Lesser Poland Food & Traditional Cuisine

The food of Lesser Poland divides between the city and the mountains, and both have contributed something the rest of the world eats.

Krakow’s cooking carries two extra layers that northern Poland lacks. The Austrian period left schnitzel, strudel and a coffee-house culture; the Jewish community left an inheritance that runs far deeper than is usually acknowledged, including the ancestor of the bagel — the obwarzanek, a boiled-then-baked ring sold from blue carts on every corner and holding a protected designation of origin.

In the mountains, the Gorale cuisine is pastoral: sheep’s milk, smoked cheese, mutton, potato and cabbage, cooked over wood. The shepherds’ huts on the high pastures still make cheese the traditional way in summer.

Running through both is the general Polish foundation — rye, sourness from fermentation, pork, forest mushrooms, and soups taken seriously as a course rather than a starter.

Oscypek is the region’s protected treasure: a smoked cheese of salted sheep’s milk, pressed in a carved wooden mould into a decorated spindle shape and smoked in a shepherd’s hut. Made only in the Tatra foothills between May and September by licensed producers, it is usually grilled and served with cranberry jam. Most of what is sold on Zakopane’s main street is not the real thing.

Obwarzanek krakowski — the braided ring of dough boiled then baked and topped with poppy seed or salt, sold from street carts since the fourteenth century and the plausible ancestor of the bagel.

Zapiekanka, a halved baguette with mushroom, cheese and whatever else, baked and drenched in sauce, is the Krakow late-night food, sold from the round kiosk in the middle of Kazimierz’s Plac Nowy.

Kwasnica is the Gorale sauerkraut soup, sour and smoky with ribs, served in the mountains.

Also: maczanka krakowska, slow-braised pork in a roll; placki ziemniaczane potato pancakes, served in the mountains with goulash; and kremowka, the cream cake John Paul II mentioned fondly and which Wadowice has traded on ever since.

Plac Nowy in Kazimierz is the region’s most characterful food place: a circular brick building that was the Jewish quarter’s kosher poultry market, now ringed by hatches selling zapiekanki until the small hours, with a produce and flea market around it by day.

Stary Kleparz is Krakow’s proper working market — trading since the twelfth century, with seasonal produce, pickles by the barrel, and forest mushrooms in autumn.

Milk bars survive in Krakow as in Warsaw, subsidised canteens serving very cheap traditional food; several near the centre are used by students and pensioners rather than visitors.

In the mountains, the mountain huts — schroniska — serve kwasnica, pierogi and tea to walkers, and are institutions in their own right; Murowaniec and the hut at Morskie Oko are the classics.

Oscypek should be bought from a producer or a marked stall with the protected designation, not from the tourist strip.

Lesser Poland is, slightly unexpectedly, the centre of Poland’s revived wine industry. The Malopolska wine trail runs through the hills around Krakow, Tarnow and Nowy Sacz, with dozens of small vineyards planted since the 2000s growing cool-climate and hybrid varieties — Solaris, Seyval Blanc, Rondo, Regent — and increasingly Riesling and Pinot Noir as the climate shifts. Several are open for tasting and the wines are light, crisp and improving quickly.

There is precedent: vineyards existed here in the Middle Ages, tended by monasteries, before climate and cheap Hungarian imports killed the industry off.

The older traditions remain stronger. Vodka and mead as elsewhere in Poland, and in the mountains the Gorale drink herbata po goralsku — tea with a shot of spirit in it — and their own plum and juniper infusions.

Krakow also has a serious craft beer scene and excellent coffee houses, the latter an Austrian inheritance.