Smoking Allowed: Poland’s Favourite Culinary Art
Since time immemorial, smoking has been a bedrock of how humans preserve food. Poland has a famous and rich tradition in smoking food, mostly to prepare fish and meat known as wędzonki. Read on to get Culture.pl’s lowdown on one of the country’s most characteristic culinary crafts.
Traditional Polish soldra & white borscht with beluga
For centuries, certain animals would be killed before winter and salted, dried or smoked, to be consumed later. Polish poet Jan Kochanowski wrote that soldra (smoked ham or shoulder of pork) dried in the wind, or in thick smoke, tastes good in winter. Also, from his epigram To Poets, one can learn that smoked ham would sometimes be present on the table during the Polish Renaissance:
Don’t sniff at what my humble home has to offer,
I, like Chiron, live in the forest.
There will be cheese and soldra, there will be fragrant plums…
Smoked capon & smoked chopped spike
According to Professor Jarosław Dumanowski, a researcher of old Polish cuisine, in the 17th century not only capon, veal or beef was used for making sausages in magnate cuisine but also fish, such as chopped pike. This was due, among other reasons, to the taboo around eating pork. Pork sausages were considered less sophisticated than those made of fish. Nevertheless, in the oldest Polish cookbook, written by Stanisław Czarniecki from the 17th century entitled Compendium Ferculorum, smoked soldra is mentioned as an indispensable element of every banquet and a tasty addition to other dishes.
There is also a recipe for smoked head cheeses (cold cuts) made of pork. Other smoked meats mentioned by Czarniecki include deer and wild boar. Here is a recipe for smoked game:
Having skinned your deer or having singed your boar, hack them into chunks which you will salt and put in a barrel, pressing it all with a weight. After several days, wash your chunks in fine water, hang them in warm smoke and smoke according to your need.
Borscht with smoked beluga
In Compendium Ferculorum one can also find mentions of smoked fish. Apart from sausages made of fish, Stanisław Czarniecki also mentions smoked sturgeon in the section of book entitled Fish Necessities:
The head of white or yellow smoked szczuka (pike), was an ingredient of a pottag, and smoked wyzina (beluga) was added to a borscht called ‘royal.’
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Restocking the Rivers: Poland’s Forgotten Surfeit of Sturgeon
While the days of Polish rivers swarming with wild hundred-kilo sturgeon are long gone, hatchery-bred sturgeon is gradually finding its way back into Polish cuisine. Over the last dozen or so years, the fish has returned to Warmia and Mazury, to the Brodnicki Lake region, and to Greater Poland. Polish fisheries are even producing luxury caviar, which is exported and enjoyed far and wide, even to the United Arab Emirates!
Giant sturgeon aren’t a rare thing in Warsaw
We should take the history of the sturgeon as a cautionary tale. As late as the mid-19th century, Warsaw papers reported on the enormous sturgeon (jesiotr in Polish) that were available in Warsaw markets. We learn from an 1847 issue of Kurier Warszawski that ‘giant sturgeon aren’t a rare thing in Warsaw’. The largest of them were said to be four metres long!
Jesiotrzyna – as sturgeon meat was known – was cheaper in the marketplace than most other species of fish. Sources tell us that Polish caviar was even shipped to the court of the Russian Tsar in Petersburg. There’s also a folk tradition that, in a certain village at the mouth of the Drwęca River, sturgeon were caught in such quantity that their caviar was fed to the local pigs.
The Misleading Geography of Polish Cuisine
Despite what they’re called in Polish, Greek fish, Canadian sausages and Japanese herring don’t actually come from those places. Learn about these and other amusing country references in Poland’s culinary language.Read morego to the#polish cuisinetopic pagego to the#heritagetopic pagego to the#language & literaturetopic pageRead more
Sturgeon were fished out of the Wisła River every year: ‘Vistula fishermen claim that the sturgeon swims all the way to the mouth of the San and, as soon as it tastes the water of that river, it immediately returns to the sea’. The fish roamed from the Baltic southward up the Wisła, Oder, Bug and Narwia. They sometimes even reached the Dunajec. In 1924, one sturgeon was caught near Niedzica that measured three metres in length and, in the 1930s in the Lower Wisła Valley, one was caught that weighed well over one hundred kilos. The sturgeon population was so depleted by overfishing that a complete ban on fishing was put in place prior to World War II. Despite that attempt at conservation, after 1945 sturgeon didn’t reappear on Polish menus.
Intensive fishing, water pollution and river control programs all served to wipe out the Polish sturgeon population. From time to time, the press would report the catch of single sturgeon, such as the almost three-metre, 140-kilo female sturgeon caught in the Wisła near Toruń. A 210-centimetre sturgeon caught in 1972 can be viewed at the Marine Museum in Gdynia. After that, sturgeon were no longer encountered in Polish waters…
Dried, marinated or smoked
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