Taste, Touch, Tradition: Sensuous Journeys Through Poland's Culinary Heart

rogal-swietomarcinski-fot-tomasz_kaminski_ag_12042014-kt049.jpg, default, St Martin crescent roll, photo: Tomasz Kamiński / Gazeta Agency

#polish cuisine

To touch, to taste or perhaps to make it yourself? All that is possible in Poland’s culinary museums, whose number continues to grow. Festivals of taste offer plenty of opportunities to participate in culinary workshops, and among its wide range of attractions, agri-tourism offers classes on how you yourself can prepare traditional food products.

Poppyseed crescent roll

The Crescent Roll Museum of Poznań (Rogalowe Muzeum Poznania) is a lively hub of the city’s traditions and culture. It’s located in a 500-year-old historic tenement house with a still-preserved original wooden ceiling adorned with polychromes, paintings and arches. The windows of the beautiful chamber overlook the town hall tower with its famous mechanical goats. The museum has been amazingly well conceived, so that visitors find themselves fully engrossed from the moment they step through the doorway. From the very beginning, the tour guides play the role of bakers who, speaking the Poznań dialect, take patrons on a riveting journey through the history of Poland and the city, followed by an introduction to the process of baking traditional Poznań crescent rolls and crowned with a tasting of the pastries.

The St Martin crescent roll is the common name of a sweet crescent-shaped roll baked for over 150 years in Poznań and a few other counties in the Greater Poland region. The filling consists of white poppyseed, sugar, crumbs, egg pulp, margarine, raisins, nuts, fruit in syrup or candied cherries or pears, as well as orange zest and almond extract. The rolls are made of rough puff pastry. The layers, visible after slicing through the crescent roll, are formed through a special kind of meticulous rolling. It is this unique, ‘flaky’ pastry, the filling made of white poppyseeds, an ingredient very rarely used in the confectionary trade, and the addition of almond extract that make St Martin crescent rolls such an extraordinary product.

Baking St Martin crescent rolls, photo: Marek Lapis / Forum

The pastry’s name originates from the custom of baking and enjoying these crescent rolls on St Martin’s Day (11 November). They are now available to purchase year-round in certified Poznań patisseries. However, their production and consumption are still at their most intense on and around the November holiday of Martinmas, when around one million crescent rolls are consumed.

In the Crescent Roll Museum, these sweet goodies are manufactured throughout the year in front of patrons. Workshop participants can volunteer and be invited to participate actively in the individual stages of the process. The story told by the tour guides combines history, politics, economics, culture and the specific nature of the local dialect, and it’s owing to the multidimensionality of the presentation that visitors can better understand how a culinary product becomes a symbol and how its flavour connects people to the city.

Signposts of taste

Culinary trails serve an important role in the promotion of Polish culinary tourism and attract a lot of interest among travellers. They include the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Culinary Goose Trail, offering smoked goose breast (wędzony półgęsek); the Mazovian Nobleman’s Food Platter, enticing us with szlachcice (noblemen), i.e. pierogi (dumplings) with potato filling; Flavours of Podhale, introducing us to the flavourful world of kwaśnica (very sour sauerkraut soup); the Oscypek Trail, on which we can meet real bacowie (senior highlander shepherds in the Polish Tatra Mountains; oscypek is a salted and smoked sheep milk cheese, ed.); the Plum Trail, where we can let ourselves be enveloped by the scent of smoked plums; the ‘Niech Cię Zakole’ Trail (lit. ‘may it bend you’, referring to the sharp bend in the lower Vistula River between the town of Solec Kujawski and the Fordon district of Bydgoszcz, ed.), with its merino lamb products; and the Flavours of Podkarpacie, with forest honey and a range of other specialties. Restaurants offering regional dishes await us on each trail, as well as culinary craftspeople – growers who make their products by hand.

