Recently a heated discussion flared up on the Internet about how far chefs can go in their culinary explorations. The eccentric chef Aleksander Baron became a prime mover and shaker in this mess, serving up multi-sensory dinner dishes that were, as he found out, too strange or plain inedible for some guests. An example? Drone bee larvae served on honeycomb, or Chinese pond mussels on sand with calamus (a wetland reed). If you have a closer look at Polish cuisine over the centuries, you’ll find many products and dishes that may appear surprising, perhaps even nauseating.
Milk skin
Each and every adult in Poland has had childhood experiences with overly-boiled food, and will definitely have encountered milk skin, the membrane on boiled milk. 99% of Poles would say that this is the most disgusting thing they’ve ever eaten. But a handful of milk skin lovers will recall with tenderness eating a slice of bread covered with these abominations and sprinkled with sugar. Once we entered the era of UHT milk, there was no need to boil it, and the skins became a rare sight. When you mention milk skins, most people will start shivering, however there are chefs trying to convince people to give it a chance, to try it in various combinations. Suffice to say, that’s what two of them were doing: Wojciech Modest Amaro and Aleksander Baron. The former served milk skin with creamed herring and onion chutney. The latter tried to win over people with two dishes: milk skins served with cod in saffron, bacon and raisins; and seasoned sirloin wrapped in milk skins together with an emulsion made from young barley shoots, cold-pressed rapeseed oil and fermented barley grains.
Calamus in sugar
Who would ever consider gobbling those reeds that grow by lakes? Well, Poles would. It’s called calamus and it’s all over the place. Several hundred years ago, there was a fashionable baroque dessert called “Tatar Herb in Sugar”. It was made from just two ingredients, calamus and sugar, and was very time-consuming to prepare. The recipe was included in a collection of medical, farming and culinary tips called Compendium Medicum Auctum. The book said that the calamus should be boiled several times (to remove the bitterness), then fried on low heat ''until dry, while mixing slowly with a paddle''. It claimed that candied calamus should taste similar to ginger but have a less spicy flavour. How did it really taste? Professor Jarosław Dumanowski, a researcher of old Polish cuisine says: ''Tatar herb in sugar was about the juxtaposition of different taste experiences. A bitter aftertaste and aromatic fragrance, all jarring with sweetness''. He adds that this pillar of aesthetic construction in Polish Sarmatian confectionery “disappeared from history with a rumble”, and reflections on it can even be found in literature such as Żona Modna by Ignacy Krasicki, a Polish Enlightenment writer. Although ''Tatar Herb in Sugar'' is already consigned to history, from time to time someone makes it as an experiment – recipes can be found on the Internet.
Dried curd
Foreign gourmets do not associate Polish cuisine with fancy cheese. They rather think of Poland as a wasteland when it comes to cheese-making. Thanks to the nascent fashion for farm cheese, “the Polish Cheese Map” is not the same as before the transformation. Many of them are surprising. Not only new original cheeses are being created, but also old recipes, popular long time ago and forgotten during the communist period. This includes specialities such as dried curd, sometimes known as quark. In a sense, its history reflects the history of Polish manor houses. After 1945, when they disappeared, everybody forgot about dried curd as well. Thanks to producers such as Ancypo from Sokółka in the eastern area of Podlasie, it’s no longer left in the realm of imagination but you can actually taste it! Gieno Mientkiewicz, an expert in farmstead cheese underlines that
the first bites are inconspicuous, the next are absorbing. You never know when the cheese disappears. It’s hard, so you have to split it. A sour accent breaks through the saltiness and sweetness and makes our salivary glands work piece-by-piece and constantly wanting more and more'.