Did Mickiewicz Eat Potatoes? The Favourite Foods of Famous Poles

Uczestnicy przyjęcia wydanego przez reżysera Ryszarda Ordyńskiego. Widoczni od lewej: aktorka Mira Zimińska, poeta Jan Lechoń, Henryk Stebelski, śpiewaczka pochodzenia polskiego Hanna Mac Cormick-Walska, Halina Szmolc-Fietelberg, literat T…, default, Did Mickiewicz Eat Potatoes? The Favourite Foods of Famous Poles, Participants of the party organized by the director Ryszard Ordyński. Visible from the left: actress Mira Zimińska, poet Jan Lechoń, Henryk Stebelski,, center, #000000

#polish cuisine

What was Adam Mickiewicz’s favourite meal? What did Czesław Miłosz reach for when he wanted a snack? Knowing the culinary preferences of famous authors, artists, and politicians gives us a fuller picture of the individual and help us get to know them. When we discover what a person liked to eat and drink, we come to know them more personally.

Crumbs & grunts

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Kremówka, photo: Roman Andrasik / Fotonova / East News

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‘I approached the lettuce with the solemnity of a high priest; I mixed up the yolk with the enthusiasm of a craftsman’ wrote the 19th-century poet and playwright Zygmunt Krasiński to Delfina Potocka, the ‘muse of Polish Romanticism’. From the memoirs of Adam Turno, whose Diary can still be found in the Ossolineum Collection and which provides a bottomless source about the daily life of the landed gentry in the first half of the 19^th century, we learn that one of our greatest Romantic poets, Adam Mickiewicz, loved czernina, a soup made with duck’s blood and dried prunes. He also ate potatoes, which in the 19^th century were just beginning to gain popularity.

Looking at the menus of famous figures can lend a certain cachet to dishes. The ‘pope’s cream cakes’ that Pope John Paul II used to eat in his school days and the suchary (hardtack biscuits) preferred by Marshal Józef Piłsudski both became quite popular. In both cases, the simple cakes or cookies were granted extraordinary significance by the association with their well-known fans. A biscuit with sweetened tea – like Proust’s madeleine – can become a microcosm and point of departure towards dreams of power. Perhaps there is some expectation or secret desire that the characteristics of the gentleman onto whose moustache the biscuit crumbs fell might somehow be passed on to us, nourishing us with more than mere carbohydrates.

Unlike the Pope’s cream cakes or the Marshal’s biscuits that are now fixed in our memories, another item has become more obscure over time, arkas, an old Polish dairy dessert and one of King Jan III Sobieski’s favourite treats. Gloger gives a recipe:

Six eggs, both yolks and whites, beaten forcefully and poured into a quart of sweet milk which is boiled into white cheese, the whey is then separated with a strainer. The cheese is then pressed and placed on a sieve with a platter for drainage and cooling. The cheese is then sliced into strips and topped with unwhipped sour cream with sugar and cinnamon mixed in.

^{Trans. YR}

A body, a vodka, & a suicide

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Czesław Miłosz's 90th birthday, Institute of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, 2001, photo: Elżbieta Lempp

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Some recollections of favourite foods are moving or touching, such as the story Jerzy Illg tells of Czesław Miłosz:

Bustling around with my back to the guests, I suddenly heard behind me Miłosz saying ‘happiness is at hand’! I thought to myself, ‘God, how wonderful it is to be able to say something like that when you’re almost 90 years old. […] I turned around and I was left speechless: Czesław said those words while looking with adoring eyes at a chilled glass of vodka and herring in cream sauce, specially prepared for him by Joanna [Jerzy Illg’s wife]. A moment later, he swallowed it, purring like a Samogitian bear, not even noticing that bits of onion were falling onto his trousers.

_{‘My Sign: About Nobel Laureates, Cabarets, Friendships, Books, and Women’ by Jerzy Illg, trans. YR}

A poem of Miłosz’s, far more disciplined in its vocabulary and more profound, closely resembles the behaviour mentioned above (one can even hear the purring). It reads:

Lord God, I liked strawberry jam /And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body / As well as chilled vodka and herring in oil.

