Polish Food

The deep red soup that opens Wigilia, clear as wine and sharp from a fermented beetroot base. It was my favourite as a child and it still is: served over uszka, or simply drunk from a cup alongside a krokiet. I grow my own beetroot for it now, and the difference from supermarket beets is not subtle.

Poland's sour rye soup, built on a fermented rye starter that gives it a tang nothing else has, with white sausage and a halved egg in the bowl. It is the centre of Easter breakfast, eaten from a plate and often served inside a hollowed loaf, though in my house we make it for Christmas too. The starter takes a few days and a warm corner, and it is worth every one of them.

The other Wigilia soup, for families who do not open with barszcz. Dried forest mushrooms, mostly borowiki, simmered into a broth that tastes of the woods in November. The dried mushrooms matter more than any technique: this is the dish that explains why every Polish kitchen keeps a bag of them.

A thick barley and vegetable soup, the kind that counts as dinner on its own. Every Polish grandmother has a version and none of them are written down. Pearl barley, root vegetables, dried mushrooms if the jar allows, and time.

Sour cabbage soup made on sauerkraut and smoked meat, the sharp cousin of every other cabbage dish here. It is what the last of the kraut barrel was for. Not the same thing as kapuśniaczki, the little pasties further down, which catches out even Poles.

Soup made from fermented cucumbers and their brine, mellowed with potato and soured cream. It sounds improbable to anyone who did not grow up with it and converts almost everyone who tries it. On the list to publish, not least because my own jars of ogórki kiszone end up as the main ingredient.

The shocking pink one. A cold summer soup of young beetroot and their greens on kefir or soured milk, with cucumber, dill and a hard boiled egg on top. On a hot July day there is nothing better, and no dish photographs less believably.

The Sunday soup. A slow golden chicken broth with fine noodles, made in every Polish home almost every week and served before the cutlet. We still cook it constantly in my own kitchen, which makes it the most obvious gap on this site. It is coming, and it deserves to be done properly rather than quickly.

The national stew: sauerkraut, fresh cabbage, several meats and dried mushrooms, cooked for hours and reheated over days, better each time. This is the rich one, with beef, wine and prunes. Mine goes in the slow cooker, because bigos catches on the base and one scorched patch turns the whole pot bitter.

The rustic bigos, and hultaj means a rogue rather than a peasant. Sauerkraut only, no fresh cabbage, soured by its own undrained brine, with beer, juniper and potatoes in the pot so it needs nothing on the side. Lighter on ceremony than the royal version and, some weeks, the one I would rather eat.

Cabbage leaves rolled around rice and minced meat, braised until the whole thing relaxes. The name means little pigeons, and no one can tell you why. Mine are my mum's version, in tomato sauce, and the type of cabbage decides everything about the timing.

Poland's answer to the schnitzel and the default Sunday dinner: pork loin beaten thin, breaded, fried in properly hot fat, served with potatoes and something from cabbage. Every Pole has an opinion about whose mother makes it best. They are all wrong, except about their mother.

The soft minced cousin of the schabowy, seasoned with onion and marjoram, and the taste of every Polish school canteen. On the site it lives a double life as a very good burger, which is not traditional and is not sorry.

Chicken pieces browned and then braised slowly until the meat gives up and the pan juices become the sauce. This is weeknight Poland: nothing fancy, nothing wasted, potatoes on the side to take the gravy.

White beans in tomato sauce with sausage and smoked bacon, named after Brittany for reasons no historian has convincingly explained, since it is Polish to the bone. Mine is built on my own recipe with kiełbasa krakowska. Comfort in a bowl, better the second day.

The pork knuckle, cooked until the meat slides off the bone, usually with sauerkraut and a strong mustard. Beer garden food in the best sense. Not yet on the site, and it will need a proper afternoon when it arrives.

The Wigilia centrepiece and the most argued-about fish in Poland. For decades carp was the only fish reliably available before Christmas, so it became the tradition, bones and all. Ours always spent its last few days alive in the bath, which was the best thing in the world when I was small and the exact reason I could never bring myself to eat it afterwards.

