Kapuśniak

Serves 4

Ingredients

350 g sour cabbage (available in shops selling Polish food)

500 g veal ribs

100 g smoked bacon, cut into strips

1 big onion, peeled, washed and finely chopped

4 potatoes, peeled, washed and cut into 3cm long strips

2 dried ceps (optional)

2 carrots, peeled and washed

2 root parsley or parsnip, peeled and washed

¼ celery root, peeled and washed

½ leek, washed

1 garlic clove, peeled

2 or 3 bay leaves

6-8 grains black pepper

3 grains allspice

1 flat teaspoon tomato concentrate

½ teaspoon caraway

1 pinch powdered chili

½ coffee spoon curcuma

Salt

Pepper

1 or pinches sugar

Preparation

First prepare the broth:

In a pan, bring to boil 1.8 l of water.

Add veal ribs and cook for about 40 minutes.

Add carrots, root parsley, celery, leek, garlic, mushrooms, bay leaves, pepper and allspice.

Cook between 30-40 minutes, under cover, over medium flame, until vegetables are soft.

In the meantime, put bacon into a frying pan and fry for 10 minutes.

Add onion to bacon and cook on a medium flame for another 10 minutes.

Prepare the cabbage:

Squeeze the cabbage and remove the excess of sour water. Keep the liquid aside.

Chop the cabbage and add into bacon with onions.

Cook, mixing often, over a small flame between 20 to 30 minutes.

The cabbage should soften.

If necessary, add a bit of broth to the cabbage, so it will not stick to the bottom of the frying pan.

Put the saucepan aside.

Strain the broth.

Throw away the vegetables or keep them for another purpose.

Reserve the meat and mushrooms.

Separate the meat from the bones and grease and cut it finely along fibers.

Add the meat into the broth.

Slice the mushrooms finely and add them into the broth.

Then add potatoes, cabbage with bacon, tomato concentrate, caraway, chili and curcuma. Salt and pepper to taste.

Bring everything to a  boil, then cover with a lid and cook over medium flame until potatoes are completely cooked, meaning for around 15 minutes.

Do not hesitate to overcook potatoes a bit – they should be really soft, even going a bit into pieces.

If your soup is not sour enough, add a bit of reserved cabbage juice.

This sour cabbage soup was rarely cooked at home.

When I was a schoolgirl, I used to eat my lunch in a school cantina, where the soup was served regularly. I had enough of it and probably that is the reason why my parents cooked it occasionally.

I became a fan of kapuśniak again a few years later, when I was a student.

Now, my favorite version is prepared with sour cabbage only – which is a typical Polish pickled cabbage - which you can buy in every shop and food market in Poland and probably every food store abroad carrying Polish food.

This version - with sour cabbage - is called "kwasnica" in the Podhale region, in the south of Poland.

There exist, however, other types of "kapusniak", made from non-pickled cabbage, or a mixture of non-pickled cabbage and sour cabbage.

 In the beginning of the nineties, when I was a student, we had a limited choice of cheap and fast restaurants: places serving traditional Polish food, McDonalds, hot dogs and “zapiekanka” (very large grilled open face sandwich, topped with cheese, ham and mushrooms). Italian or French restaurants were very expensive and Kebab places simply did not exist. As to “Chinese” restaurants, they were out of the question because of their awful quality.

This explains why, in these days, kapuśniak was always popular amongst students, as nutritive, rich and cheap.

Usually students spent their money for such pleasures of life like parties. Kraków, my hometown, has been a university center, with thousands of students and hundreds of pubs. Sometimes students suffered from hangover and lack of money on the day after the parties. Very often they cured the hangover in groups, sipping hot tea, coca cola and consuming something heavy, a bit greasy, nutritive and sour…for example, a good kapuśniak.

Nowadays I cook this soup very often when it is cold. I worked out my own favorite version of this soup, made exclusively from sour cabbage. I always add a bit of curcuma and chili – not Polish spices. They upgrade the color and taste of the soup, while it still remains a Polish dish.

Potato pancakes with chanterelles sauce

Serves 4

Ingredients

For about 20 potato pancakes

1.2 kg potatoes, peeled and washed

2 onions, peeled and washed

2 eggs

2 tablespoons flour

Salt and pepper

100 to 150 ml vegetable oil

For chanterelles sauce

500 g fresh chanterelles

2 onions, peeled, washed and finely chopped

3 tablespoons butter

200 ml sour cream

Salt and pepper

1 bunch fresh parsley, washed, dried and finely chopped

Preparation

Firstly, prepare the chanterelles sauce.

