Our roving critic muses on culinary roots and diversity
by Richard Foss
My mother’s family emigrated from Poland in the 1920s, but never shared stories about their lives in that country with my brother and me. Even my mother knew very little. Her family never taught her a word of Polish, saying, “We are in America now, you will speak English.”
She did not know the name of the village they came from, Szczuczyn, until she unearthed some paperwork after their deaths.
Her mother did teach her some Polish cooking, because it was what she knew how to cook. Our Thanksgiving table featured homemade kielbasa and sauerkraut simmered with pork ribs, caraway seeds, and apples alongside the turkey. (My brother and I were surprised to find other people had holiday dinners without sauerkraut.) Along with the fried pastries,called crustikis, that were a Christmas treat, they provided a tenuous cultural link to our roots.
I learned about the regionality of Polish cuisine one afternoon in Chicago on a layover while flying home from Europe. I often arranged a stop of five or six hours there, causing colleagues to think I was terrified of missing my connection. I wasn’t, but with five hours there was time to take a cab into the Polish neighborhood of Chicago, buy a cheap suitcase at a thrift store, and fill it with gifts for my mother — brown bread from local bakeries, better sauerkraut than I could get in LA, ham, and of course kielbasa.
On one of these stopovers I visited a butcher shop that had a wall of sausage rings hanging on pegs, and was boggled by the selection. The friendly butcher asked what I wanted, and apologized that their selection of kielbasa was low – it was toward the end of the day and they only had about 20 kinds left. When I told him I was looking for kielbasa like my grandmother used to make, he asked where she was from. When informed that I didn’t know, he walked to a wall map of Poland and started asking rapid-fire questions. Pork or pork and beef? Coarse or fine grind? With or without juniper berries? And so on. With each answer he covered areas with his hands and at the end one small section remained uncovered. He pointed theatrically at that region near the border with Belarus and announced, “Your grandparents came from here.”
I filled the suitcase with sausage, and when we got home, the flavors brought tears to my mother’s eyes. Her mother had died years before, but it tasted precisely like the sausage we all remembered. Later I looked at a good map of that part of Poland and found the name of a village: Szczuczyn. A butcher in Chicago knew the region of Poland that our people came from before I did.
So it was that when my twin brother and I went to Poland this October, we knew there were regional variations, and resolved to learn about them. We didn’t visit Szczuczyn because it’s almost a ghost town due to depopulation during World War II and decades of young people leaving for better opportunities. That border area is also dangerous due to international tensions with Russia..
This area may be the home of the bagel, which was documented in Poland as early as the 14th century, though a similar ring bread that is boiled before baking was described in Syria 100 years earlier. The Polish bagels we tried were different from American bagels, less chewy with a lighter crust. They had been boiled, but not as long as it is common in California and New York. This may be heresy, but I prefer the California version.
The sauerkraut varied in vinegary tang from restaurant to restaurant, and the seasonings differed subtly – in fact that adjective applies to almost every element of Polish cuisine. The stereotype of this diet is that everything involves meat, potatoes, onions, and cabbage, and that’s not wrong. Those meats vary – we saw duck on menus about as often as chicken, and goose and venison were available and delicious. These were sometimes cooked with fresh or dried fruit that made them delightful, and with mixtures of green herbs that were heavy on marjoram. We gained a new appreciation for dill, which is used along with sour cream, but found only one recipe that we want to recreate at home. This is a soup called zurek made with fermented rye flour, chopped root vegetables, a meat or intense mushroom stock, eggs, fresh kielbasa, and dill, and it’s delightful. I have ordered rye flour and intend to master this by our Christmas feast. It was the bright spot in a cuisine we found hearty but unexciting, and as we boarded a train from Krakow to Prague, we hoped for a livelier dining scene there. Surely hundreds of years of being federated with the cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian Empire had left them with a more interesting table.
This assumption was entirely wrong — we hadn’t researched Czech cuisine and how it was affected by nationalism and communism. The Czechs bitterly resented the Austrians’ attempt to Germanize their country, and when they broke away after the First World War, they discarded every element of Teutonic culture they could. When the Soviets took over, they made things worse with culinary social engineering, distributing a cookbook to every household, and demanding that every restaurant use it. While the old cooking is making a resurgence, every chef in the country learned on the Soviet version.
As a result the palate here is even less varied than in Poland, and almost every meal in Czech taverns and restaurants consisted of roasted or grilled meat with timidly spiced brown gravy. This is accompanied by the so-called Czech dumpling, a loaf of white bread dough that is steamed rather than baked and then sliced and served hot. If as a kid you had your mom cut the crusts off of Wonder Bread sandwiches, you’ll have a moment of nostalgia, but my brother and I were not those kids.
Some sort of vegetables are on the side of the plate, almost always onions, potatoes, and cabbage. Salads are available, but are identical almost everywhere – cucumber, onion, tasteless hothouse tomatoes, and orange bell pepper. The dressing was always vinegar and oil, with slivers of cheese and an occasional wisp of herbs. At one restaurant in an upscale area we were delighted to see a Caesar salad on the menu, but were chagrined to find that there was more bacon by volume than lettuce, and the dressing had little body and no anchovy. After a few days of this and desperate for vegetable flavors, we visited first an Italian restaurant and then a Vietnamese eatery.
A Czech guide told us that there are regional differences within the country’s regions of Bohemia and Moravia, but it takes a while for foreigners to understand them. The conversation reminded me of a similar exchange in rural Ireland, where locals say they can taste subtleties in potatoes from different fields. My brother and I started wondering – if we stayed longer and immersed ourselves in the local specialties, would we start perceiving them differently? Had our Californian palates become blunt instruments thanks to the everyday onslaught of chili peppers, wasabi, ginger, tamarind, curries of all kinds, and other strong flavors? We don’t think so, but we don’t know how we could know.
What we did appreciate in both countries was the hospitality, artisanal products like brown breads and rich cheeses, spicy local beers and crisp Moravian wines. However, we don’t expect to see these in any restaurant in our neighborhood any time soon. That would take a community of first-generation immigrants longing for the flavors of their ancestral home, or a second generation nostalgic for their parents’ cooking. That population use to live here, frequenting Bit of Germany in Redondo, Alpine Village in Torrance, and Redondo’s Czech Point, but the clientele at all three aged as the next generation moved to more savory thrills. Much was gained, but something was lost too, and in my family we will honor that heritage with sauerkraut on our holiday table. ER
