Masovia Food & Traditional Cuisine

Masovian cooking is Polish cooking in its central form — hearty, built on what grows on a cold plain with poor soil, and defined by sourness more than by spice.

The sour comes from fermentation, which runs through the whole cuisine: soured rye flour for zurek, fermented beetroot juice for barszcz, sauerkraut, soured cucumbers and soured milk. It is the flavour Poles miss when they are away.

The staples are rye, potato, cabbage, beetroot, mushrooms gathered in the pine forests, and pork. Dill, marjoram, caraway and horseradish do the seasoning.

Warsaw adds two things. One is the milk bar, the bar mleczny — state-subsidised canteens created in the communist period, several of which survive, serving genuinely cheap traditional food at formica tables. The other is a Jewish culinary inheritance that shaped the city’s food for centuries and largely vanished with its people, though gefilte fish, cholent and rye bread left permanent marks.

And since the 2000s, a capital-city restaurant scene that has become genuinely ambitious.

Pierogi are the obvious starting point — dumplings filled with ruskie potato and curd cheese, with meat, with cabbage and mushroom, or with seasonal fruit — boiled and often then fried in butter with onion.

Zurek is the soup that defines the region: a sour rye soup, made from a fermented starter, with white sausage, potato and a halved boiled egg, sometimes served in a bread bowl.

Barszcz, clear beetroot broth, is drunk from a cup at Christmas with tiny mushroom-filled uszka, and served as a soup the rest of the year.

Bigos, the hunter’s stew of sauerkraut, fresh cabbage, several meats and dried mushrooms, is cooked over days and improves each time it is reheated.

Kotlet schabowy, a breaded pork cutlet with potatoes and mizeria cucumber salad, is the Sunday dinner of the whole country.

Also: golabki cabbage rolls; flaki tripe soup, a Warsaw speciality; pyzy potato dumplings; and paczki, the rose-jam doughnuts eaten in quantity on Fat Thursday.

Milk bars are the institution worth going out of your way for. Several survive in Warsaw — Bambino and Prasowy among them — serving soup, pierogi and cutlets for a few zloty at shared tables. Order at the counter, take your tray, return it yourself. They are subsidised, used by students and pensioners alike, and are a genuine survival rather than a revival.

Hala Mirowska and Hala Koszyki are the two poles of Warsaw market life: the first a working hall with butchers, pickle stalls and the women selling forest mushrooms and blueberries outside in season; the second a beautifully restored hall turned into a food court, which is pleasant and quite different.

Wild mushrooms are a serious national pursuit. From August to October, families go picking in the Masovian pine forests, and the roadside stalls sell what they find.

Christmas Eve — Wigilia — is the year’s great meal: twelve meatless dishes, carp, barszcz with uszka, poppyseed cake, and a wafer shared around the table before eating.

Vodka accompanies rather than precedes food, drunk cold in small glasses.

Masovia is too far north for a traditional wine industry, and Poland’s drinking heritage is built on grain and fruit instead — but both halves of that are worth knowing.

Vodka is the national spirit and Poland contests its invention with Russia. Distilled from rye or potato, it is drunk neat, cold and in one, with food rather than before it. Zubrowka, flavoured with a blade of bison grass from the Bialowieza forest, is the best-known flavoured version.

Mead — miod pitny — is the older tradition, made in Poland for a thousand years and classified by how much water is added to the honey; the richest, poltorak, ages for years and is a protected product.

Nalewki, fruit and herb infusions made at home from cherries, sloes or quince, are the domestic tradition and are offered to guests.

Polish wine does now exist as a small industry, mostly in the warmer south and west rather than in Masovia, and a handful of vineyards near the Vistula around Kazimierz are experimenting with cool-climate varieties.

Polish craft beer is excellent and Warsaw has plenty of it.