The Evolution of Polish Taste: An Interview With Michał Korkosz
We cook differently today than our mothers and grandmothers did. We live in different circumstances and have different opportunities. In my opinion, contemporary Polish cooking is faster, healthier and lighter, with full Polish flavour but reinterpreted, enhanced with ingredients that are now easily available but 30 years ago were considered exotic, says Michał Korkosz, author of the 'Rozkoszny' (Delightful) blog.
Karolina Rychter: Your new book is a story about contemporary Polish cooking. Why do you prefer the term ‘Polish cooking’ to ‘Polish cuisine’?
Michał Korkosz: Food culture, like language, is not something unchangeable but evolves over the years. I didn’t want to use the term ‘Polish cuisine’ in the book because I find it too formal and limiting. The term ‘contemporary Polish cooking’ is much more vivid, flexible and indicative of what we’re cooking and eating right now. In my first book, which I wrote with an American audience in mind, I focused on collective memories, nostalgia and a bit of a reinterpretation of recipes from my grandmother’s notebook. It presented modernised versions of dishes that for me and for many Poles are an integral part of tradition. However, it did not accurately reflect modern times, the way my friends or I cook every day.
During my studies, I had originally planned to write a thesis on recipe books as vehicles of national, ethnic and local identity. It turned out that this issue had already been covered at length and in depth, so I eventually defended my thesis at the University of Warsaw on this charming topic: Powiedz Mi, Co Jesz, a Powiem Ci, na Kogo Głosujesz: Wzory Żywienia Jako Element Odtwarzania Podziałów Politycznych Wśród Posłów i Posłanek (Tell Me What You Eat, and I Will Tell You For Whom You Vote: Dietary Patterns as an Element in Reproducing Political Divisions Among Members of Parliament). However, while exploring this first topic and reading the publications of many great researchers, I realised that cookbooks that are published now will be the future research material for historians and sociologists. They will be able to find out, for example, what Polish cuisine looked like in the 2020s. So, I decided that since the first book was a bit of a trip into the past, the second one should show what I think contemporary Polish cooking looks like. As I said, I didn’t want to use the term ‘Polish cuisine’ because it seemed a bit too bold and daring; I preferred to be more conservative. I realise that my vision of Polishness and contemporary Polish cuisine is just a certain slice of what’s happening in our country foodwise. It probably also reflects more the experience of people in big cities. In the book, I talk about the fact that, in my opinion, Polish cooking over the past 30 years has become permeated with influences and inspirations from the world. Globalisation and mass migration have indeed greatly impacted how we eat.
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‘Nowe Rozkoszne: Polskie Przepisy, Które Ekscytują’, photo: Buchmann
KR: The subtitle of the English edition reads ‘Modern Vegetarian Cooking from Global Poland.’
MK: Yes, I’m referring to the fact that Poland is now part of the global village. Poles travel, and they bring various culinary inspirations from their travels. Even if you go to a hypermarket nowadays, a simple one, nothing sophisticated, you can buy soy sauces, tahini pastes and various other ingredients that were once considered exotic. Now we don’t treat them that way anymore, because you can buy them both in the big city and in the countryside. That’s why I’ve started to think that this is an important part of our modern Polish cooking. I also see how the readers of my blog want to cook. I have a really large audience cooking with me every month, so I have an idea of what recipes Polish women and men reach for. Polish cuisine has undergone significant changes in relation to the way our mothers and grandmothers ate and cooked. These changes are and have been constant because it’s worth remembering that although we associate Polish cuisine primarily with a cookbook with that title [Kuchnia Polska] published by PWE (Polskie Wydawnictwo Ekonomiczne [Polish Economic Publishers]) in the People’s Republic of Poland, it looked completely different in the inter-war period. In the 19th or 18th century, it had completely different flavour profiles. It was also fascinating for me to discover how much it used to be permeated with influences from all over the world. In what’s happening now, you can see a kind of return to the roots, a return to this reaching for bold flavours. In the 17th century, the cuisine of Polish magnates had a very strong flavour profile; there was a lot of cinnamon, nutmeg, cumin, lime and lemon. These seasonings are now coming back. Besides, even the traditional Polish apple pie has cinnamon, which doesn’t grow in Poland after all. That emboldened me to use miso paste, soy sauce and similar ingredients in the recipes presented in the book.
KR: However, you also reach for typically Polish ingredients such as curd cheese or rapeseed oil. Do you think that after being enchanted by world cuisines, we’re now more inclined to return to dishes such as pierogi leniwe [dumplings made from potato flour, eggs and curd cheese, trans.] or mushrooms in vinegar? Dishes from which, until recently, we’ve distanced ourselves in order to cook in a modern way?
MK: Yes, you’re right. I know it even from my experience: when I started to develop culinarily, I learned mostly from foreign recipes. I cooked everything, just not Polish dishes. It was probably also because Polish dishes appeared regularly on the table in my home, and I felt the need to discover something new at the time. I’m not sure when the change happened, but when I got a proposal from an American publisher to write my first book, I thought it was a fantastic opportunity and that I had to use it to promote Poland. I was also struck by stereotypes about Polish cuisine, which is seen as very meat heavy. So, I felt a strong urge to show that there are a lot of great vegetarian dishes.
