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Recipes from Poland

Appears in

By Alan Davidson

Published 1980

  • About
Polish fish cookery has in the past been directed primarily at freshwater fish. Poland, after all, has not always had a coastline, or has had only a corridor door into the Baltic. Now, however, an active fishing fleet brings back large quantities of seafood, not only from near-by waters, and there is increasing scope for the Polish cook to practise seafood cookery.

There are mixed traditions in the Polish kitchen. As Edouard de Pomiane has pointed out, Poland is one of those Slav countries which received its Christianity from Rome rather than Byzantium, and therefore has a western outlook in cookery as in other matters. The Italian influence is surprisingly strong. It is largely due to Queen Bona, of the Sforza family in Milan, who was the bride of the Polish King Sigismond I (1506–48), and who brought with her to Poland both Italian recipes and Italian ingredients. To this day, tomatoes are pomidory in Poland, and Poles make a stoufada just as Italians do. It is tempting to think that this good consort, ‘gourmande et intelligente’, brought ravioli too, and that this developed into the pierógi of Poland, the kolduny of Lithuania and the varenki of Russia; but Lithuanians have an enchanting legend of their own to account for kolduny. Many Lithuanians were, of course, at one time within the Polish frontiers; and the influences from the east are highly visible in Polish cookery. Some were brought by Tartars who settled in Poland in the fourteenth century after being made prisoners of war. More important still were the Jews, who were once so numerous in Poland, and whose culinary influence remains pervasive and beneficial.

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