Let nobody say that Poland is a vegetarians’ paradise. While vegetables are on tap, the cuisine is heavy, rich with meat, and often laden with sauces. But what else are vacations for? Herewith is a selection of the things I ate in Poland after I left Dobrzyn (pictures of the markets will be posted separately).
The national dish is pierogi: filled dumplings that are either boiled or fried. They come with a gazillion kinds of fillings, and I haven’t had a bad one.
After my talk in Warsaw, we all repaired to a restaurant famous for pierogi (click all photos to enlarge):
The Polish menu (enlarge it) shows all the varieties on the left, while the health benefits (LOL) of each type is on the right. For each pierogi order, you can have it slathered with either butter, sour cream, or a type of gravy:
The English translation. These are fancy pierogi; my favorite was the one filled with “forest mushrooms”, topped with sour cream. (A zloty is about one-third of a US dollar):
My selection: I had five varieties, two of each:
My neighbor preferred his pierogi fried after being boiled, and topped with bacon bits as well (I told you this wasn’t healthy food!):
Potato pancakes (Jews call them latkes) are one of my favorite foods; my mother used to make them when I was young). They are time-consuming to prepare properly, but a superb dish when served with either sour cream or applesauce (I prefer to alternate in a single meal). They are sold in many places; here’s a potato pancake stand in Cracow, with an order costing 3 zl, or about a US dollar:
The goods:
Placki are sometimes served covered with goulash, and I had this in a milk bar in Warsaw. Now this is a hearty meal! The drink on the side is kompott, the watered-down exudate made from boiling fruit with sugar:
One of my companions at the milk bar had cheese-filled savory pancakes (I don’t know the Polish name), topped with a bit of grated cheese. These pancakes are an alternative to pierogi, and often offered with the same fillings:
A meal in a restaurant in Cracow’s Jewish Quarter. (There aren’t many Jews left, of course, but the old Jewish area is remarkably well preserved since it wasn’t destroyed by the Nazis as was Warsaw’s ghetto. Much of the movie Schindler’s List was filmed in this area). We had potato kugel with a savory relish, and goulash, all washed down with a beer (Polish beer can be good, especially if you get the one with the bison on the bottle):
On our way out, I saw a plate of hamentashen, a filled, three-cornered pastry usually made only on Purim, a special Jewish holiday. The shape is a mystery, and has been variously said to resemble the ears or the hat of Haman, the villian of the story. Hamentashen are often filled with prune jam, but this one contained a sweetened poppy-seed paste:
Here’s an incredibly cheap meal at a local place in Cracow. The total bill for everything, including two beers, was about $14:
A Lithuanian (or so I’m told) rye-bread-based soup with egg. It was yummy!
My dinner: pork sausages with onions, cabbage, and mustard. The veggies are an afterthought:
There was also a huge plate of another famous Polish dish: bigos (“hunter’s stew”), made with cabbage, various meats, and spices. This was also excellent:
One of my favorite Polish treats was paczki, or jam-filled “donuts”. They differ from American donuts because the dough is much richer, made with eggs. The fillings vary, and they’re often topped with powdered sugar or, on the fancy kinds, bits of preserved orange peel:
The inside:
Finally, I’d be remiss if I omitted the wonderful Polish breads, often studded with different types of grains and nuts. Here’s a bakery (mostly sold out since this was late in the day), but I’ll show more scenes from the market in a later post:
A glass of carrot juice – vs – mouth orgasms over sticks-to-your-ribs Polish food. Tough decision…
I know, right?
😀
All looks good. Any weight gain?
Those big flat pancakes, served with either savory or sweet filling (or sometimes just with a sprinkling of powdered sugar) are called naleśniki (pronounced na-lesh-nee-kee). They are like a cross between French crepes and American style pancakes. The sweet cheese-filled version is not unlike Jewish blintzes (but the dough is lighter).
OMG that was the best food porn yet! That donut! Mmmmm! And all the pierogi! It all looks so good and yet the local people don’t seem over weight. I guess they know how to control their urges for over eating.