The new book is a bit of a reconciliation of these two things: on the one hand, the desire to explore my own culinary identity and, on the other, the awareness that our Polish cooking no longer looks like it used to. We’re in different circumstances and have different opportunities. In my opinion, contemporary Polish cooking is faster, healthier and lighter – with full Polish flavour but reinterpreted and enhanced with ingredients which have appeared in Poland relatively recently. That’s why in Polish’d, you’ll find recipes for dishes such as pierogi, Silesian potato dumplings or leniwe, but in a new configuration, with surprising sauces. Often, too, traditionally Polish ingredients are juxtaposed with newer ones. For example, yesterday I cooked pasta with caramelised red onions and sun-dried tomatoes sprinkled with parsley rubbed in lemon juice and smoked curd cheese. For me, it tastes as Polish as can be, even though it contains Italian pasta and soy sauce. And that was my goal – to create more than 100 meatless recipes that are not a re-creation of old recipes but a proposal for something new, something exciting. Hence the subtitle of the Polish edition of the book is Polish Recipes That Excite.
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Spring vegetables at a stall in Hala Mirowska, photo: Tomasz Jędrzejowski / Forum
KR: In 2017, your blog won two awards from the magazine ‘Saveur’, which in the culinary world are what the Oscars are in the film world. Then you signed a book contract with an American publisher for ‘Fresh from Poland: New Vegetarian Cooking from the Old Country’, which was subsequently published in a Polish-language version as ‘Rozkoszne: Wegetariańska Uczta z Polskimi Smakami’. The new book also premiered first in English and is now in Polish. At Expo 2020 in Dubai, one of the highlights of the Polish pavilion was your cooking show. Do you feel like an ambassador of Polish cooking?
MK: Ambassador is a bold title; I would be wary of using it. Over the years, however, my mission has certainly become the promotion of Polish cuisine. In reading for my thesis on culinary diplomacy, I learned that food culture is part of the soft power of the state, which is also very important. It seems to me that Poland is still doing too little in this area, whereas food is a very important element of diplomacy. One such example of perfectly executed culinary diplomacy is what South Korea has done over the past ten years. From an absolutely unknown cuisine, it has suddenly hit the big time and is now one of the most popular cuisines in the world.
KR: I’ve heard that it was very well thought out.
MK: Yes, it was decided that the healthy part of what is generally meat-heavy Korean cuisine, such as monastery cuisine, needed to be made visible. This opened the floodgates to interest in their country and was, of course, part of a wider policy because it’s not just Korean cuisine that has become so popular in the past ten years but also K-pop and other elements of Korean culture. In any case, the fact that South Korea’s culinary diplomacy is called kimchi diplomacy is very telling.
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Michał Korkosz, photo: Mati Grzelak
KR: Finally, I wanted to ask you a question that is not very original. If you were to delight a person from abroad with Polish cooking, what would you serve them?
MK: I can easily answer that because it was on the occasion of a promotional tour in the States that we served two dishes from the book for a week at the Pierogi Boys restaurant in New York. Pierogi Boys is a really cool place in Brooklyn run by two Poles who emigrated eight years ago. I decided to serve two dishes from the book: pickle soup with turmeric and hazelnut cream and pierogi with smoked curd cheese, roasted celery and dill oil. These pierogi are very complex in flavour, full of umami. Pickle soup, on the other hand, has a sour flavour characteristic of Polish cuisine. The contribution of pickled vegetables to Polish cuisine is very important, and I think, learning from the success of kimchi, it’s worth highlighting. But pierogi, of course, are still the most famous Polish dish in the world; none of our dishes even comes close to its position. It really is a huge success of our food culture because when people in the States talk about dumplings, the first type of dumpling that comes to my mind is precisely Polish pierogi. Pierogi are also great because they open up a whole range of possibilities: they can have a classic sweet or savoury filling, but we can also opt for something more innovative and modern, as I did this time. A very good dish for promoting our food culture is soup, of which we have a great variety in Polish cuisine. It’s not just pickle soup but also, for example, żurek [sour rye soup], which is a dish that brings people from abroad to their knees. It is, as the Americans say, funky. It’s out of the ordinary. For us, it’s something usual, but, for example, I happened to eat an interpretation of żurek in a fine-dining restaurant in Copenhagen, which the chef there served as something amazing and unique. I could see for myself, after serving my pickle soup and my dumplings in New York, how much of an impression both dishes make on guests.
Michal Korkosz is a culinary artist and the author of viral recipes that the internet has come to love. He started cooking as a kid, fascinated by Nigella Lawson’s achievements. He has been blogging since 2016 and was quickly recognised, winning two Saveur awards for food photography. The awards, which have the status of ‘culinary Oscars’, have become his ticket to an international career. In 2020, his debut recipe book, Fresh From Poland: New Vegetarian Cooking From the Old Country, was published in the USA and Canada by The Experiment and was named one of the best cookbooks of 2020 by Booklist and the San Francisco Chronicle. Its Polish-language version Rozkoszne: Wegetariańska Uczta z Polskimi Smakami became a bestseller right away. He writes about food not only on his blog, however; he regularly collaborates with Vogue Polska and the Przekrój (Cross-Section) quarterly, in which he runs a food column.
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