“In my house we never baked bread,” Łukasz Szlapa, a humble Krakowiak aerospace engineer and hobbyist bread baker, told me. “But we did bake szarlotka. It’s one of my first memories around food, the smell of baking apples, turning deep brown and caramelized in the szabaśnik, the ever-warm baking part of my grandmother’s piec kaflowy, the enormous, old, tiled stove that kept the whole house warm in her Beskidy village just south of Kraków.” There’s almost no Polish family wi