^{Trans. YR}

The poet, director, and journalist Agnieszka Osiecka was also the subject of culinary recollections in Karolina Feldberg-Sendecka’s book, Colleague: Memories of Agnieszka Osiecka. Feldberg-Sendecka recalls a moving anecdote:

Young Agnieszka had determined to commit suicide. Then she heard that her mother was calling her in for soup. She decided to ask what kind of soup. It turned out to be tomato. That was her favourite food, so she decided to go in and eat it rather than doing herself in.

^{Trans. YR}

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Agnieszka Osiecka, Budapest, 1966, photo: Lucjan Fogiel / Forum

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Many years ago, Onet organised what was at the time a pioneering online meeting direct from Maisons-Laffitte, the seat of the Paris journal Kultura. In this experiment, people could pose questions through the Internet to the leading lights of the Polish humanities. Online commenter ‘Anna26’ went straight for the writer and Kultura editor Jerzy Giedroyć:

You impressed me. I thought you were just an old bastard, half senile. But you’ve shown totally sharp thinking. What do you eat to keep your mind so clear?

Several answers to that question were given:

Henryk Giedroyć: ‘Everything he shouldn’t’.
Jerzy Giedroyć: ‘I entirely agree with him: I eat everything I shouldn’t’.
Zofia Hertz: ‘He likes to eat everything that he’s not permitted’.
Jerzy Giedroyć: ‘I like Lithuanian-Russian cuisine; a rather heavy cuisine, but to my mind the best, with kołduny (dumplings) best of all’,

Picturing the artist with dumpling grease dripping down his chin makes him seem more human, more relatable, more real, less iconic, if he had seemed to be such. Maybe this is where our fascination with the diets of famous people comes from.

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Maja Berezowska, 'At the table in Ziemiańska', from the left: Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Julian Tuwim, Kazimierz Wierzyński and Jan Lechoń

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A favourite food of Chopin, both in his youth and in his Paris years, was hot chocolate (‘My chocolate comes from Bordeaux, where they make it intentionally without any flavouring in a private home’ – 1847). The composer’s taste developed particularly in the French capital which at the time was the world’s capital of gastronomy. According to testimony from some of Chopin’s friends, he was a regular in the most fashionable eateries, such as the Tortoni Café, the restaurant Le Grand Véfour, and Au Rocher de Cancale, known for its seafood menu. Dr Wojciech Bońkowski, a musicologist and wine critic, informs us that at Au Rocher de Cancale, Chopin dined with gusto on a feast of oysters, venison cream, asparagus, and fish in red wine, all topped off with a bottle of Champagne. From this description, we can understand what a sumptuous and elegant lifestyle the composer lived.

Along similar lines, Juliusz Słowacki wrote to his mother from London in August 1831:

I have a lovely room, an English breakfast in the morning, a beautifully served second breakfast at 1:00 PM, at 6:00 a sumptuous lunch – I buy the wine separately… After lunch, we men drink until 8:00, but we drink modestly, never more than half a bottle…

_{Trans. YR}

The elegance of a table by our criteria comes from an air of general refinement, an appreciation for art, beauty, literature. Our diet places us on a particular rung of the social ladder, a place on the map that is read ‘between the servings’. Władysław Jagiełło failed under these criteria. He liked to eat ‘low’ – primitively – he opted for kiszka, intestine stuffed with various ingredients: blood, fat, lesser cuts of meat, groats, and vegetables. The chronicler Jan Długosz wrote in 1412 that the king spiked a fever ‘when he gluttonously ate a freshly prepared buffalo heart having gone, just prior to consuming such a heavy meal, to the bathhouse’. To Długosz, Jagiełło was just a savage pagan.

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Witold Gombrowicz in a restaurant, 1960, photo: Giovannetti Gio / Olycom / Forum

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After coffee, by and large I go home and I still manage to scratch something onto paper or I set myself to writing correspondence on my Remington. I also see to various phone calls at that time. When my clock shows 8:00, I go into town for dinner and, if I haven’t been invited somewhere, I eat most often at the Sorrento Restaurant on the main street, Corrientes. Yesterday, for instance, I ate:

Majillones (a type of shellfish)
Pavesa (a soup, probably Basque, with bread and an egg)
Lomo (loin) con puree
A fruit salad in wine
Wine or beer.

