On a break back in October, I headed off on a two week tour of Poland. I wanted to give life to my extensive reading knowledge of the country’s WWII history. My primary conception of the Poles were as the unlucky ones overrun by Hitler’s first blitzkrieg. Well, I also had a random rock video playing in my head of the Winged Hussars, but that’s a different kind of memory. I’m a little ashamed to admit that it wasn’t until I crossed the border from Germany into Poland that I began to have other memories, ones connected to my childhood. I regularly heard my grandmother say with a smile, “We have enough food to feed the Polish Army!” when the entire family got together. I grew up knowing that both grandparents were Polish, but other than the jokes and my grandmother’s maiden name, Tycz (a quintessentially Polish name) we didn’t talk about it much. As I gazed at the countryside beyond my window, I wondered why I didn’t know more.
I spent my first weekend in Poznań where I finished grading, but also enjoyed my first exposure to the culture. The old city square, the Stary Rynek was quaint and unique in a way I haven’t seen yet here in Europe. It was actually a square within a square as the Town Hall, a stately, brick-roofed museum, and brightly painted shops emerged from the center of a square with gold-gilded fountains in each corner. The Town Hall, originally built in the mid-1200’s, burned in a town fire in the mid-1500’s. Legend has it that the town was roasting venison to celebrate the rebuilt town hall, but the cook got distracted by the festivities. The venison roast fell in into the fire and burned. The cook rushed around to find replacement meat and spotted two goats in a nearby field. Dragging them into the town hall kitchen, they escaped, ran up the tower, and began butting heads on a turret overlooking the town. The town pardoned the goats and commemorated the botched meal with goats that emerge from the clock tower every day at noon to re-enact the tower head butt. Standing in that brightly painted square, with a group of selfie-taking, cell-phone-holding Poles felt like a juxtaposition of the old world and new.
My visit to Poland wasn’t the first time I ate pierogies. That happened in one of my dear friend’s kitchen years before. I find it odd that, despite my grandparent’s Polish heritage, my first experience with this traditional Polish dish was dumping them from a store bought bag of Mrs. T’s Pierogies pulled from a freezer. Let’s be honest, it’s probably a good thing that this potato and dough loving kid didn’t realize the joy of blending those two foods together until my 20’s. That Americanized version of the dumplings was no small reason for my desire to roam through Poland. I considered making it my personal quest to sample “the real deal” until I couldn’t take any more.
The food my grandmother prepared in her kitchen of brown tiles and plain wood cupboards was eclectic, designed to feed a large family easily. I remember Chop Suey, which was more like a soup resembling the American-Chinese dish I’ve seen since; homemade Mac’n’cheese that devolved into noodles with Velveeta; a spaghetti I still make to this day laden with cumin that creates a unique comfort food; and occasionally cabbage rolls. I wish I had thought to ask her why pierogies never made the list, perhaps because the process would have been too complicated for her large brood.
As I sat in the town square of Poznań with my delightfully dark beer and steaming plate of onion pirogi smothered in more onions and bacon, I thought of my grandma and wondered what she would think of her granddaughter’s trip to the land from which she got her name and her jokes. I went in search of living history and found a connection to my living past.