A Mostly Landlocked Country with Better Fish Than an Island. Yeah, That's Right.

First thing that I should say about Polish food is that I really like it. It’s warming, hearty and just what you need to line your stomach for a night on the beer and to keep the cold out. Does exactly what it needs to, in short. However, I have a couple of issues with it. Either way, we out a lot, because our flat is always disgusting, there's never any clean crockery, the fridge is too small for leftovers, and we can afford it, so I can't complain too bitterly about anything, really. Still, I'll try, for comic effect.

The first issue is that I’m now officially sick of pickled cucumber. See, I thought that was impossible. I have the kind of palate (that of a heavy smoker, that didn’t have much of a sense of smell or taste before he started) that requires big, strong, powerful flavours. Otherwise, it’s like eating a big plate of cardboard. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle, because that means that I have chilli sauce on absolutely everything, including cheese on toast and sausages. That, of course, doesn’t help the fact that I can’t taste anything. Polish cuisine isn’t exactly bursting with flavour, I’m afraid, which means that a load of gherkins with it is kinda necessary to make it more palatable. It’s good without, don’t get me wrong, but not particularly exciting. Before I came here, I was excited at the prospect of being able to eat gherkins with basically everything, because they’re one of my favourite things in the world. However, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. I didn’t realise that you could do that with pickles. In my first year, I used to be quite fond of sitting down and eating half a jar of the things, if I was controlling myself, like a pregnant woman. Not so, now. This, in a way, makes me sad. 

The Polish are absolutely crazy about soup. I can see why, actually. I’m not the world’s biggest soup eater (drinker?), but their soup is great. There’s zurek, which is fantastic, along with various beetroot based soups, and so on. They generally have it as a starter to their main course, and it’s great. Zurek in particular, because that can be eaten as a main course by itself. The café across the road used to serve it in a big, fancily-shaped, hollowed out loaf of bread, which was generally too much for me to finish. My favourite Polish dish, on the other hand, is pierogi. These are like filled dumplings, which you can have boiled or fried. Filled with what? Anything, as far as I can tell. I like the cheese-based ones best, but there are also meat, cabbage and mushroom and basically whatever you want, even sweet stuff. I found this out at a big old self-service buffet place. I loaded my plate with them, to find that they were filled with some kind of sweet cheese. They worked quite well, but not alongside whatever other savoury stuff I’d piled on. I have heard rumours of fruit-filled pierogi, but I’m not sure if I believe them. 

One day I'll see this somewhere and greet it like a long-lost friend

On the other hand, they do love their salad. Their go-to salad is a mix of white cabbage, carrot and some other stuff, lightly pickled, which is rather moreish. It works absolutely brilliantly with the traditional food, but less well with everything else. Doesn’t stop them from trying though. One thing is definitely does not work with is Chinese food. But still, whenever we go to the Chinese place, without fail, we get

a little pile of the stuff, sprinkled with sesame seeds. It’s the same basically everywhere. I think that a meal without it, to the Polish, is like an English family Christmas without some kind of deep misery – just unthinkable.