Delicately clean mushrooms from leftovers of the forest.

Scratch the stems to remove soil.

Rinse the mushrooms delicately under cold water.

Cut some mushrooms in halves, should some of them be too big.

They all should be about the same size, so they will fry evenly.

In a hot frying pan, melt butter, add onions and cook on a medium flame for 10 minutes.

Do not let onions burn.

Add mushrooms into the frying pan and sauter them on a medium flame until they release their juices and absorb them back in.

Salt and pepper generously, stir and add the cream. Put aside.

While mushrooms are cooking, prepare your potato pancakes.

Preheat the oven to medium heat.

Grate potatoes and onions finely.

Squeeze the mixture and remove any excess of water.

Add eggs, salt, pepper and flour.

Mix well until the mixture gets homogenous.

In a hot frying pan, heat the oil well. 

Using a tablespoon, drop a spoonful of potato mixture in the hot frying pan and form a flat pancake of around 6 cm large and about 1/2 centimeter thick.

Fry until the first side gets slightly brown, flip the pancake and fry the opposite side in the same manner.

Remove fried pancakes from the pan and place them on a paper towel to absorb excess of grease.

Repeat operation for the remaining potato mixture.

Once all pancakes are ready, place them on a baking sheet and put in the oven to keep them hot.

In the meantime, heat the chanterelles sauce.

Serve 4 or 5 pancakes per person on warm plates, with the sauce on the side.

Sprinkle with chopped parsley and freshly pepper.

You may want to prepare the sauce with other forest mushrooms, like ceps or bolets.

You can also use frozen mushrooms; in that case they will require more cooking if you start cooking them while still frozen. 

You may also add fresh or dry thyme, marjoram leaves, or any of your favorite herb to the potato mixture.

Potato pancakes are one of my favorite dishes from childhood. They find their origin in poor peasant cooking. Not so long ago, only bad quality or even rotten potatoes were often used for this dish.

Potato pancakes may be topped with a variety of condiments, ranging from savory (such as sour cream) to sweet (such as sugar or jam), or they may be served just plain.

My favorite version is served with a fresh forest mushroom sauce.

I do not like potato pancakes sprinkled with sugar.

Usually potatoes are grated very finely. I prefer them when they are grated on the medium grade of the grater. This makes them crispier. 

In Poland, you can find potato pancakes in nearly every fast restaurant serving traditional Polish food, but quite often they may be fried in used oil, so they will not be as tasty. Furthermore, in many quick restaurants potato flour may be also added, so the pancakes texture is gluey, instead of crispy.

You can complement this dish by adding some grated zucchini and some grated hard cheese (for example oscypek - more detail about oscypek HERE), or even some bryndza cheese.

A Quick Lunch Break

Ingredients

Salad

8 shrimps, cooked and peeled

1 avocado, washed, peeled and cut into slices

2 Thai green onion, washed and chopped

2 large leaves iceberg salad, chopped

1 tablespoon peanuts, grilled and chopped

1 pinch powdered chili

Dressing

1 clove of garlic, finely chopped

2 tablespoons peanut oil

2 to 3 tablespoons lime juice

1 teaspoon palm sugar

1 tablespoon fish sauce

Preparation

In a bowl, prepare the dressing: mix palm sugar with lime juice and fish sauce until sugar dissolves, then add peanut oil and mix. Taste and eventually adjust the seasoning according to your own taste.

Add avocado, green onion, shrimps and iceberg salad.

Mix everything well.

Sprinkle peanuts and chili over the salad.

You may sprinkle some fried onion as well.

Eat immediately.

In Paris, in the 13th “arrondisement”, there exists an important Asian quarter. There are tons of restaurants serving Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotian, Thai, Cambodian and other Far Eastern food. On the other hand, Indian food and stores can be found in a completely different part of the city, in the north of Paris.

The resources for Asian food are plentiful there. Aside from restaurants, which we visit occasionally only, as we prefer to cook at home, there are several stores offering nearly everything you need for your experiments with Asian cooking.

I visit the neighborhood quite often, and I actually would not mind moving somewhere closer to the Chinese quarter. Twice per month we do our shopping there, and then cook Asian food at home for a couple of days.

