An Introduction to Polish Cuisine

Okay, I am far from being the best judge here. A vegetarian writing about Polish food? You might as well have a teetotal man reviewing Italian wines. But hold on. People write about war without picking up a gun. I know what people tell me about rolada or kotlet schabowy. “You can only write about X if you have experienced X” sounds like a woke identitiarian idea to me.

Polish cuisine is heavy on, well, heavy foods. Its people spent long years working on farms, in armies and down mines — often in the sort of cold that penetrates your bones if you don't have a lot of hearty fuel to power your internal engine. So, there is a lot of meat. There is a bread. There is a lot of potato. There is a lot of oil and butter.

A classic Polish Sunday lunch, for example, involves a fearsome slab of breaded pork (kotlet schabowy) or a hedgehog-sized meat roll (rolada — though I think that might be a Silesian word) with a mound of mashed potato or dumplings and a generous splodge of sweet-and-sour red cabbage.

In fact, Poles always eat their biggest meal for lunch — generally around three o'clock when people get home from work. As a teacher, I generally worked in the afternoons and evenings — taxing my digestion after eating far more than my stomach needed at midday. Finally, I insisted on returning to sandwiches.

Polish people are the first to joke about some of the less sophisticated aspects of their cuisine. One Silesian soup, wodzianka, is made of stale bread, garlic, butter and water. Poles will claim their mother makes the best wodzianka.

But it takes a lot of skill to cook a deep, rich barszcz. I know. Mine looks and tastes like what it is — salty purple water. On the other hand, I can still taste the delicious bowl I enjoyed in a Benedictine monastery near Kraków eight years ago.

Moreover, Poles can be quite particular about preparing food. Sandwiches are a strange but real example. In the UK, a sandwich can be fixed in ten seconds once you seize two slices of limp bread and a bit of cheese. At a Polish breakfast, people are calm and calculated in assembling their lofty open-faced sandwiches, with cheese, ham, tomato, onion, pepper and salt. It must be a nice reflective way to start a morning.

Polish restaurants are still a lot cheaper than their English or American cousins, though that is changing. I still cannot quite believe that two bottles of sparkling water on the Krakow market square set us back 29 złotych (about five pounds) last month. Perhaps it was the glass bottles.

Still, waiters and cooks must be earning more so I suppose one cannot be glum. I recall a friend going for an interview about a job in a pizza restaurant, seven years ago, and being offered about sixty pence an hour.

Italian restaurants are everywhere in Poland — but, then, perhaps they are everywhere in Europe and the US as a whole. Pizza is fundamentally a great restaurant food because we have a lot of options without any of them being especially unfamiliar. Besides, most of us are too lazy to make it at home.

Poland also has a lot of kebab joints. Once, walking through Warsaw after the controversial (but enjoyable) Independence Day march, a friend of mine looked at the long queues outside the kebab shops and said, “Ah, Ben. They call themselves nationalists but how many of them are going for pierogi?” Then again, kebab joints are rarely staffed by Turks. Often, the cooks are Polish. In my town (for reasons that escape me) they are Bangladeshi.

Milk bars are a curious phenomenon. The communists established them as places where anyone could have a hot meal, quickly, at a reasonable price. That remains true today. The food is nothing special — but food doesn’t always have to be. The clients are a strange mix of homeless men and hipsters.

Some of my favourite restaurants have been little traditional places in the Polish mountains, lined with wood and dense with smoke. Few of them have vegetarian food beyond fried cheese and dough — but who cares? A lot of eating is ambience. I would rather have some smoky oscypek or butter-slick pierogi with the view of the Beskids and the smell of burning wood than have haute cuisine in a pretension-pervaded place.

Drinking is an important part of Polish life. Poles are not (I think) much more liable to be alcoholics — if at all more liable to be alcoholics — than other Europeans. But drinking with others is a key aspect of Polish social rituals. Refuse a drink and you can be in trouble. Claiming to be on antibiotics is a convenient if disingenuous escape route.

Drinking has its own rituals. When I used to meet with friends to drink (in someone’s house, or on an allotment, or in a garage) I would arrive to find glistening bottles of wódka surrounded by dainty little plates of herring, pickled cucumbers, pickled mushroom and pickled peppers. I am not sure it is an ideal combination. Still, I am not sure what would make for an ideal combination with vodka. None of us drink it for the taste. It is a communal thing.

Poland is not famous for its desserts but there are riches here. Szarlotka is a delicious apple cake with a sweet and crunchy topping. Krówka is a crispy fudge with a gooey heart. Karpatka is a cream pie evocatively named (I think) after the Carpathian mountains. Makówki, a sweet dish made of poppy seeds, is only eaten at Christmas, which is a dreadful shame.

I hope I have given you some nice ideas should you ever visit Poland. Just don’t stick with pizza. Ask for the flaczki perhaps. No need to look it up.