Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 1 - Poland

Intro

Over the years I’ve accumulated an extensive collection of cookbooks - perhaps something that seems a bit odd in the age of online recipes but I do genuinely think there’s an experience to a good cookbook that can’t be replicated by BBC Good Food, the Waitrose website or AllRecipes. Beyond the physical experience of a good cookbook I do find there’s just a level of quality in recipes that can be found in these books that you don’t tend to get online - with a few honourable exceptions.

Beyond that you can be exposed to dishes you’d never have considered and even cuisines you’d never thought of as how common restaurants are and how common cookbooks are are curiously uncorrelated - I own a Burmese cookbook despite being aware of only one restaurant of that kind in the country while I’ve been unable to pin down a good Nepalese cookbook despite these restaurants being surprisingly common (granted there isn’t one in my own city of Brighton!).

So for 2021 I’ve set myself a project to leverage this collection - a big meal a fortnight using recipes from my cookbooks from a different cuisine. I’ll start somewhere in Europe and travel (very roughly) west to east ending up back in Europe again by December 2021 and try and avoid recipes I make regularly. Naturally these are all recipes from copyrighted works so I’ll be refraining from posting the recipes but I will point to where the book can be sourced, outline any adjustments I made to the recipe and perhaps give brief thoughts on each book.

Finally I’m not a great believer in the maxim that the first taste is with the eyes. Frankly it’s entirely possible to have food that looks disgusting but has little aesthetic appeal - the Chinese dish “ants climbing a tree” is an example, tastes fantastic but looks like dog sick. So this is intended to be “warts and all” rather than Instagram perfection, presentation is still a factor but something ugly but tasty will be posted. However something that completely didn’t work, as happens on this very first post, may be skipped!

On the topic of presentation being a secondary factor here’s a picture of my messy bookcase (a few of these are my partner’s as well).

Brexit-related supply issues permitting this is what I intend to start here. If when the supermarkets’ stockpiles run dry or if the next regulatory shift this summer causes supply problems I promise nothing!

The book

Today’s country is Poland and for my cookbook I’ve selected Polska: New Polish Cooking by Zuza Zak. This seems to be one that got a fair bit of attention from the powers that be and you can read a piece on it in The Independent, including one recipe that I cooked for this post.

After the fact there are many reasons why I can say I picked Poland as my starting point: food from Northern Europe being underrated and excessively maligned, a curiousness about why Polish culture has impacted British culture so little despite most of us having at least one Polish friend, compensation for me having never tried a dedicated Polish restaurant (aside from The Witchez in Brighton, which only sort-of counts).

In reality I put this book onto a wishlist and received it as Christmas gift. I wanted to try it and due to how my timings and inclination panned out this evolved into this 2021 project.

What I cooked (and adjustments)

For this project I attempted four new dishes simultaneously. For a main course I decided to cook beef and gherkin old country zrazy (page 101), which are stuffed beef rolls. Essentially seasoned, flattened steaks wrapped around gherkin and peppers and slow-cooked in a wine based sauce - reportedly a fairly old-fashioned dish. The recipe suggested serving with mashed potato, crusty white bread or toasted buckwheat groats. My groat supply was a tad short so I went for the mash.

My second recipe chosen was gypsy-style mixed greens (page 128), which are steamed veg with a spiced tomato and vegetable sauce. I very much got the impression this is a slightly odd combination but both seemed appealing dishes.

In the event of someone wanting to make these dishes after me I’ve noted down my adjustments, which in this case were quite minor. For the zrazy I made three adjustments:

I scaled up the recipe from four to six zrazy, to better match the ingredients purchased.
Zrazy are held together while cooking using toothpicks - I didn’t have these but opted to use shortened bamboo skewers instead.
The sauce typically involves both rehydrated dried mushrooms and the water they were soaked in, I couldn’t source any dried mushroom so these were substituted with fried chestnut mushrooms and chicken stock - this was a suggested substitution in the recipe.

For the greens I also made three adjustments, the first two of which I do regularly for many recipes:

I live with my partner who has a garlic intolerance, so garlic was replaced with asafoetida which is an acceptable though imperfect replacement when cooked. For a fresher garlic substitute a three-herb mix including savoury may be used but this is both more effort and less robust.
Most recipes tend to be conservative with amounts of herbs and spices and as I keep a wide range of spices around sometimes they lose flavour over time - therefore I typically double the quantities of such seasonings in recipes and did so here. As a note with this specific recipe this was an error.
I omitted shaved pecorino, as I thought that as a side dish it would be better without. But more importantly because I forgot to buy any when I was at the shop.

I also made two kinds of dumplings - the delightfully named little hooves with cripsy onion and bacon bits (page 159) as a savoury side, these are potato and egg dumplings, and as a dessert the very out of season pink summer pierogi with strawberry filling and vanilla cream (page 156).

The little hooves are potato and egg dumplings and are rather moreish - as I had excess potato I adjusted all measurements except the egg accordingly (as it would have scaled to 1.25 eggs) but otherwise followed the recipe precisely

For the pierogi: I used halved the volume of beetroot juice used for colouring (reasoning later) but otherwise my only adjustment was omitting vanilla cream because repeat my lame joke from earlier in the post here. Yes, I forgot to buy any cream. Good start.

Cooking

As zrazy are slow cooked I started off by prepping the ingredients for it.

The yellow liquid is chicken stock from a cube, apologies for my laziness. I was too cowardly to attempt Crunchy Nut zrazy so the cereals were not used in cooking!