Probably the biggest food store is “Tang Frères”, located at 48, avenue d'Ivry. You can find not only the necessary spices, pastes, sauces, vinegars, cooking wines and so on, noodles, rice, dried and fresh mushrooms, but also - and most notably - fresh Asiatic herbs, vegetables, leaves, fruits, sweets, fresh and frozen meat and seafood. Thanks to such a great source of supplies, it is possible to cook genuine dishes, without any substitutes.  The shop has become more and more popular and crowded over the last few years. For that reason, it is best to go there in the morning, never on Saturday afternoons, when shopping - instead of being a pleasure - becomes a nightmare.

Last weekend, we were cooking a Thai dinner for our friends from Poland. The dinner was served quite late in the evening. I don’t like to bother my guest with taking pictures while they wait for their meal, as I don’t like taking pictures with artificial light.

After the weekend, I still had some ingredients leftover from this meal, which I had to eat before they would get rotten. I hate to throw food away.

All in all, I made a quick salad, but it was so tasty, that my husband advised to put in on the blog, in between oscypek and pierogi.

We had it for lunch (we did not plan on going outside that day, so we could enjoy its fresh garlic taste) and its preparation did not even take 10 minutes!

Pierogi Ruskie

Serves 4

Ingredients

440 g pierogi dough (click HERE for the basic pierogi dough)

600 g potatoes

200 g dry curd cheese

3 onions, peeled, washed and finely chopped

5 tablespoons clarified butter

Salt and pepper to taste

1 bunch fresh chives, washed and finely chopped

Preparation

In a large saucepan, boil water and cook potatoes, with skin on.

Strain and let cool down a bit; peel them when still warm and mash them using a potato masher.

Let potatoes cool down.

Using the potato masher, mash the cheese

Working with hands, carefully mix potatoes and cheese.

Put aside.

In a hot frying pan, melt butter, add onions and cook on a low flame for 20 minutes.

Do not let onions burn.

Combine 1/3 of onions into the potato / cheese mixture.

Reserve remaining onions.

Season with salt and pepper and mix again thorough fully.

The taste should be quite seasoned.

Prepare and cook pierogi as described HERE.

Serve immediately after cooking with the remaining onions sprinkled with some chopped chives, grilled bacon or pork back fat.

The filling of these pierogi should be piquant. Part of their peppery taste is lost while cooking, and if you do not season the stuffing with heart, the pierogi will be too blend in taste.

The best cheese for the pierogi is the Polish hard, curd cheese. In France, as in other countries, you usually can buy it in stores selling Polish and Russian food. However, curd cheese is quite easy to make at home. I will write a recipe for curd cheese in the nearest future.

The stuffing for the pierogi must be thick. The best proportions are 3 parts of potatoes and 1 part of cheese. Otherwise, the stuffing will become too liquid.

Pierogi also taste great on the second day, grilled on a frying pan with a bit of butter.

The name of this dish, in Polish, is misleading and its history is a bit complicated. A direct translation of the term “ruskie” suggests that the dish has its origins in Russia. Make no mistake! It relates to the ancient name of Ukraine, which was “Kievian Ruś”. In ancient cookbooks published before the First World War, those pierogi are called “pierogi with potatoes and cheese”. Before the Second World War, the same dish in Ukraine was called “Polish pierogi”.

It is most likely that “Pierogi Ruskie” were created by the Poles living, at that time, in the Ukrainian territories. Those territories belonged to Poland before the Second World War and the dish was very popular amongst the Polish minority leaving there.

These pierogi got their new name – “ruskie” - after the Second World War only. The frontiers of Poland had been changed by history. Thousands of Polish people were forced to leave their homes in West Ukraine and move to Poland, more particularly to western territories.

Pierogi with Bilberries

Serves 4

Ingredients

440 g pierogi dough (click HERE for the basic pierogi dough)

300 g wild bilberries (Vaccinium myrtillus)

1 tablespoon flour

200 ml sour cream or thick natural yogurt

1 tablespoon powdered sugar

2 tablespoon butter

3 tablespoons breadcrumbs

Preparation

Sort out the bilberries and remove all rotten fruits and remaining leaves.

Put the berries in a bowl and delicately mix them with flour; do not mash the fruits.

In a small saucepan, melt butter; add breadcrumbs and fry on a very small flame until gold and crispy. Put aside.

Mix cream with sugar, and put aside.

Prepare pierogi with the berries, and cook them as described in the basic recipe LINK.

Serve immediately after cooking.

Sprinkle with cream and breadcrumbs on top (warm them up right before serving).

