Daily life did not really interest the early generations of ethnographers, who were more focused on folklore. Nevertheless, in the collections of Oskar Kolberg’s writing, aside from transcriptions of songs and folk tales, we can find fragments recording country people’s daily nourishment. This is what people ate in Morownica, a village in the region of Greater Poland, in Kolberg’s times:
In summer, in the morning, at eight, milk soup with potatoes and a piece of bread. For dinner, potatoes and dumplings, or cabbage and peas, or groats and potatoes, or potatoes and barley. On Sunday, those who are rich cook meat broth, and eat it with potatoes, barley or millet. In the evening, there is soup with potatoes, same as in the morning, but with no bread.
Jan Słomka, a peasant and social activist from Galicia, recollects in his Pamiętnik Włościanina od Pańszczyzny do Czasów Dzisiejszych (editor’s translation: Diary of a Landlord, from Serfdom to Modernity) from 1912:
When I lived with my parents and grandparents, and for the next 30 years when I managed the farm on my own, rural breakfasts, dinners, and suppers were the following:
For breakfast, there was usually borscht with wholemeal rye bread. If the farmer had enough potatoes, then potatoes garnished with some fat or just salted were served as the main course; when bread was scarce, borscht would be served with potatoes. Dinner usually consisted of two courses. The first one was always cabbage with groats, and the second – millet or pearl barley with milk or seasoned with fat. Sometimes, for a change, dumplings made from quern-ground rye or wheat flour, served with milk or seasoned with fat, and sometimes pierogi with cheese, and in fasting periods with press cake. Supper resembled breakfast.
Galicia, where Słomka was from, was a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time. It was known for its poverty, as reflected in its official name being twisted into the Kingdom of Barrenness and Hungerdom (Golicja i Głodomeria). In richer villages under the Prussian occupation peasants could afford much more, at least when it came to meat (however, as we saw in Kolberg’s account, meals were monotonous there as well). Peasant diarist Tomasz Skorupka from the western region of Greater Poland, in his memoires entitled Kto przy Obrze Temu Dobrze (editor’s translation: Those by the Byre Have It Good), described meals from the days of his youth in the second half of the 19th century:
Father did as mother did: he would take some butter, lard and eggs from the pantry, than crack the eggs over the pan and fry them (…). Each year a piglet and a two-year-old calf were killed. When the meat was gone, they would kill another.
However, meat and eggs were usually intended for sale. They were cooked only when someone in the family was ill or when an important guest was to be invited, for example, a priest visiting at Christmas time.
Food was supposed to, first of all, make people feel full. In Oskar Kolberg’s collected works dedicated to Krakow and its surroundings, we come across the following fragment: ‘(…) the peasant here is not fussy at all and is satisfied with any food (as long as it is a large portion).’ In another fragment, Kolberg notes that peasants would rather sell better products than ‘consume them without profit.’ In his memoirs, the aforementioned Słomka comments:
Peasants didn’t want to spend money or time preparing better food; and the housewife would always say: ‘I’m not going to be all creative, fuss, and waste time.’
In 1933, the Institute of Socio-Economics (Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego) chaired by Ludwik Krzywicki, announced a competition for peasant diaries. The texts, gathered in two volumes, are an indispensable source of knowledge on the pre-World War II Polish countryside. In one such diary, a woman from the Łódź voivodeship writes:
In the morning, dziad (a soup made from stale bread, water and some additions, depending on what was available), zalewajka (sour rye soup with potatoes), potato soup and potatoes thinned with water, for dinner: boiled potatoes with borscht, seasoned with egg whites or agaric, or barley groats with dried pears, for supper: potatoes. Over and over again.