Marinated herring, dressed either in oil with onion or in soured cream with apple. It sits on the Wigilia table and at every Polish party ever thrown, because it is the traditional companion to a cold glass of vodka.

Sauerkraut braised down with dried forest mushrooms until it turns dark and mellow: the Wigilia workhorse. It fills the pierogi, it fills the kapuśniaczki, and it stands on the table as a dish in its own right. It already appears on the site inside the krokiety and the pasties, but it has never been written up on its own.

The famous ones: half moons of soft dough filled with potato, twaróg and fried onion. Ruskie refers to old Ruthenia, not Russia, a point Poles have been making with increasing firmness. Boiled first, then ideally fried in butter until the edges catch.

Tiny folded dumplings filled with wild mushrooms, made to float in barszcz on Christmas Eve. The name means little ears, which is exactly what they look like. Making them is a production line job, so in most families everyone folds, and the freezer does the rest.

Round potato dumplings from Silesia with a thumb print in the middle, and the print is not decoration: it is a ladle for the gravy. Made from cooked potatoes and potato starch in a ratio Silesian grandmothers measure by eye and everyone else measures by quarters.

Lazy because there is no filling: the twaróg goes straight into the dough. Soft pillowy pieces boiled and dressed with butter and sugar or fried breadcrumbs, a nursery dinner half of Poland still quietly orders as an adult.

Diamond cut potato dumplings, first cousins to gnocchi, named for the hoof shape the diagonal cut leaves. Butter and breadcrumbs, or a mushroom sauce, or next to anything with gravy.

Whole plums sealed inside potato dough, boiled, then rolled in buttered breadcrumbs and sugar. When the plum inside collapses to hot jam, that is the whole point of September.

Little pasta squares tossed with braised cabbage, sauerkraut and fried sausage. It shares a root with the word lasagne, which surprises everyone, and in the American Polonia the same idea goes by haluski. Weeknight food that eats far above its ingredients.

Crisp lacy pancakes of grated potato, eaten sweet with sugar or savoury with soured cream, and in the mountains drowned in goulash as placek po węgiersku. The secret is patience with the grated potato: let the liquid settle, pour it off, and stir the settled starch back in.

Thin pancakes rolled around sweet twaróg, jam, or anything the fridge offers, then sometimes fried again until the edges crisp. The bar mleczny classic. Every Polish child has strong feelings about the correct filling and carries them for life.

Small thick pancakes with pieces of apple in the batter, dusted with icing sugar and eaten warm. My babcia made these all the time, and they are at their best minutes out of the pan, which is why a plate of them rarely survives to the table.

Rich yeast doughnuts, traditionally filled with rose petal jam, at their glorious peak on Tłusty Czwartek when Poland eats them by the tens of millions. A proper pączek is light enough that eating three is a decision you only notice afterwards.

Brittle ribbons of dough twisted through a slit in themselves, fried and buried in icing sugar. Also called chruściki, also called chrust, depending on whose region you ask. Roll them to two millimetres and never store them in plastic, or they go leathery overnight.

Poland's cheesecake, made with twaróg rather than cream cheese, which makes it a different cake entirely: lighter, less sweet, faintly tangy. It stands on both the Christmas and Easter tables. In my family it carries raisins, which is a hill I am prepared to die on.

The summer sernik: no oven, a biscuit base, a light set cheese layer and a lid of fruit jelly, usually with whatever berries the market had. The jelly layer is a Polish institution and negotiable in colour only.

The apple cake every Polish home bakes when the orchards tip over in September: a thick layer of spiced apples between short pastry, dusted with icing sugar. Serve it slightly warm and nobody leaves the kitchen.

A soft yeasted or butter cake with halved plums pressed into the top, their juice bleeding purple into the crumb as it bakes, finished with crumble. The węgierka plum was born for this.

A yeast dough spiralled around a dense sweet filling of ground poppy seeds, raisins and nuts, and it was always on our table. Poppy seed at Wigilia is old luck, older than the Christmas it now belongs to. High on the list to write up this winter.

The most ancient thing on the Wigilia table: whole wheat grains with poppy seeds, honey, nuts and dried fruit. It comes from the eastern borderlands and some families would not consider Christmas Eve valid without it.