I have a sentiment to wild bilberries, as I spent tons of hours in my life picking them up in the summertime. Besides, I like them a lot. They are best fresh, just collected in the morning. Such an opportunity is of course not common nowadays, as I do not live in Poland and even when I visit Kraków, the last thing I think about is to jump into a car at 5 a.m., and drive several kilometers to find a forest, and the fruits. I buy my berries on a local market from local women, who come regularly from outside Kraków. The berries are still cheap, much more than in France, as all other wild fruits, where I cannot afford them to buy in wholesale quantities.

I like these berries the most with just a bit of thick, natural yogurt, some vanilla grains and a pinch or two of sugar.

And, of course, in pierogi, as a filling.

I am a great fan of pierogi, but not a huge amateur of fruits. In Poland, during summertime, people cook a lot of pierogi with various fruits inside. Those with wild bilberries I like the most. As a dressing, except for cream or thick yoghurt, I always add a bit of breadcrumbs delicately fried on a frying pan with freshly melted butter - this is so unhealthy, but awfully tasty!

You can find those pierogi in the summertime in nearly every bar mleczny (“milk bar” - a type of quick restaurant, about which I will write later), cantina, pierogarnia (a type of restaurant carrying only pierogi) as well as better restaurants serving traditional food.

Those pierogi may be eaten cold, as a dessert, but then the dough, in my opinion, is too tough, and I prefer them just cooked, served hot.

Pierogi - Basic Dough Recipe

Serves 4

The following quantities will make about 440 g of dough.

If properly rolled out, it will make about 40 to 50 pierogi.

Dough

Ingredients

280 g flour (have some extra flour handy to adjust the recipe and to work the dough and roll it out)

½ teaspoon salt

1 egg

1 teaspoon butter

100 ml mineral sparkling water, at room temperature (have some extra water to adjust the recipe)

Preparation

Sift flour on your working table.

Form a well in the centre of the flour.

Place the egg, salt, butter in the well and mix all the ingredients with as much flour as possible.

Then start adding water, 2 tablespoons at a time. Knead the dough so the water is completely absorbed before adding the 2 following tablespoons of water. Should you add too much water, the dough will become sticky; in that case, add little by little the extra flour until the dough is no longer sticky.

Knead the dough for about 15 minutes; it should become smooth, shiny and elastic.

Divide the dough into 2 equal parts.

Place the first part on your working table.

Wrap the second part in a plastic film and put aside.

Sprinkle some flour on your station and start rolling out the dough until it is between 1 and 2 millimeters thick.

Occasionally, flip the dough and sprinkle some flour over it so it does not stick to the table.

Preparation of pierogi – instructions applicable to all types of pierogi presented in my blog

When dough is rolled out, cut disks of between 4 to 6 centimeters using a cookie cutter or, if not available, a kitchen glass.

Put the scraps of leftover dough together and gently knead to form a small ball. Wrap in plastic film and put aside to roll out later.

Place about 1 teaspoon of stuffing in the middle of each disk.

The stuffing must not reach the edge of the disk or it will prevent the proper sealing of the pierogi.

Fold disk in half and pinch edges together.

Should the dough be too dry, it will not seal properly. In that situation, use a brush to moist the edges of the disk, and pinch them together.

Place pierogi on a flat dish sprinkled with flour, and cover with a light cotton towel.

Repeat to prepare pierogi from the second part of dough and scraps.

Cooking of pierogi – instructions applicable to all types of pierogi presented in my blog

In a large saucepan (about 5 liter capacity), bring to a boil 3 liters of water; add some oil and a flat teaspoon of salt.

Drop a few pierogi at a time, bring again to a boil and reduce flame.

When pierogi rise to the surface, let simmer another 3 to 4 minutes.

Taste one of the pierogi to check that the dough is well cooked.

Do not strain them; use a slotted spoon to remove them from water and place over a paper towel to remove the excess of water.

Serve immediately according to your particular pierogi recipe.

Pierogi is the name of famous Polish half-circular dumplings made from noodle flour dough, finely rolled, cooked and stuffed with various fillings.

Despite the cultural and culinary changes in last twenty years, they remain one of the most popular Polish daily dishes, usually served in fast restaurants, school cantinas and at home. You can buy them as well in every food shop in Poland, usually frozen.

Pierogi are known in Poland probably since the middle ages and had been incorporated into Polish culinary tradition from the Far East through the Kievian Rus. The word “pierogi” appeared in Polish language in the XVIIth century.

