The Culinary Universe: To Poland From Foreign Lands

5_zjadanie_obcego_mburdzynska_male.jpg, default, Illustration: Magdalena Burdzyńska

Defining 'national dishes is a risky endeavour. Cuisine is constantly changing and developing, and the culinary universe is always in a process of expansion. Products find their way to tables from various parts of the world, become settled into the culture and tamed, and penetrate the existing culinary repertoire. They become ‘ours’. Many dishes regarded as strictly Polish are re-workings of foreign specialties, and products that are seemingly of native origin often turn out to have come to Poland from distant countries.

According to the Polska na Talerzu report published annually by MAKRO, invariably more than half of Poles consider Polish cuisine to be their favourite type of food, and indicate pork chops with potatoes and cabbage as their preferred meal. This isn’t traditional Polish cuisine, but is in fact a legacy of the Polish People’s Republic, when Poles had to rely on cabbage and pork and other food items, such as asparagus and goose meat, were scorned as a bourgeois invention spoiling the morale of the working man and exported to Germany.

Is the piece of meat in which Wiesław Golas rubbed his face as the narrator of Wojciech Młynarski’s song W Polskę idziemy (Into Poland We Go) (‘Then we’ll dream a colourful dream, a painted dream, with my face nestled in a breaded pork chop’) really a Polish dish?

Like an immigrant with an immigrant

Thumbnail — Thi Thu Giang Nguyen from Little Hanoi, Katowice, photo: Kamila Kotusz / AG

In Poland, the pork chop is a poor man’s version of Viennese veal schnitzel, which in turn was a variation on a Milanese dish, namely la cotoletta alla milanese, meat fried in clarified butter. The capital of Lombardy has preserved a list of dishes served in the year 1134 for the Sant’ Ambrogio men’s choir, which includes the item Lumbolos cum Panitio, which can be translated as ‘small cutlets with breadcrumbs’. There are theories that the Italians adopted this way of preparing meat from the Spaniards, and the latter from the Moors living on the Iberian Peninsula. The act of frying meat is said to have originated in Byzantium, which, of course, only confirms the fact that man, as a gluttonous species, has always adopted ways of spicing up his diet from his more innovative brethren.

The potato, in turn, came to Poland thanks to King John III Sobieski (he is said to have sent Marysieńka a sack of potatoes during the Battle of Vienna), and the tubers were planted near the royal palace by gardener Paweł Wienczarek. The latter’s son-in-law, Jan Łuba, grew potatoes in Nowolipki during the reign of King Augustus the Strong, and the crop began to take off on a large scale. Around 1820, when Mickiewicz was writing his poem Potato ('I, simple bard, weave humble garlands for you: a worshipper of agriculture, cultivator of the earth'), potatoes were already widespread throughout the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the harvest in the Kingdom of Poland alone exceeded 80,000 tons. The potato’s popularity also grew because it could be used to make vodka.

Cabbage is also an immigrant, albeit a centuries-old one. Today it occupies the first place in the cultivation of vegetables in Poland (about 30% of the area occupied by vegetable crops). It appeared in Poland as early as the 14th century thanks to German cuisine – cabbage was brought by monks. The first mention of its cultivation was in the 15th century, and more detailed descriptions appeared two centuries later.

Poland was once very ethnically and culturally diverse, and this changed only during the communist era. Until World War II, Jews, Tatars, Mennonites, Eastern Orthodox Christians and other ethnic and religious minorities lived here. People brought their culture and customs with them to Poland. Furthermore, the cuisines of neighbouring countries always exert a great influence on each other. In Poland, the influence of Lithuanian, Hungarian, German, Ukrainian and even Turkish cuisine is evident, as we bordered Turkey for many years – the border between the Polish Republic (the Crown) and the Ottoman Empire and its fiefdoms (Transylvania, Moldavia and the Crimean Khanate) existed from 1478–1792.

Our daily kebab

More than two million Ukrainians now live in Poland. The Vietnamese community numbers around 60,000. Belarusians, Georgians, Indians and Nepalese also live here. People from Afghanistan, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Qatar, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates come to Poland and receive residence permits. Each of them contributes something to our culinary landscape. Falafel, pho, puri, pelmeni. Domesticated, adapted to our palate, accessible. Added to this is the global market – in the corner vegetable shop we can find Spanish olives, rice paper, wine from Australia, avocados, yams and kumquats. Cuisine in Poland is constantly changing; the dream of a culinary canon is an attempt to capture something that is fluid, changing, dynamic. Our illusion that we have some ‘purely Polish’ dishes or products nurtures a sense of identity built on myths and bronze monuments. Cuisine is a journey, an exchange, an experiment.

Pepper and other spices came to us from Arab countries, as well as kebab – meat wrapped in a thin, wheat flatbread, which is available on every street corner. Kebabistan by Krystian Nowak is a contemporary story about this exotic dish that has conquered Europe, adapting to local tastes and preferences. It is a story that unfolds within a social, economic and human context. Nowak’s book shows that after 30 years of the presence of kebabs in Poland, we don’t intend to give it back. The Jews, in turn, left us sweet carp with raisins, challah, matzah, paskha. Poles don’t associate these foods with religion or Jewish holidays; we’ve absorbed them as our own. Challah eaten with jam for breakfast on Monday is no longer ritual food, but ordinary bread.

The road to claiming a product as one’s own can be straight or winding, and always involves social change and the history of a nation, but also the stories of people, families, personal fortunes and what kind of wanderer just happened to be welcomed at someone’s table and what he took out of his traveling bag to treat the hosts. A flavour in the mouth is always an invitation to an unknown culture. Recognizing it as one’s own is the warmest way to welcome a stranger.

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

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