After flattening my rump steak (cheaper cuts would be fine, these were on special) and chopping vegetables I seasoned the meat, with the rest of the ingredients pictured, including a slice of that rye bread, ending up in a casserole and forming the basis of the sauce - the mushrooms were fried before being added to the sauce.

If you look closely you may see that the secret ingredient is mustard.

The meat was rolled up and the contents skewered to keep them intact during slow cooking. Although there was a lot of prep work this wasn’t too complex to prepare and it was merrily cooking away while I prepped everything else. These were cooked in an orange casserole dish and there were minor issues with the meat sticking to the bottom (perhaps the heat got up too high at some point) but broadly they turned out well.

Next - greens. Truthfully I didn’t take as many pictures of these as I should have but here is the only in action shot of their preparation. Chopped green veg in a steamer, far in advance of cooking, and a tomato and pepper mixture covered in herbs and spices. This mixture was baked in the oven until starting to char and then blended with honey and mustard, leaving a chunky sauce to briefly cook on the hob.

The Skips in the background were an integral part of the recipe, naturally.

Now comes the dough. Firstly little hooves.

Has anyone noticed how when you photograph copyrighted material the photo blurs on its own? Weird, huh?

The bacon and shallots were finely chopped and fried and the remainder of the ingredients (along with a basic mash) were combined into three cylinders of dough. My partner did this mix for me as she is more experienced with dough and the recipe suggested this needed to be done well and quickly. These were later diagonally cut into smaller dumpling shapes and cooked in boiling water, like gnocchi.

Sneks. Also, if you look closely you can see hints such as the beetroot juice that I may have been doing a lot of these recipes in parallel.

The final step after this was to lightly brown the dumplings in a pan with the bacon and shallot. There were rather too many to do this as well as I’d like in one pan but the results were acceptable!

Finally the pierogi. Pictured are two identical bowls of (very out of season) strawberries with sugar - one of these, with water, makes a simple but very nice strawberry sauce and the other is intended to be the filling. The beetroots were to be juiced, blended with some water, and a portion of this juice was to be integrated into the dough. Any excess went into the boiling liquid for the final cooking of the dumplings.

Although this is the internet and this is shot from the top down I promise this won’t turn into one of those horrifying Facebook cooking videos.

And here is that dough.

If you look closely you may see that this dough is, in fact, pink.

Sadly I forgot to take a picture of the pierogi post assembly, very useful instructions were included involving cutting the dough using the bottom of a wine glass. Like a fool after assembly, I stored them too close together and they got stuck and tore during cooking. Messed this one up, sadly.

As for the rest of the food I served it in the traditional Polish way - on a tray with pictures of dogs on it.

The Schnauzer is the most traditional Polish dog of all.

Broadly I was happy with how the dish turned out aside from the pierogi - it wasn’t perfection as the zrazy could have had a bit more integrity, the sauce for the greens could have been better balanced (it was too spicy) and the hooves could have been more browned. But for totally new recipes, including a dumpling recipe, typically a weakness of mine, an acceptable first run.

What I’d do differently

In this case when eating the gypsy-style mixed greens it was clear something had gone wrong - the description of the sauce states it is sweet and slightly spicy. My own version had far too much heat so perhaps I shouldn’t have doubled the chilli powder quantity. In addition the little hooves (as pictured) are fried in bacon and shallot at the end of the recipe - if I were to make them again, which is possible, I’d fry them in batches as they could be a bit less crowded and therefore easier to brown.

One massive error I made was simply forgetting how sticky dumpling dough is, thereby ruining my pierogi. Unless I come into vastly more counter space in the future I should just remember to never attempt multiple dumpling dishes at once, sadly the only way around this problem is a bigger kitchen. An amateur mistake, probably obvious to those more used to working with dough, but nevertheless one to learn from.

As a minor adjustment, if possible, I’d try and reduce the amount of beetroot used for colouring in the pierogi recipe. I couldn’t source beetroot juice, which is used for colouring the dough, so I made my own - made from four beetroots as suggested in the recipe. This produced about twice as much juice as was actually needed so was a little wasteful. It’s a cheap vegetable though so not too much was lost. Otherwise the recipe seemed to work, although I might also chop the strawberries for the filling a bit finer were I to try again.

Views on the book

Broadly I had positive views on Polska - the recipes, at least the ones I tried, tended to work out of the gate - which is not always a given and, although I can’t speak for its authenticity either way, I found the dishes that emerged from the recipes to be thoroughly enjoyable. This is despite two of the recipes featuring mushrooms, something I’m not at all a fan of!

Moreover the content of the book was well conceived with a good balance between presentation and practicality. For example the recipes were not presented bare bones but were accompanied with explanations of the dish and any wider significance it may have as well as photos of the completed recipe. This is hardly groundbreaking but Polska kept these elements in balance well, using these to keep interest without succumbing to the temptation to pad out the book with excessive photographs or long tangents.

No horses were consumed in trying out this book.

This approach is also found in balancing the typical front matter for these kinds of cookbooks focusing on a national cuisine: a brief overview of the country, a bit about its history and some general descriptions of its cookery in general - seasonings and seasonality and things like that. There was enough here to be interesting for its own sake without having it take over the book, under 10% of the pages - I find many older (i.e 20th century) cookbooks neglect this kind of content and many “newer” (21st century) cookbooks overindulge, so a good balance is welcome.

If you’re interested in Polish food it seems a good an introduction as any, with workable good recipes and a polished presentation.