The Staples of Polish Easter Cuisine

koszyk_wielkanocny_en.jpg, default, The blessing of the Easter basket, photo: Andrzej Zbraniecki/East News, The Staples of PolishEaster Cuisine

#polish easter

#polish cuisine

Easter, the most important Catholic holiday, is celebrated almost as loudly as Christmas. A lot of Easter traditions are connected to food – no meat on Good Friday is a remainder of the numerous fasting days in centuries past; the blessing of Easter baskets on Holy Saturday underlines the symbolic meaning of several ingredients which are then consumed – usually on breakfast on Sunday – Easter Day; and the most meaningful of Easter symbols is obviously the egg.

And yet, although there are lots of culinary things that come to mind when we think of Easter – eggs, white sausage, watercress, horseradish, and cakes such as babka and mazurek being some of them – there’s no canonical list of recipes, and the choice of foods seems more diverse and less obvious then on Christmas. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular Polish Easter treats:

Eggs

As symbols of a new life and Christ’s resurrection, eggs need to have a presence in the Easter basket and pretty much on every Easter table (except for vegan ones, obviously), both as colourful, decorative pisanki, and as an important ingredient of the abundant Easter breakfast. They can be simply hard boiled and served with mayo, or deviled – stuffed with yolks mixed with mustard and horseradish and decorated with watercress.

Żurek

This unique, tangy, sourdough soup is one of Poland’s most important dishes. For centuries – alongside herring – in its meatless version, it was a fasting food staple, while today it often speaks of abundance: it is flavoured with mushrooms and horseradish, served with hard-boiled eggs, potatoes, bacon and white sausage (unsmoked pork sausage spiced with marjoram and garlic), sometimes with a dollop of cream or even in a bowl made of bread. This richness makes it a satiating dish in itself, sometimes jokingly referred to as ‘Polish ramen’.

Sałatka jarzynowa

Not just an Easter specialty, but a compulsory element on Polish tables during all sorts of festivities and parties, sałatka jarzynowa – translated simply as vegetable salad – is a mixture of finely chopped boiled vegetables (usually carrots, parsley roots and celeriacs used to make rosół, sometimes with some potatoes as well), dill pickles, peas and tart apples, all combined with mayo. Curiously, this simple salad, known in Western Europe as Russian salad or salad Olivier, originated as an elegant dish in tsarist Russia, but changed completely during Soviet times. Humble as it is now, we couldn’t imagine our Easter table without it.

Pasztet

There’s usually a lot of sausages and cured meats on the table on Easter Day; in centuries past, after a long period of Lent, Easter meant having a lavish – and therefore meaty – feast, and this variety is a remainder of that. The aforementioned white sausage and pasztet – a traditional Polish pâté, baked in a rectangular baking tray – are among the favourites. Pasztet can be made with various types of finely ground meat (or even lentils and groats), mixed with lard, vegetables, spices and often lightened with whipped egg whites. It is typically served with pickles and horseradish or ćwikła – a traditional mixture of horseradish and beets.

Mazurek

The beautifully decorated, colourful mazurki are cakes composed by layers of shortcrust pastry, marmalade, and various icings. The cake's name may have its origins in the Mazur tribe inhabiting the central Mazovia region, or in the traditional folk dance mazurek. The cake probably arrived in Poland from the East with the Turks in the 17th century, but it has now become an intrinsic part of our pastry tradition. It can be slightly tangy from the marmalade or almost cloyingly sweet from caramel and chocolate, but it’s always a vivid, decorative element on the Easter table.

Babka

The Polish babka is a sweet yeast cake, shaped like a cylinder with a hole in the middle. The word baba and its diminutive, babka, mean either ‘grandmother’ or ‘old woman’, and sometimes the sides of the cake display corrugations that resemble the pleats of a skirt. In Henri Babinski’s cooking encyclopaedia Gastronomie Pratique, published in 1907, we can read that baba à la polonaise is the mother of all similar cakes known in France – king Stanisław Leszczyński apparently came up with the idea of soaking the baba in rum, therefore creating a delicacy beloved in France and Italy until today.

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