The most traditional fillings of the pierogi are: cooked, mashed potatoes with curd cheese and onions, ground meat, cooked or pickled cabbage with mushrooms, buckwheat kasha, curd cheese with sweet or spicy additions, spinach, bryndza cheese, seasonal fruits such as strawberries, bilberries, cherries, wild cherries and, in some regions of Poland - lentils.

On the other hand, the imagination of my compatriots in pierogi field developed over the last years and does not know any limits. In many Polish cities you can find fancy pierogi houses – called “pierogarnia”, small restaurants exclusively serving pierogi. There, you can eat pierogi with more sophisticated fillings, expensive and unusual stuffing.

Today rich pierogi reality reminds me of the times when I was a school girl eating her obiad in a school cantina every day for 12 years. During my school times I became an enemy of all Polish traditional flour dishes. The school reality in the eighties was very often not tasty. School pierogi dough was thick, tough, not tasty, gluey with a little bit of the stuffing, so little, that you nearly could not feel it when eating.

After I left for France and despite my further fascination with cooking from foreign countries, I started to discover again Polish food.  I had been investigating older members of my family about traditional recipes for classical Polish dishes, including the good recipe for the pierogi dough.

In Poland, there are tens (or maybe even hundreds) recipes for the pierogi dough. I can say that there are as many recipes as households preparing pierogi. However, the best pierogi are those which have a very fine, elastic dough and a lot of tasty stuffing inside. My family classical pierogi recipe consists in flour, sparkling mineral water and salt. It is easy to roll it very finely.

Pierogi need small accompaniments. Salty pierogi go ideally with clarified butter, caramelized onions, fried bacon, lard or crème fraiche. I like to add fresh parmiggiano or oscypek and to sprinkle them with fresh greens: chopped chives, parsley, green onions, fresh mint, thyme or other favorite herb. Sweet pierogi taste best with cream or thick yogurt mixed with some vanilla and sugar.

Pierogi taste delicious the day after, especially if you will grill them in a frying pan with a bit of butter. They also freeze very well, so you do not have to eat everything at once. 

Oscypek with Lingonberry Preserves

Serves 4

Ingredients:

1 oscypek (if you cannot get oscypek you can use other oscypek-like hard mountain salty and smoked cheeses which you can buy on Polish food markets in the south of Poland, food stores in Poland and sometimes food stores with Polish items in other countries)

8 tablespoons lingonberry preserves (you can replace by cranberry preserves) - for the recipe for the preserves click here.

Preparation:

Cut oscypek into 1 cm slices.

Heat a frying pan, fry the slices on both sides, until it starts melting and getting a gold color.

Put the slices of cheese on warm plates and serve quickly with lingonberry preserves on top of each slice.

You can also grill the oscypek in your oven, using a baking sheet.

If you like bacon, it is also possible to roll a slice of oscypek into a thin slice of bacon and grill it until bacon becomes crispy.

I think that the oscypek and other oscypek-like mountain cheeses also taste delicious when eaten just cut into thin slices as an accompaniment to tartines, sandwiches and salads. You can shred it on your łazanki (type of Polish square noodles), pierogi or many other pasta and noodle-like dishes, including Polish “gnocchi”, various sorts of potato and vegetable pancakes and even fusion pizzas - whatever you like.

About a little mountaineer who did an international career

Except for the “bundz” and “bryndza”, oscypek is my favorite Polish cheese.

And maybe the only one known a bit abroad.

What is this oscypek?

It has a very characteristic long, doubled-edged conic shape with decorative patterns.

When you eat the cheese, it makes a particular noise in the mouth. It creaks. The taste is intense, salty and smoked. The inside structure is hard, but at the same time elastic.

As a small girl, I spent many summer holidays in the area of Białka Tatrzańska, now a big and overloaded touristic village close to the Tatry Mountains, in the Podhale region. I remember my parents and me visiting from time to time some shepherds’ wooden houses where different cheeses had traditionally been manufactured from the sheep’s and cow’s milk. Amongst them - oscypek - a cheese that made an international career in that sense that a few years ago it was registered within the EU system as a regional product. Now oscypek is a protected name under the EU’s Protected Designation of Origin geographical indication.

The best oscypek should only be made out of sheep’s milk; however current regulations allow for the addition of a certain amount of cow’s milk. It is still manufactured with traditional methods between May and October in some parts of southern Poland, mostly in Podhale.

The picture of oscypek presented in this blog was made in June last year, when I visited Poland.