_{Trans. YR}

Modest, but tasty

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Gołąbki, photo: Tasty Colours

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Lavish descriptions of menus attesting to the richness of Polish noble cuisine, but also to the good nutrition of the writer, can be found in the accounts of Kazimiera Zapałowa, the honorary curator of author Stefan Żeromski’s estate:

Text

From tales told by Anna and Monika Żeromska, from the ‘Diaries’, from letters and writings of the author, one can recreate a quite rich menu – for holidays and weekdays – in which there figure borschts, bouillons, cabbage soups, fruit soups, rabbits in cream sauce, wild boar saddles in hawthorn sauce, stuffed chicken, roasted lamb, beef steaks fried in butter, sausage in a thick grey sauce with richly salted potatoes, grilled veal, patés, fried and jellied fish, salads, vegetables, compotes – after which, as Żeromski wrote in ‘The Beauty of Life’, ’one’s heart melts and one’s thoughts turn to optimism’ - ‘modest, but tasty’roasted potatoes, dumplings with cheese or blueberries, potato pancakes with blueberries, cabbage rolls with groats and mushrooms, Christmas Eve cabbage with peas in oil, Easter mazurkas, muslin and saffron cakes, poppy seed cake, cakes with plums, wild strawberries with cream, cherry preserves, wine, fruit liqueurs, tea from the samovar, and café au lait.

Author

Trans. YR

Food appears in historical sources not only as a tradition or pleasure, but also as an aspect of health or evidence of a worldview. Writer Maria Dąbrowska wrote in a letter to the politician Stanisław Stempowski in October 1949:

Text

The two of us are keeping very scrupulously to our weight-loss diet. As for me, I found that after giving up baked goods my indigestion completely disappeared and my ‘tummy’ started returning to its normal, concave shape. That’s why I recommend to you, too, to at least reduce (despite Frania’s objections) your intake of baked goods and to switch for awhile to more meat. If you can’t get anything else, eat poultry and fish, spinach, vegetables, eggs, homemade cheese, and fruit. As a last resort, buy our canned meats – you can get them in any store and even in our cooperative, but unfortunately Frania’s not bright enough to look out for these things.

Author

Trans. YR

You write about pancakes?!

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Image from 'Fresh from Poland: New Vegetarian Cooking from the Old Country' © Michał Korkosz, 2020, reprinted by permission from the publisher, The Experiment

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The radical provocateur and experimenter Stanisław ‘Witkacy’ Witkiewicz tried to adopt a policy of avoiding harm to any living things, not only swearing off meat, but also vowing not to wear leather products. By not eating meat for a period of time, he had in mind both the welfare of animals and – perhaps chiefly – his own health. At the same time, meat was a dominant theme in his writing. Jan Karol Maciej Wśieklica, the protagonist of the play bearing his name, says of himself that he is ‘a head cheese stuffed with all the garbage of the world’.

Writing about food as such was considered an inferior category of literature. Eliza Orzeszkowa, the author of, among others, the tale On the Niemen River, wrote to Lucyna Ćwierczakiewiczowa, who sold cookbooks more popular than the works of Sienkiewicz, to ask: ‘You write about pancakes?!’ Ćwierczakiewiczowa is said to have replied: ‘Yes, I do. And you write crêpes’.Stefan Żeromski wrote in Seedtime: ‘It’s always easier to deal with a man when he’s eaten, especially tasty things which he wouldn’t just find in any city’. This is as true of outstanding creative figures as it is of common people.

And to close this text about the favourite foods of famous Poles, I will write (‘with the solemnity of a priest’) that the favourite food of Mr. Kleks, the protagonist of Jan Brzechwa’s book, was a nasturtium flower dipped in green paint, then in blue paint, and finally in silver paint. Do you want to be a poet or a magician? Eat nasturtium flowers and herring.

_{Originally written in Polish, translated by YR, Nov 2021}

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