There isn’t much by the way of spicy food here, which is something of a sadness in my life. As someone from a former colonial country, we can’t help but to have food from the places we conquered. In short, I’m absolutely mad for curry. For my money, there’s nothing that can beat it. The Polish don’t have much of a tradition of that kind of stuff here. There is a curry place in the main square, but that involves paying English prices, which I refuse to do on principle. This means that we have to make it ourselves. I’m actually quite happy with the recipe that I’ve developed. Tomatoey, spicy, satisfying, and about as authentic as deep-fried pizza. Speaking of which, the eating places near to my accommodation are a bit of a mixed bag. There is an excellent pizza place across the road, which comfortably makes my all-time top-ten eating places. It looks wonderfully swanky, with tablecloths, linen napkins, the whole thing – but we can afford it. The food’s excellent, but I’m slightly put off by the decoration. Plates affixed to the walls (!), along with photographs of people that I think I should recognise, and surreal stuff, like family photos, where the father has a big fork instead of a head. That’s great, but we don’t always fancy pizza. The café, where we spent basically all of our first three weeks has been closed for renovations since December, which is highly annoying to say the least. The Chinese place is great. Poorly translated menus, Asian chefs, disinterested waitresses and ‘authentic’ decorations – the food’s great, unnecessary salads aside. However, there is a peculiar side effect to it. I think they cook it with Rohypnol. I’m being serious, whenever we eat there, we have to fight falling asleep for the rest of the evening. I don’t know how they do it, I really don’t. There’s also a traditional Polish place called Jedzonko, a word which I’m reliably informed is close to the Dutch for “your joint”. The food is traditional, and rather excellent, in the heavy way that it is. Free salad and soup when you order, which is always nice. The only problem is the decoration. They like to decorate the place with apples, and decorative gourds, which I suppose is different, and quaint, if that’s the way you think. Unfortunately, they don’t factor in that SUCH THINGS ROT. I kid you not, it’s a restaurant, decorated with decaying food. 

Artist's impression of one of the men decorating the Greek place.
Imam-looking guy not included. He scared me last night, he'll
scare me now.

Equally bizarre is the Greek place down the road. I had a craving for moussaka, so I dragged my flatmate along with me. Last time I was there, they didn’t have any moussaka. This time they didn’t have any beer. They also decorate the walls with late-middle-aged Greek-looking men (one with inexplicable parrot). That part makes sense. However, the picture of the sink, the Imam and the chef looking like he wants to eat my soul do not. My moussaka was something akin to cottage pie, with tomato soup. Most bizarre, but actually okay, despite the whole cardamom pods added liberally throughout. What was less good was the man breaking into helpless floods of tears about halfway through our meal. We don’t have a clue what was going on there, but it didn’t aid digestion. They also had a huge display of jars of black olives, and salt. 500g tubes of Greek salt. I find myself wondering: wasn't there anything better, or more stereotypically Greek that they could have chosen than salt?

Something else that I have noticed is that, in a more expensive restaurant, you have to order the main part of your dish and the side orders separately. So, if you want a pork chop, and order a pork chop, you’ll get a pork chop. Nothing else, just a pork chop. We found that out early on in our time here, where Marek and I, between us, had a wonderfully balanced, tasty meal. However, he had the meat part, and I had a kind of vegetable platter, both of us looking enviously at one another’s dinners. That said, I do go mad for the fish here. Poland is basically landlocked, with a few towns way up in the North, on the Baltic Sea. The fish here, on the other hand, is rather good, if you go to a restaurant - unlike England: an island, where fresh fish is a treat. 

Unrelated picture of pierogi

Poland is a beer/vodka country. However, it is closer to South-Eastern Europe than we are, which means that you can get some rather excellent wines. In England, you can generally get French, Spanish and Italian wines, then the new world varieties. I have to bust a gut every time I want to get hold of some retsina. Restsina is of course a Greek wine, with a rather admirable idea behind it. They take a bad, undrinkable wine, then add pine resin, which makes it bad and undrinkable in a completely different way. I go absolutely mad for it, in the summer. Plus it gets you wonderfully blitzed. But here, we can get Bulgarian and Moldovan wines as well. The Moldovan wines are some of my favourites, both red and white. Cheap as anything, of course. They seem to prefer their sweet wines here, which I absolutely do not. The flavoured vodkas are good as well. The lemon is my favourite. Intensely lemony, sour, warming – it’s great. I drink it during fire alarms. The cherry stuff is good as well, when chilled right down. They also do some kind of buffalo grass vodka, which smells of summer, and tastes slightly like vanilla. It’s easy drinking, which is always dangerous. 

As a parting comment on Polish eating and drinking, I will say this: their cakes look excellent. I’ve never had one, because I’m worried that I’ll get a taste for them, and finish the year looking even more like John Prescott than I do now.