Justyna Laskowska-Otwinowska: You Are What You Cook [INTERVIEW]

3_rosol_mburdzynska.jpg, default, Illustration: Magdalena Burdzyńska

Where did ‘traditional shortbread cookies’ in Łapsze and tomato soup in the Spisz region come from? Monika Kucia talks to Dr Justyna Laskowska-Otwinowska, an ethnographer, researcher and certified curator at the Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw, about the changes in rural culinary culture after World War II.

Monika Kucia: We are convinced that eating in rural areas is different than eating in cities. One might imagine, for example, potatoes topped with bacon eaten by the entire family from one bowl, although that has nothing to do with reality. What exactly is the subject of your research?

Justyna Laskowska-Otwinowska: The Mapa Pasji Foundation was conducting research in 2018 on highlander culture. I undertook a study of food in the Spisz and Pieniny regions, focusing on the historical change in what people ate in rural areas after World War II, as this had interested me previously. The book Góralszczyzna mniej znana (Less Well-Known Highlander Culture) was published in 2019, and it summarized this work. The results of earlier ethnographic research mainly concerned traditional food, which has been the most attractive since the 19th century. But I haven’t encountered any research on the change that led to the completely different eating habits in rural areas today.

MK: What influenced this change?

JL-O: During the communist era, directives were introduced for training on proper nutrition in rural women’s associations. There were regulations in all Eastern Bloc countries, especially in the Soviet Union, on how to eat and what proper nutrition meant. The propaganda was intended to free women from cooking so that they could go to work. What would be best for the state would be if everyone ate according to the same pattern, and restaurants even received ready-made menus.

MK: How could the state influence the diet and the popularity of specific products?

JL-O: In Łapsze, in the Spisz region, there’s a manufacturer of ‘traditional shortbread cookies’. Out of the blue. Traditionally, yeast dough was made by housewives there, but since the state recommended opening café clubs in villages, the idea of shortbread cookies to go with it emerged. This was intended to encourage peasants to stop drinking vodka and instead go to café clubs to drink coffee and eat shortbread cookies – that’s how civilization and modernity were understood.

MK: Were there any attempts to standardize diets across the Eastern Bloc?

JL-O: There was certainly a tendency for the state to control the plate of every citizen. In the USSR, dishes from various republics were supposed to be available in other republics. Central control also extended to the cuisine of the ordinary citizen.

MK: But there’s also such a thing as organic migration of dishes, sudden, uncontrolled culinary revelations.

JL-O: One such revelation was tomato soup in the Spisz region. After all, there were no tomatoes there, but summer camps appeared there at some point along with hired cooks, who came there to work. There was a Dom Pracy Twórczej [House of Creative Work] at Niedzica Castle, and the local chef began introducing new dishes. He was helped by local women, and what emerged and shone like a star was tomato soup. A highlander’s cuisine previously had only Sunday chicken soup; later, locals would joke that two transfigurations occurred on Sundays: one was the transfiguration of the Lord, and the other was the transformation of chicken soup into tomato soup – tomato soup made from concentrate, of course.

MK: What other dishes have enjoyed similar success?

JL-O: I was organizing the Festiwal Żółtych Kalendarzy [Żółte Kalendarze (Yellow Calendars) Festival] in Bochnia County and researching the local cuisine. Silesian dumplings [kluski śląskie; a type of potato dumpling, trans.] were an assimilated dish there. Many people traveled to Silesia to work. Coal is one thing, but word of Silesian dumplings spread far beyond Silesia. During my research in 2020, I found a similar story about them in the Kurpie region [a region in north-central Poland, ed.]!

MK: The most significant factors in the change you’re describing were economic.

JL-O: Yes, this is repeated everywhere. In Podhale, buses ran four times a day transporting people for shift work at the Podhale leather-goods factory – they themselves say that it was then that people began to interact with another culture – namely, with the factory’s workers from different parts of the country. It’s well known that women told each other what they were cooking. People also traveled ‘to earn a living’. In Kurpie, right after the war, women were making things such as kilims for Cepelia or curtains, and they started selling them themselves by travelling to Greater Poland, for example, where the wealthy people lived. You had to stay overnight somewhere, so you would see what people were cooking and eating; it was inspiring.

MK: And back home, what could have caused the change?

