Main Dishes

Nowadays, Polish cuisine is very meat heavy, but it hasn’t always been that way. Until fairly recently, meat was a luxury that only the richest could afford. (It’s crazy how history can change the way people eat.) But even magnates and aristocrats didn’t eat it all the time since, in our Catholic country, people fasted long and often. They did eat fish and seafood, because—though I don’t understand why—they weren’t considered meat. Vegetarian dishes began to appear in Polish cookbooks as early as the seventeenth century, and the first documented vegetarian recipe is ćwikła (beetroot salad with horseradish), by the poet Mikołaj Rej in “The Life of the Honest Man” in 1567.