How to do this cheese? Well, I am not a slow-foody expert and I do not know so much about production of cheeses in general. However, firstly the unpasterurized sheep's milk with addition of rennet is turned into a kind of curd. Such a cheese is then repeatedly rinsed with boiling water and squeezed. The cheese is pressed into wooden forms in decorative shapes. The forms are then placed in a barrel filled with brine for a day or two, after which they are placed close to the roof inside a special wooden hut and smoked for several days.

The first recorded recipe for oscypek was allegedly given in the XVIIIth Century; however remarks concerning cheese production had been made before.

But be careful: since registration within the EU system, it is difficult to find genuine oscypek as the population of sheep in Poland became lower and the cheese production expensive.

However, in many shops and local food markets in the south of Poland you can buy “oscypek-like” smoked cheeses. They contain much more cow milk or are made only from the latter. They are sold under the names of “gołka”, “mountain cheese” or “scypek” - the latter, in my opinion should not be allowed, as it is misleading.

Those cheeses have various shapes, and they cannot be named “oscypek”, although in practice everybody calls them exactly that name.

A lot of them also are tasty, so you can grill them as explained in this recipe.

Find out more about oscypek:

In English:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscypek

http://www1.american.edu/ted/polish-cheese.htm

http://www.videocrux.com/video/7391i7392/A-shepherd-making-Oscypek-cheese-in-Tatras-mountains

In French:

http://www.gret.org/ressource/pdf/oscypeck_2002.pdf

Lingonberry Preserves

Makes about 3 jars of 200 ml each.

Ingredients

1 liter lingonberries (about 800 g)

230 g granulated sugar

300 g hard pears, washed, peeled and cut into quarters or eighths, depending on their sizes

100 ml water, at room temperature

Preparation

In a saucepan, boil water and sugar to obtain a syrup.

Add the pears to the syrup and let simmer for ½ an hour.

The cooking time may vary depending on the ripeness of the pears.

In the meantime, sort out the lingonberries and remove all rotten fruits and remaining leaves.

Do not wash the berries.

When pears are soft and slightly transparent, add the berries to the syrup.

Simmer for about 40 minutes.

Do not stir; instead, shake the saucepan left and right occasionally, and make sure that they are not burning.

Remove the foam that is forming on the surface of the syrup.

When berries become slightly transparent, stop the cooking process and pour the preserves into the sterilized jars.

Close the jars and flip them upside down for 20 minutes.

Let cool down before refrigerating.

Should you wish to keep your preserves for more than 2 to 3 weeks, you will need to pasteurize them in boiling water for 20 minutes.

These preserves make a wonderful complement to Pâtés, meat terrines, baked meats, hot or cold, and certain types of cheeses, for example, oscypek.

Should you want to keep your lingonberry preserves for a longer time you should pasteurize them in jars. Once you put warm preserves in clean sterilized jars as indicated in my recipe, seal the jars and immediately place them for 20 minutes in a boiling water bath. Remember that the jars cannot touch the bottom of the saucepan so you should place them in a basket and then place the basket into boiling water. The jars in the basket should not touch each other.

Before placing the jars into water, screw-on the jar rings firmly, but do not over-tighten them.

Water in the saucepan should come 1 cm below the top of the jars.

After 15 minutes remove jars from the water bath, close them tighter, let cool down and store them in a dark place.

Lingonberry is a small plant with edible red fruits.

As far as I know, it is not cultivated in Poland.

The fruits are collected in the wild, in the forests.

The berries are tart. They are almost always cooked and sweetened before eating as preserves, juice or syrup. Raw fruits may however be just mashed with sugar, which preserves most of their nutrients.

In Poland, you can still buy raw lingonberries on traditional food markets. When I am in Krakow during summertime, I try to buy them on a famous food market called “Kleparz market” and I prepare the preserves. I serve them to my family with meat or oscypek cheese. The preserves have a bit of a tart aftertaste, but that is exactly what I love in them.

In the 80’s, preparation of various preserves was a big culinary tradition in my family. We were spending most of our summers close to the Tatry Mountains. At that time I had a small doggy, which my parents bought for me one day on a traditional animal market in the town of Nowy Targ. Piwko (“a little beer”), a little mountain doggy was always taken with us for long escapades to the forest. I remember him as a big amateur of small, red fruits.

We were spending a lot of time in local forests picking up wild fruits. Not only because there was a crisis, but also because it was a good culinary tradition to have homemade preserves.