A flat, rich Easter tart on shortcrust, iced with kajmak or chocolate and decorated to the point of competition. Traditionally the decorating is handed to the children, with results the table is required to praise.

The tall fluted yeast cake of Easter, glazed with icing, named after the grandmother whose skirts its shape resembles. A good babka is judged by its lightness, and everyone claims their family's is lightest.

Spiced honey gingerbread biscuits, soft from the first day, in the tradition of Toruń, the city that has baked them for seven hundred years. Mine skip the ageing the old recipes demand and stay soft from the start, which I consider progress rather than heresy.

The cake Polish homes make on repeat all summer, swapping in whatever fruit the week brings: a soft creamed sponge, fruit on top, kruszonka crumble over everything. The method is ciasto ucierane, the everyday beaten cake batter every Polish cook carries in their head.

A naleśnik rolled tightly around sauerkraut and mushrooms, breaded and fried until the outside crackles. The classic partner to a cup of clear barszcz, on Wigilia and in every good soup bar. In my house it is a two day production, and my wife sometimes takes over the filling.

Little baked pasties of yeast dough around the same dark sauerkraut and mushroom filling that runs through the whole Wigilia season. Not to be confused with kapuśniak the soup, a trap the names set for everyone. Excellent beside barszcz, better still warm from the oven.

Half a baguette toasted under sautéed mushrooms and melted cheese, striped with ketchup, eaten standing up at midnight. Born in the milk bar era, perfected in Kraków's Kazimierz district, and entirely unembarrassed about the ketchup.

Finely diced cooked vegetables, pickles, egg and apple bound in mayonnaise: the holiday fridge dish. During Polish holidays it lives in a bowl in the fridge, and the whole point is walking past feeling hungry and helping yourself. It only works cut small and made properly.

The grated fresh salad that lands next to every Polish dinner plate, this one from celeriac, apple and carrot. A surówka is not a side dish exactly, it is a constitutional requirement: something raw and sharp to cut the cutlet and potatoes.

Thin sliced cucumber salted, drained and folded into soured cream with dill. The name comes from misery, allegedly for how the sliced cucumber looks, and no Polish summer dinner is complete without it.

Grated cooked beetroot sharpened with horseradish, the standard companion to Easter meats and to cold cuts all year. Two ingredients, one jar, and the horseradish does all the talking.

Cabbage braised soft and thickened with a light roux, sweet and sour from a spoon of vinegar and sugar. This is the something-from-cabbage that completes the classic Polish dinner plate, and in English it hides under half a dozen names: fried cabbage, stewed cabbage, sweet and sour cabbage. All this one dish.

Real Polish pickles: cucumbers fermented in salt brine with dill, garlic and horseradish, no vinegar anywhere near them. Mine are made with cucumbers from my own allotment, which grows far more than I can eat fresh, and that is the whole plan. The half sour stage, młodokiszone, is a delicacy with a fanbase of its own.

Shredded cabbage fermented in its own brine, the backbone of half the dishes on this page: bigos, kapuśniak, pierogi fillings, the Wigilia kapusta. The shop version soured with vinegar is a different and lesser thing. A homemade recipe is overdue here, my brine calculator already has the preset waiting for it.

Plums cooked down slowly, no added sugar and no pectin, until they turn thick, dark and faintly smoky. The old way took days over a fire with the whole village stirring. It is what belongs inside knedle and on morning bread.

Beetroot fermented in brine until the liquid turns deep red and lightly sour. Some drink it as a tonic, but in my kitchen its real job is barszcz: the fermented base is what gives the Wigilia soup its colour and its edge, and no vinegar shortcut gets you there.

The Wigilia drink: smoked and dried fruit, mostly plums, apples and pears, simmered into a dark smoky compote that is drunk, not eaten. It only appears once a year and tastes like nothing else in the calendar.

Borrowed from Hungary and thoroughly naturalised: peppers, tomatoes and courgette stewed down with smoked sausage. Every Polish allotment garden produces a glut of exactly these vegetables in August, which is why every Polish family now has a leczo recipe.