Possibly Poland’s most original soup, it’s based on fermented rye, spiced with garlic, marjoram and horseradish and often served with potatoes, sausage, bacon and a hard-boiled egg. Through the ages its function and ingredients varied, yet ‘żur’ is undeniably an institution and one of the most distinct flavours of Polish cuisine.
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Bottled żur and barszcz, photo: Artur Barbanowski / East News
We have to start by mentioning an ongoing dispute and a certain confusion around what żur is and what it isn’t. The name itself comes from the Old-German word sūr (now: sauer), which quite straightforwardly means ‘sour’. Although many people would use the name interchangeably with its diminutive żurek, others would argue that the former is richer, thicker, made with rye, oat or even buckwheat flours, while the latter is lighter and made using wheat. The former would be then served with potatoes and smoked sausage or bacon, while the latter – with cream, egg and white sausage.
What’s more, we often get confused by the distinction between żur (or żurek) and barszcz biały – white borscht. The term barszcz itself comes from the hogweed plant, which was already used hundreds of years ago to make a sour, green soup, and is now an umbrella term for any type of soured soup (nowadays the most popular version is barszcz czerwony or red barszcz, made with beetroot; some people also talk about ‘green barszcz’ when referring to the popular sorrel soup). If you took a recipe for barszcz białoruski (Belorussian barszcz) from Hanna Szymanderska’s cookbook Kuchnia Polska: Potrawy Regionalne (Polish Cuisine: Regional Dishes), you’d find a creamy white soup based on rye sourdough with sour cream, served with potatoes and cottage cheese.
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Ukrainian barszcz, photo: Kamil Piklikiewicz / East News
The best-known version of barszcz ukraiński (Ukrainian barszcz) on the other hand is made with no sourdough but lots of meat, beans, potatoes and fermented beetroot. Food historian Jarosław Dumanowski, who studied the history of barszcz thoroughly, found an intriguing example of żur/barszcz in a 17th-century manuscript – the concoction was called ‘barszcz for a fasting day’, and included both hogweed and flour.
For fasting & festive days
The practice of fasting is very important when it comes to understanding żur’s meaning in Polish culinary history. Even though today it is often associated with a very rich, one-pot wonder – often thick, full of potatoes and bacon, served with white sausage and an egg, and sometimes poured into bowls made of hollowed bread – it used to be one of the dishes most associated with Lent. In the Middle Ages, Catholics were supposed to abstain from meat and any food obtained from warm-blooded creatures for almost half a year. Then, in the 17th and 18th centuries some of the restrictions were lifted, but fasting was still practiced for a third of the year and, in some homes, two or four days a week. And so, the ‘original’ żur was actually vegan and pretty humble – just a water-and-fermented-flour mixture, sometimes thickened with almond milk (which nowadays sounds rather fancy). Among the dishes eaten before Easter, there was also kisielica – a jelly of sorts, made with żur, herbs and honey. In fact, during that period żur was eaten so often, there was a folk ceremony called ‘the burial of żur and herring’ (pogrzeb żuru i śledzia) organised during the Holy Week to say goodbye to the dishes everyone was fed up with.
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Peter Breugel, The Fight Between Carnival And Lent, photo: Wikimedia Commons
Speaking of fish: in the region of Upper Silesia, where żur is one of the most beloved soups (it was even served to miners for breakfast before a day of hard work), it was traditionally made with carp heads – which in the Catholic tradition, kept it perfectly suitable for Lent. There are other regional variations: the Lemkos of Southern Poland use oat flour and serve their żur – or keselica, as they call it – with boiled potatoes on the side; the Kashubians add lots of garlic; in the mountain region of Podhale, traditional sheep’s cheese oscypek is added, while in central Poland there’s a peasant soup called zalewajka which consists of boiled cubes of potatoes, over which żur is poured.
Nowadays żur is not associated with any dietary restrictions, but rather with festive occasions – it’s a soup popular at weddings, on Easter, even on New Year’s Eve. Due to its unique flavour, heartiness and wide range of possible additions some people call it the ‘Polish ramen’ (the connection is made stronger due to the common addition of a hard-boiled egg).
Even if a soup made with fermented flour sounds weird to you, don’t hesitate to give it a try – it’s not only an interesting taste, but also a dive into the history of Polish cuisine.
Written by Natalia Mętrak-Ruda, Apr 2021