When I read the Polish menu I only recognized one word. Is that where the use of the word Ruskies in the US comes from?
The Polish word for Russian is rosyjski, -a, -ie (depends on the gender). Notice that in Polish you do not capitalize what in English we call proper adjectives. Ruskie can be best translated as Ruthenian – and in the Polish context to the Slavic population of Lithuania. Until the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795, Poland was properly the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth(from 1569) and previously the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (from 1386). Lithuania was the much larger entity – including what is now western Belarus and western Ukraine. Most of the people in Lithuania were Slavic peasants who were Orthodox Christians – in Polish they were referred to as rusi. Ukrainians may take issue with that description – regarding themselves as autochthonous to the area. I come from the “we are all African” school and don’t really care.
Ruskie pierogi are made with potato and cheese. Usually farmer’s cheese (twarog). I knew a lady who made them with cream cheese and I thought they were great.
Wow, thanks. You have a very good knowledge of history and historical boundaries.
I think I’ve heard the word in old movies and read it in War World stories.
I’m “all from Africa” also. I was just curious.
*Stands and applauds*
Vaal
Dear Jerry,
I have enjoyed your sojourn to Poland very much. Hili is a delight and the pictures of food had me salivating (at the wrong time of day, as I generally viewed them late at night, Australian time).
Thank you!
I hope to receive a case of holiday latkes this year with a gift card for troponin level monitoring.
Where are the golabki? i.e. cabbage leaves wrapped around minced pork or beef, chopped onions, and rice or barley baked in a tomato sauce. Golabki is the plural diminutive form of golab – Polish for a pigeon or dove.
My Polish granny called those galumpki or holopchi.
The Polish word gołąbki is pronounced [go’wompki] (the hook under the vowel indicates a nasal articulation). It has been borrowed into some regional varieties of US English as golumpki, which is, phonetically, a fair approximation. There are related dishes (and related words for them) in other Slavic languages, such as Ukrainian голубці (= holubtsi), which accounts for your granny’s second variant. It’s actually likely that the Polish word is a 19th-century calque from Ukrainian.
I wonder if gołąbki were originally stuffed with squab, or if it was just the size and the shape of the rolls that resembled a roast pigeon.
In Russian they are called Golubtsy. These cabbage rolls are very popular in a number of East European countries.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbage_roll
Cabbage rolls are popular in western Canada, too, probably thanks to the large Ukrainian element in the population, esp. in Alberta.
The nearest second-rate grocery store sells hot cabbage rolls from the deli counter, in tomato sauce. They’re good, though almost certainly frozen and reheated.
JAC has done a good thing documenting his trip to Poland. It’s a very civilized country with a long and tragic history, Polack jokes notwithstanding. If anyone reading is interested in learning more about Polish history, Wikipedia is a very good place to start; someone has taken the considerable time and trouble to prepare decent articles on the subject in all its aspects.
Jerry, if you ever get tired of doing science, you’ve got a guaranteed-lucrative career awaiting you as a travel journalist / Epicurean tour guide.
Cheers,
b&
In Switzerland we have the exact same jam-filled “donuts”, they are a traditional “donut” and your description of the Polish ones describes the Swiss ones exactly! They apparently are of German origin. In Switzerland, they are called Berliner in the German-speaking part and Boules de Berlin in the French-speaking part. They in fact exist all over the world under various names.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_%28doughnut%29
The best ones in Poland (traditionally filled with rose petal jam) are produced by the Blikle pâtisserie in Warsaw. I had the pleasure of personally meeting Andrzej Blikle, the former owner of that family company (established in the mid-19th c. and now run by his son). He was, of all things, a professor of Computer Science at Warsaw University in the early 1980s and I attended his lectures there. He doubled up as a pastry chef (with all the necessary certificates), and turned out to be a very able manager when he had to take over the family business — the Michael Corleone of doughnuts!
