A family recipe travels around the world

Pat Gercik (above) makes cabbage pie (below) from a recipe that goes back for generations in her family. (Photos by josh reynolds for the boston globe)

CAMBRIDGE - Pat Gercik's cabbage pie comes straight from Latvia - with a little detour through Tokyo.

Each winter, Gercik (pronounced Grr-sick) throws a party and serves the traditional Russian dishes that her grandmother and great-grandmother made: the cabbage pie, blini and caviar, beef Stroganoff, and more, all washed down with plenty of ice-cold vodka. But the Cambridge resident didn't exactly learn to cook from her grandmother - at least not directly. Born in Canada, Gercik spent most of her childhood in Japan, where her father had gone as a young man to go into his "very entrepreneurial" uncle's watch business. Her father brought his mother, Johanna Gercik - in her 60s at the time - to live with the family in Tokyo.

It worked out well. Gercik's grandmother taught the family's Japanese cook her traditional Russian dishes, and the cook, in turn, taught Gercik. "I learned to cook because I was close to the servants; my cook taught me to cook," she recalled recently as she prepared cabbage pie in the homey kitchen of her Porter Square Victorian.

The family history is complicated and includes sojourns in Shanghai and Switzerland and Yokohama. It's all carefully archived in "The Moveable Feast," a little family cookbook complete with reproductions of hand-written recipe cards and photos of several generations. In all their travels, the family cherished the handed-down recipes that tied them to their home in Latvia.

Cabbage pie is a dish that has a particularly long pedigree. Says Gercik, "This recipe came from my grandmother's mother, and it was given to her by her mother" - a woman who could comment from firsthand experience on the bad behavior of Napoleon's army as it came through Latvia.

Gercik, who is managing director of an MIT program that trains students in Japanese culture, has perfected the pie over the years. It's a double-crust round filled with cabbage, onion, and hard-cooked eggs. As you saute the cabbage for the filling, says Gercik, don't let it brown; your goal is perfectly softened, but not colored, vegetables. And don't be tempted to treat pepper as an afterthought: "Pepper is really critical," says the cook, as she adds a hefty pinch of coarsely ground black pepper to the vegetables. "It really brings out the taste of the cabbage." The chopped hard-cooked eggs may seem unexpected, but they help tie the dish together and lend it some protein heft.

It's a simple, rib-sticking dish, and it's easy to imagine in a cold Latvian winter. More difficult is picturing it prepared by Gercik's family's cook, a woman she describes as "one of the best cooks in Tokyo," who made elaborate spun-sugar desserts and boneless ducks stuffed with crabmeat. The Japanese cook's kitchen lessons have stayed with Gercik. "From her," she says, "I learned not to try to do everything at the same time when cooking." Case in point: The cabbage filling, she says, can be prepared a day in advance and refrigerated, and the pie comes together quickly the next day. "And," says Gercik, "she taught me that cooking alone is not fun. While we cooked together, we'd talk about her life."

Today, as Gercik rolls pastry and sautes cabbage, she talks about her own life - about the journey that brought a family halfway around the world and across many different cultures. Through all the upheaval, some of the only constants were cabbage pie and other Russian dishes. The hot, hefty, homey pie should be accompanied by shots of vodka. It's a dish that has traveled well.