JL-O: In Bochnia, the change was triggered by the beginning of contracts for Tymbark [Polish producer of juices, trans.]. Currants were requested and began to be grown locally on a large scale. At the same time, housewives began making currant jelly at home, which is now a part of traditional cuisine. Elsewhere, someone suddenly started a carp farm and needed to sell the fish, so they started smoking them, and smoked carp became a permanent part of the local culinary repertoire. The wedding cook was also an invaluable source of innovation. She was an important person who could cook cheaply, in large quantities and well; she had to be a culinary authority. She was constantly trying to find something new and different. She was appreciated, photographed, fawned over; and she would appear in ritual songs (for example, they’d jokingly sing to her: ‘We’re bringing you a lean and lame chicken’). Another factor were ‘mixed’ marriages, meaning between people from different regions. At home, of course, the mother-in-law cooked, but every young wife’s ambition was to introduce her own food – this was the quintessence of herstory.

MK: Circles of Rural Housewives [Koła Gospodyń Wiejskich] are also an incredible source of innovation, sometimes surprising ones.

JL-O: In Niegowić, where John Paul II’s first parish is located, members of the circle invented Niegowić tea: strawberry puree (strawberries must be from the garden, not purchased), dried mint from the garden and lime or lemon. The infusion was invented by the women of the Circle of Rural Housewives because they wanted to win a competition, and the tea later became famous. Ambition can be a source of change.

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MK: Shops were surely a significant factor in change in the post-war era.

JL-O: In Kurpie, only rye and potatoes were grown, and suddenly white wheat bread was available in the shops, so sandwiches appeared, including the beloved mortadella and canned luncheon meat. Traditional Kurpie cuisine was terribly poor; potatoes were baked in ashes, washed down with ‘onion water’ to which vinegar was added for flavour. I was told that dinner would sometimes include ‘broth from a lopsided hen’, which was hot water with a spoonful of lard and salt. Sometimes other factors imposed changes. Fafernuchy of the Kurpie region, so called ‘tooth-crackers’ – that is, pepper cakes made of rye flour and carrots – are not a suitable dish for tourists; to please them, you have to change your customs.

MK: There are culinary cultures that don’t want to please anyone.

JL-O: In Urzecze, weddings are the same as they’ve always been; nothing changes. Pork chops with cabbage have always been served. The town of Karczew is an old butchers’ centre; the film Zakazane piosenki [Forbidden Songs] features a woman with meat from Karczew. Farmers from there have been supplying Warsaw with meat since the interwar period.

MK: Did you buy meat from ‘some woman’ in the Polish People’s Republic?

JL-O: My daughter was born in 1981, on 8 December, just before martial law. The family gathered then to buy a whole pig and divide it up. My father was a doctor, and we lived with my parents. One evening, my husband was cutting up a pig quarter on the table for Christmas. I was cooking cloth diapers on the stove using bad laundry detergent because there was no other, and on top of that, cabbage for Christmas was cooking on the stove – and then there was the pig on the kitchen table. My father, who had experienced the war, returned from his shift and said, ‘Oh, this stinks of poverty’. Soapsuds, cabbage and raw meat – that was the smell of poverty for him.

MK: And yet, meat was a scarce commodity in the Polish People’s Republic.

JL-O: Not necessarily. Farm workers in the Urzecze region had ration cards and their own pigs, so a cut of meat in horseradish sauce appeared almost daily. People tell me they had the most meat when ration cards were available. They also made money selling pork, of course.

MK: In food anthropology, the journey of a product and the migration of recipes is expressed in changes in the diet of a specific social group, as well as individuals. However, each of us cooks differently. Have there also been changes in ceremonial cuisine?

JL-O: Here the changes have probably been least significant. The greatest innovations have to do with spices. Housewives grow marjoram and lovage but also oregano, lemon balm and other herbs and buy a variety of spices. Formal dinners, such as Christmas Eve, are traditional though; sushi won’t suddenly appear on the table. But desserts, for example, are evolving. In the Kurpie region in the 1970s, kisielaki and budyniaki, i.e. cakes made with gelatine or instant pudding powder, appeared along with village shops, because the ambition was for the cake to be pink. The changing nature of cuisine is a story told from a woman’s perspective, of course, in the context of the community: raising one’s status, enhancing the meal’s appeal, pleasing one’s husband – cooking ‘on your own’ is an initiatory moment. After all, you become a different person depending on what you cook.

Translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar

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