Polish cuisine maintains close connections with both highbrow culture through literature and art, as well as with more lowbrow customs, such as folk tales and proverbs. Rare and historical cookbooks, produced for the upper classes, showcase refinement and cosmopolitanism; later on, cookbooks printed for the masses provided recipes and ideas for homemakers among the general public.
Trying to make sense of such a rich and varied mosaic is not an easy task. Polish cuisine has been influenced by a variety of cultures that, over the course of history, flourished in the territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – including Jewish, Tatar, and Galician communities.
Historically, the Commonwealth was not isolated from other European kingdoms, and its gentry (szlachta) could elect members of royal families from all over Europe as sovereigns. At different points in time, its cuisine was influenced by Italy, France, and Germany… Along the centuries, new products were integrated into the local diet, from potatoes to beetroot, while some, like mushrooms or buckwheat, have mostly remained the same. Others, such as hogweed (barszcz, from which the homonymous dish may have originated), have almost become historical curiosities.
The Polish culinary landscape still maintains noticeable connections with Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe, and in particular with other Slavic cultures, as the presence of similar dishes in Ukraine and Belarus indicates. This is a statement that has often gotten me into trouble but, just like in the case of Italy, it may make more sense to talk of food in Poland than of Polish food…