore. You remember all the things you did as a child.”

Sarah Hofius Hall

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WVIA News

If the name “Kugelis” sounds strange to you, remember that Americans used to call immigrants “aliens.”

Elaine Luschas, 73, and her 74-year-old husband, Alvin Luschas, are descended from Lithuanian immigrants who brought their food traditions with them as they settled and did the hard work of growing the United States.

Elaine is the daughter of Leo and Adeline (Swirsky) Mack and granddaughter of Joseph and Josephine (Burba) Swirsky. Josephine came to the United States from Lithuania in 1899. Joseph was in the United States in 1888, but when he arrived is unknown.

Elaine’s mother, the youngest of four children, was the only one to graduate from high school. Two aunts, like many women, worked in dress and shirt factories in Mahanoy City, where the family settled.

Joseph Swirsky toiled as a coal miner and died of black lung in 1927, like many before and after him. She inherited a valuable possession from him.

“And I got my grandfather’s wicker rocking chair that my Aunt Helen said he always sat in next to the coal stove in the kitchen,” Elaine says. “And he died in that rocking chair.”

Alvin Luschas, who introduces himself as Al, is the son of Alphonse and Mary Luschas and grandson of John and Agnes (Rainis) Luschas. John came to the United States in 1905.

The Luscha family, who live in North Centre Township near Berwick, grew up in Mahanoy City in Schuylkill County, where many Lithuanians, Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans immigrated more than a century ago.

“Yes, my grandfather worked in the mines. My uncle worked in the mines. My father worked in the mines,” says Al.

Not Al. He became a lawyer.

“Even though I worked in a nitroglycerin factory and she worked there,” he said.

“I made detonators,” says Elaine.

Lithuanian immigrants brought kugelis and other local recipes here, which they often kept only in their memories.

Al, who is half-Slovak, grew up eating kugelis. Elaine didn’t, but her daughter Carol, 42, researched various kugelis recipes and made her own. This is the version they make today.

Even after crossing the ocean more than a century ago, kugelis is still essentially a cake baked from potatoes, a vegetable that is no longer so foreign to other Americans.

“It actually came to the country (Lithuania) relatively late in the 18th century, but it has become a very popular vegetable,” says Carol. “It’s a Lithuanian second bread, so to speak.”

Every Eastern European potato dish usually starts with a well-peeled potato. On this day, Al Luschas acts as the head potato peeler.

Sarah Hofius Hall

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WVIA News

He loses five pounds in less than ten minutes.

“These are pretty easy potatoes, but they still take a while,” he says. “Watch the bacon, Carol.”

Across the kitchen, Carol Luschas fries diced bacon and onions on a gas stove for a topping called spirgucias. Bacon fat crackles and sizzles in the spaces between the bacon and onions in the metal pan.

Finally, Al peels four onions. Now it’s time to grind the potatoes and onions.

“The machine we use to chop everything up comes from Lithuania,” he says. “And we’re done – as far as the chop-up goes – in five minutes. Without this machine, it would take maybe 45 minutes.”

On this day, Kugelis are baked for friends.

“Did you tell him to put the cigar in?” Al asks, smiling, holding an unwrapped cigar in his right hand.

Carol Luschas hangs her mother’s wicker baskets from the kitchen ceiling and fills a meat grinder imported from Lithuania with potatoes and onions.

“I don’t have a system, but it doesn’t matter because everything is mixed together,” says Carol, barely audible over the crunching.

After adding milk, eggs, salt and pepper, the mixture is poured into 9-by-13-inch glass pans. Elaine Luschas sets the oven to 400 degrees.

An hour later the Kugelis are ready. Once again a culinary tradition is continued.

“It’s a very unique culture,” says Carol.

During a Russian class at university, Carol says, the professor asked the students about their family traditions for Christmas and Easter.

“The children couldn’t answer that. They had no traditions,” says Carol. “It was kind of sad. I felt like an alien, so to speak.”