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| State Meats in Parma, Ohio |
If you come to Cleveland and you want to buy some sausage, I am really the girl to look up. I know where the best links are all across this town. I go to specific sausage shops to buy specific sausages for specific recipes. There's the double smoked spicy garlic sausage from Dohar in the West Side Market. I use that for my Hungarian Lesco. For very fine smokies, I like Czuchraj's stand, also in the Market.
But when I want to make sausage and sauerkraut, which I love to a fault, I head over to Parma, specifically State Meats in Ukrainian Village in order to buy their European-style smoked kielbasa, which is of the absolute highest quality.
State Meats has a host of traditional offerings, from borscht to pyrohy and all points in between, including three types of head cheese (hot, vinegar and regular). There is a small selection of imported groceries and the table by the door is piled with Ukrainian newspapers. On the Saturday before Easter, the tiny shop is packed solid with people and business is so frenetic, a Parma cop has to direct traffic on that section of the road.
State Meats is one of those authentic places in this town that I want to last forever and ever. Just the thought of it ever closing makes tears sting my eyes. The surrounding neighborhood is quirky and proud. Every August, Ukrainian Village celebrates the Ukraine's independence from Russia with a festival and parade.
Hence, while most of us sit in front of the idiot box, indifferently watching the evening news with it's 90-second clip on the situation in the Ukraine, there is a contingent of Americans who have significantly more at stake.
As for the parade, I have never been, but I think I will go this year.
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| A mural in Parma's Ukrainian Village |
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