A Polish Thanksgiving? Culinary Inspirations for the Most American of Holidays

thanksgiving_gettyimages_8.jpg, default, Thanksgiving table, photo: Lauri Patterson/GettyImages

On the fourth Thursday of November most Americans celebrate Thanksgiving. It originated as a harvest festival and the most important part of the celebrations is… Thanksgiving dinner. Turkey, yams, pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce are some of the staples, but… say you want to shake things up a bit and add some Polish flavour to your dinner? Here’s some Polish culinary inspiration from Culture.pl!

Although there are some customs that shouldn’t be messed with – and the ‘Holy Trinity’ of turkey, football and family on Thanksgiving might seem like one of them – in a country such as the United States, where multiculturalism forms the very core of national identity, few things are set in stone. Even though there is a canon of foods that people from all over the world associate with this celebration – turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and this weird sweet potato-marshmallow concoction that people from outside the US observe with trepidation – in reality not every Thanksgiving table looks the same. Americans with different ancestries celebrate the November harvest festival adding their own traditional dishes – whether Italian, Mexican, Chinese, or Lebanese – to the mix, or using flavours from their countries of origin to spice up the traditional turkey and mashed potatoes. Some even celebrate twice and make two dinners – one ethnic and one full-on Americana.

In 2007, New York Magazine asked celebrated chefs of different ethnic backgrounds – Swedish-Ethiopian Marcus Samuelsson, Italian Fabio Trabocchi, Mexican Aarón Sánchez, Chinese Joe Ng and French Laurent Tourondel – to come up with their own versions of traditional Thanksgiving dishes and the results were delightful. With delicacies such as harissa turkey and mango sambal from Samuelsson, gnocchi gratin and chestnut-filled turkey legs by Trabocchi, roast suckling pig and corn bread by Sanchez, lemongrass turkey rolls and pumpkin bao by Ng and chestnut-stuffed guinea hens and gâteau aux pommes with calvados caramel by Tourondel… well, it was mouth-watering to read.

And so, for all our American friends out there, we at Culture.pl thought it would be fun to provide you with some Polish-inspired ideas for Thanksgiving dinner!

The meat

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Cutting the roast duck photo: Alleko/iStockphoto /Getty Images

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Roasted turkey isn’t actually very popular in Poland, but in November we celebrate independence with the flavour of a different bird – which is sometimes served for Thanksgiving by German or Dutch Americans – goose. Celebrated in Old-Polish cuisine and almost forgotten in the socialist era, it’s now having a bit of a comeback, as a campaign was launched several years ago to reintroduce traditional Polish goose to the new Polish tables. It is called Gęsina na Świętego Marcina (Goose meat on St Martin’s Day). In the Roman Catholic tradition, St Martin’s Day is a holiday celebrated on 11th November. It coincides with the custom of slaughtering birds before winter, and also with the remembrance of the end of the Great War in 1918. That date might seem quite familiar to you, as it is also the day Poland has celebrated regaining its independence since the 1930s.

A delicious traditional way of serving goose is to roast it whole, rubbed generously with garlic and marjoram and filled with tart apples. A similar treatment can be applied to duck, which is also a traditional bird, especially beloved in the city of Poznań in Greater Poland.

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Lentil pasztet, photo: iStockphoto/Getty Images

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American vegetarians and vegans use stuffed tofurky, while the British have nut roasts or simply stuffed squash as an alternative to turkey; here in Poland we celebrate many festive occasions with plant-based pasztet: a roast made with pulses and grains, vegetables (carrots, celeriacs, parsnips, mushrooms, fried onions) and spices such as marjoram, lovage, bay leaf, juniper or allspice. My favourite pasztet is made with green or brown lentils, millet groats, onions fried with spices, sunflower seeds and – in accordance with the festive spirit – some dried cranberries.

The sides

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Pampuchy, photo: Krzysztof Kuczyk / Forum

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The aforementioned Poznań-style duck is usually served with red cabbage stewed with red wine, apple and cloves, and traditional dumplings called pyzy. These steamed yeast buns – also known as pampuchy, parowańce or kluchy na łachu – could easily stand in for corn bread or biscuits. Here’s a recipe from Chef Michał Kuter’s bilingual cookbook A Nóż Widelec:

Text

120 ml milk

3 marjoram sprigs

2 garlic cloves

2 bay leaves

5 g salt

10 g sugar

20 g fresh yeast

250 g flour, type 500

1 egg

Heat the milk with marjoram, garlic and bay leaves, than cool down to 35ºC. Sift through a sieve, add the salt, sugar and yeast, and mix well. Add sifted flour and egg. Knead the dough and leave to rise for 15 minutes. Punch it down and divide into eight equal balls, put them on the tray, cover with cloth, and leave to rise for another 15 minutes. Steam the dumplings for around 12 minutes.

