BIEROCKS: A GERMAN-RUSSIAN TREAT IN AMERICA

Bierocks. Sounds like a combination of a German beer festival and a rock concert. (That would actually be a good promo name for such an event!)
I had never heard of Bierocks until a German Life reader wrote to ask me about them. She was an American from Kansas, who had also lived in Germany, and she had just finished reading my new memoir-cookbook, T-Bone Whacks and Caviar Snacks: Cooking with Two Texans in Siberia and the Russian Far East. Her question: “The ethnic German-Russians in western Kansas and the Mennonites prepare a pie similar to pirozhki [in the cookbook], stuffed with ground beef or sausage, onion, and sauerkraut, that they call Bierocks. I had never heard that name in Germany. Do you have any idea of its origin?