In Podlasie, Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Jewish, and Tatar influences combined in a melting pot of culinary goodness. Some of its specialities include: kartacze or cepeliny (big potato dumplings filled with meat, which are also one of Lithuania’s national dishes), pierekaczewnik (a meat pie typical of Tatar cuisine), soczewiaki (another potato dumpling, this time filled with lentils), and sękacz (a spit cake from the Suwałki region, similar to the German Baumkuchen). Yet nothing says Podlasie like babka ziemniaczana.
A peasant dish par excellence
Babka ziemniaczana – which also functions under the named kartoflak, bugaj, rejbak or kugiel – probably came to these lands from the East. It is one of the most important dishes of Belarusian cuisine, where, quite similarly to Poland, potatoes have been a staple of their daily menu since the early 19th century. In many dishes, such as dumplings and pancakes, they actually ended up replacing grains – and hence the name, which references babka: the sweet yeast cake, known in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since the 17th century. It is also related to the kugel of Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine – a casserole, which can be made with different ingredients bound together with egg, potatoes being one of them.
Babka and Kiszka Ziemniaczana Baking Championship, Supraśl, 2018, photo: Anatol Chomicz / ForumIt was always a staple of the humble peasant diet. In the simplest of versions, its only ingredients are potatoes, onions, and a bit of flour and eggs, which could then be richened by pork jowl or bacon when meat was available (usually during the holiday season, after pig-sticking). That’s also when a similar dish called kiszka ziemniaczana (somewhat unappetisingly named ‘potato gut’) was prepared. Instead of being baked in a large tin, the same onion-potato-and-pork mixture was put inside a pork intestine to make a sausage of sorts. Maria Łukaszewicz, the owner of the Łukaszówka restaurant in Supraśl – a town so fond of this delicacy, that it organises an annual Babka and Kiszka Ziemniaczana Baking Championship, which Maria is a winner of – recalls:
From what my mother told me, the frequent baking of babka and kiszka was due to poverty. A meat-free babka was usually made on Friday and then reheated during the week. We often served it with lardons or made gugiel – a type of babka with buckwheat and pig’s blood.