Classic mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce are something we could easily get on board with, although Poles wouldn’t be themselves, if they didn’t insert some mushrooms to the autumnal mix – and not necessarily in the form of the cream of mushroom soup added to the green bean casserole. An intense sauce made with wild mushrooms foraged a couple months earlier is more like something Poles would serve in November.

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Stewed cabbage, photo: Kamila Kubat/AW

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Green beans would also not appear on our November tables, since the season for fasolka szparagowa ends a couple of months earlier; what we might serve instead is a dish made with a vegetable from the cabbage family, such as Brussel sprouts, kale or the most popular of all – green cabbage, which we might stew with some butter and dill. As fans of everything sour, we would probably serve some of our fermented treasures: sauerkraut and dill pickles for some punchy, healthy tartness. Plums or pears in a vinegary marinade with pepper, cloves and cinnamon are also a great side both to roast meat and vegetarian pasztet. And wouldn’t it all just taste sublime with some horseradish sauce?

The dessert

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Szarlotka, photo: iStockphoto/Getty Images

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The Polish apple pie – szarlotka – is an obvious choice. We make all sorts of cakes with apples, but possibly the most traditional version consists of a layer of short crust pastry, a thick layer of stewed apples spiced with cinnamon and a streusel on top, sometimes preceded by a layer of meringue. Instead of pecans, we’d use some walnuts and hazelnuts in our desserts – orzechowiec is a name you might come across, although it can be used for a variety of nut-based desserts, usually layered cakes.

As for pumpkin, we don’t really use it as a pie stuffing, but we add it to the dough we make our yeast cakes with, which makes them wonderfully moist and appealingly orange. There’s also a delicious pumpkin cake called baniocek from the Świętokrzyskie region you might want to try. Here’s a recipe from Paweł Ochman’s Roślinna Kuchnia Regionalna (Plant-Based Regional Cuisine) cookbook:

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Homemade pound cake baked in a loaf pan on a wooden board, photo: iStockphoto/Getty Images

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Text

2 cups wheat flour

¾ cups sugar

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp cinnamon

1 cup raisins

15 prunes

1 cup chopped walnuts

1,5 cups soy milk (regular milk will do, if you’re not plant-based – NMR)

¾ cups pumpkin purée

½ cup rapeseed oil

2 tbsp apple cider vinegar

1. Put the milk in a bowl and add the vinegar. Leave to stand for 15 minutes.

2. Add the oil, pumpkin purée and mix thoroughly.

3. In another bowl combine the flour, soda, baking powder, cinnamon, sugar, nuts, raisins, and finely chopped prunes. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ones and mix quickly and thoroughly with a spoon.

4. Layer a 20 x 30 cm baking tray with parchment paper. Pour in the batter and even the top.

5. Bake the cake for 40-50 minutes in an oven heated to 180 °C (350 °F). Let cool and sprinkle with powdered sugar or cover with melted chocolate.

The drinks

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Mulled wine, photo: photo: Yulia Naumenko/Getty Images

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If you’ve never had Polish cider, a Thanksgiving celebration might just be the right occasion; apples are one of the most important ingredients in our cuisine, and although for years the opportunity to make a delicious alcoholic drink with them was neglected, in recent years cider has been reintroduced to the Polish public. If it’s cold outside, mulled wine – grzaniec – could be the right option. We make it by heating sweetened red wine with the addition of some apples, oranges, cinnamon, and cloves. Some people in Poland prefer mulled beer: they heat it up with some honey and spices such as cinnamon, cardamom and nutmeg and either drink as is or, in a more luxurious version, which makes this drink more of a dessert, they pour it over kogel-mogel: the Polish version of eggnog is a fluffy mix of egg yolk and a couple teaspoons of sugar.

Cranberry nalewka – żurawinówka – might be a good idea to enjoy at the end of the meal, and for those who don’t drink alcohol – a cranberry infusion or mulled apple juice might just be the perfect choice.

Whether you decide to use some of these inspirations during your celebrations this year or not, all of us at Culture.pl wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving!

Written by Natalia Mętrak-Ruda, Nov 2021

Language English

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polish food

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