Similar to the Crescent Roll Museum of Poznań, other Living Museums are popular tourist attractions, making it possible for us to get to know the history of a product, the connection between food and tradition and the nature of human labour behind each specialty. Notable among these museums are, for instance, the Museum of Bread in Radzionków; the Gingerbread Museum in Toruń, located in Europe’s oldest gingerbread factory, which was previously owned by the Weese family; and the Living Museum of the Obwarzanek (a kind of pretzel, ed.) in the Kleparz district of Kraków.

Each of these places offers the opportunity for us to dip our hands into flour or spices, to knead dough, to shape it and to wait for it to finish baking while listening to a guide discuss the history of the process, often dating back to the Middle Ages.

Liquor enthusiasts can visit Polish breweries in Żywiec, Poznań and Tychy, as well as the Perła Brewery Underground in Lublin, where both the history of the city and the process of brewing beer are presented in a minimalist set-up. Visitors to Warsaw can enjoy the Vodka Museum, which boasts a collection of several thousand items related to the distillery industry in Poland, to the design of bottles and containers and to the history of Poland’s most popular alcoholic beverage. The items that are displayed were assembled by two collectors: Adam Łukawski and Piotr Popiński, friends and fellow enthusiasts.

Oscypki, photo: Łukasz Dejnarowicz / Forum

Culinary festivals and events also enjoy unflagging popularity, providing the opportunity to taste top-notch traditional and regional specialties. The most important culinary event in northern Poland is the Festival of Flavour in Gruczno, promoting the traditional cuisine of the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship. Equally notable is the National Festival of Good Taste in Poznań, one of the largest open-air food festivals in Poland. There we can find local and traditional products from all the regions of Poland, from bryndza, a soft, creamy sheep milk cheese originating in Podhale to Kashubian fish and Masurian sheep milk cheeses. The event always takes place on a weekend close to 15 August, the Feast of Our Lady of the Greens (folk name for the Feast of the Assumption, ed.), and it’s a must-attend for all foodies.

Visitors to the Latosowo Agrotourism Farm in Mazovia are welcomed by cats nuzzling against them and goats grazing on the grass. An exciting attraction awaiting them are workshops on making sękacz (spit cake) over an open fire that is run by Ewa Mitowska, a folk artist specialising in ritual and decorative arts as well as regional culinary products. The most exciting attraction of the sękacz are the sęki (tree knots), which are shaped by roasting the dough over an open fire on a rotating skewer in the shape of an elongated cone.

Museum of Polish Vodka in Praga-North district of Warsaw, photo: Adam Burakowski / East News

During the workshops, participants are able not only to rotate the skewer and make sure the dough doesn’t get scorched but also to learn that the addition of a glass of vodka prevents the dough –which requires as many as 40 eggs to make! – from drying out.

Memories in a bottle

Multiple vineyard regions have emerged along with the development of Polish winemaking: the Sandomierz region; the Vistula River Gorge of Lesser Poland; the Lesser Poland Region along with the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland; Lower Silesia, which boasts the best condition for grapevine cultivation; and the Gorzów Wielkopolski region in the direction of Western Pomerania. They are famous for, among other things, their eco-tourism. Mierzęcin Palace, Turnau Vineyard and Kojder Vineyard are now widely recognised brand names. Many vineyards provide the opportunity to visit, taste the wines and attend workshops. Some even offer accommodation for eco-tourists.

Wine tourism in Lubusz Voivodeship, Zielona Góra, photo: Władysław Czuła / Gazeta Agency

Food-oriented travel enables us to savour the personal experience of a whole spectrum of encounters with a product: from the raw fruit of the earth through the manufacturer to the flavour in the natural conditions of its production. What proves memorable is the experience, the sensation, the meeting with the people behind the process. Memories return later as we open the bottle or unwrap the box containing a locally purchased specialty. Culinary journeys are a sensuous experience, engrossing also on an emotional and intellectual level. It is the best way to explore the world.

Written in Polish by Monika Kucia, 9 December 2020, last updated 30 June 2023

Translated by Anna Potoczny

Language English