That sounds delicious! I love rose petal liqueur and rose petal syrup (popular in India and Pakistan). Alas, I no longer can indulge as I have developed Diabetes Type II.
Of course there is the famous joke of Kennedy saying in his 1963 speech in West Berlin
“Ich bin ein Berliner.”
Perfectly valid sentence, conveying solidarity with the people of the then still divided city. But if german listeners would have been in a silly mood, they might have heard him saying “I am a donut.”
We call this pastry “Berliner”, or “Pfannkuchen”, elsewhere in this country also “Kräppel” or “Krapfen”. Traditionally we eat them for New Year, although you see them in the shops now all year round. They are filled with delicious Pflaumenmuß (plum jam), but any other sticky sweet fillings available of course, and if you are unlucky on New Year’s eve, you get one that was cheekily filled with mustard instead. Doesn’t happen with the ones from the shops though, I believe.
In any case, the more Berliner Pfannkuchen you eat on 31.12, the luckier you are supposed to be for the next year. Surely that belief calls for some rigorous testing!
That soup and bigos look really good.
Before I went vegetarian, I made Polish Hunter’s Stew a few times a year. Here is the basic traditional recipe I used that may be augmented to suit your liking:
-2lbs. sauerkraut, rinsed & replace juice with water
-1/2lb bacon
1/2lb veal (or lamb), cubed
1/2lb venison (wild game), cubed
1/2lb Polish sausage pieces
1/2lb pork, cubed
(Oxtails make an excellent substitution meat if you can’t find veal or lamb; remove meat from the bones after browning).
1/2lb small cabbage, sliced
1-2 dried oyster mushrooms
2 yellow onions, chopped
3/4lb fresh mushrooms, sliced
3 small tomatoes, sliced
1 bay leaf
2 large Granny Smith apples, diced
1 Tbsp caraway seed
1/3 cup white wine
butter
salt/pepper/sugar to taste
water as needed for desired consistency
To a crock pot add kraut with water. Bring to boil, then simmer. Brown cubed meats using bacon. Add all the meat and cabbage to pot.
Rehydrate mushrooms in 1/2 water, dice and add to pot with the water they were soaked in. Saute onions and fresh mushrooms in butter until not quite done, then add to pot. Add bay leaf, apples, tomatoes and caraway seed. Simmer 3-4hrs. 1/2 before serving, add wine, salt, pepper, sugar as desired; stir. Add water if too thick.
This stew lends itself to the sweet side; never salty or vinegary (rinse the sauerkraut). Service with hard crusted rye bread and enjoy.
Recipe corrections.
1/2 of a whole small cabbage
1/2 cup of water to soak mushrooms
Clarification: your crock pot will likely be filled to the brim with all the raw cabbage but it will reduce down nicely in a few hours.
Oh, thank you for that! Very kind of you.
I mostly eat vegetarian myself these days, but that looks perfect for the long, cold winter days.
One correction: oyster mushrooms are a poor substitute for dried boletes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boletus_edulis
Thank you!
My favorite Polish dish of all time is the Zurek soup that you showed. I had it in Warsaw in a bread bowl (even healthier! ha!). I actually tried to make it at home, making the rye sour and everything…it didn’t quite taste as good as it does in the restaurants. I could seriously eat a bowl every day. Loved these pictures…made me hungry for my mother-in-laws cooking.
The sourdough has to be well fermented (till it has a thick head of froth and tastes really sour). Some people put a piece of brown bread crust in it to speed up the process. A clove or two of garlic are obligatory too.
Makes me kind of sad that AM radio stations around here don’t broadcast in Czech and Polish any more. And you can’t get this kind of food in small Texas towns like you could when I was a kid. All the young people have left the farms and agribusiness has either bought the land or forced farmers out of business so they have to sell their land to become some rich person’s hobby ranch.
Maybe I need to go to Poland.
Oh, super yum-yums!
You are making me miss my grandmother’s cooking even more. Everything looks so wonderful, I think I’ll buy some pierogi on the way home.