Communist Cuisine: Hardship & Comfort
When you ask Polish chefs and foodies about the development of the country’s cuisine, more often than not, they will tell you it was flourishing right until the times of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL), when the lack of resources – and the lack of imagination – unified and limited it to a salt-and-pepper, ground-meat-and-boiled-potatoes flavour palette.
On the other hand, many of the dishes Polish people consider their favourite and their ‘own’ are somehow rooted in the PRL decades – think mielony cutlet made with ground pork, served with boiled potatoes and beetroot, think tomato soup made with canned tomato paste, and think leniwe dumplings, pancakes with cottage cheese and many other staples of Poland’s most iconic restaurant concept – the milk bar.
The Mighty Milk Bar
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Robert Stoop in the 'Neptun' milk bar, Gdańsk, photo: Przemysław Kozłowski / Forum
Although the milk bar is not a communist invention – the first one was opened in Warsaw in 1896 – it is mostly associated with that era, since there were very few other options. Apart from some hotel restaurants in the biggest cities, and workers’ canteens, if you wanted to eat out, you had to go to a milk bar, which was – and in many cases still is – subsided by the state. The experience wasn’t always pleasurable but it was very popular among students, pensioners and those who wanted to save time and money.
As poet Mieczysław Jastrun wrote in 1958:
For a long time I searched for a restaurant in the centre of the capital. Bars are so dirty, you can’t eat there, since disgust clogs the gullet.
Low prices were one of the main characteristics of the milk bar; another was their almost total meatlessness. You could be served eggs or cottage cheese in the mornings, and then a selection of soups (tomato, gherkin, button mushroom, sorrel…) and dishes based on potatoes and flour – dumplings, crepes, or – in the most modest version – just mashed potatoes served with a glass of curdled milk.
To Meat Or Not To Meat
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Cutlet, photo: Getty Images
Nowadays not eating as much meat may seem as the most reasonable thing you can do, yet in the times of food rationing in the Polish People’s Republic it was an object of desire, and its shortage was a cause of panic. In the common imagination it became a symbol of vitality and strength, and it was supposed to be available for all – isn’t equality what the socialist economy was all about? And yet it wasn’t. Especially the crisis of the 1980s – right after the slight economic betterment of the so-called ‘Gierek decade’ – brought big changes to the structure of home budgets: food not only became more expensive, but getting what you wanted – mostly meat, but also sugar and sweets – depended more and more on whom you knew. To give a personal example – my grandmother worked in the Polish Scientific Publishing House (PWN), where they had a ‘veal lady’. Each month the veal lady would come and make a list of requests for meat among the editors, and the faster you were, the better chance you got.
Since meat was so scarce, different efforts were made to make people eat less of it – in women's magazines you could find recipes for dishes which included eggs, dairy and vegetables; sometimes even ‘alternative’ sources were promoted, such as calamari and… nutria. While in a Catholic society people tend to abstain from meat on Fridays, communist authorities encouraged 'meatless Mondays' – just as Linda McCartney, yet for very different reasons. And milk bars were a part of that, constituting the socialist cuisine as largely vegetarian – just as the food of our peasant ancestors.
The Comforts of Home
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Milk bars serve homemade food at affordable prices, so they still have many devoted supporters, photo: Bar Mleczny Domowy
When Poles born in the 1960s, 70s and 80s recall the cuisine of socialism, they don’t necessarily think of smelly milk bars, veal ladies, long queues nor the monotony of a diet without almost any imported ingredients. We might vaguely recall that we only had oranges for Christmas, but we remember our grandma’s tomato soup and cheese-and-potato dumplings very well. That’s why nowadays milk bars – or, as Fabio Parasecoli called them in Amelia Nierenberg’s article in the New York Times – ‘hipster projections of milk bars’, are still so popular; that’s why simple, comfortable fare is what we crave for in the times of uncertainty; that is why no tomato soup will ever taste as good as my grandma’s – even if it wasn’t made with fresh tomatoes, but with frugal tomato paste.
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