September. Folks, flies and wasps cling to the final of the blackberries and the primary delicate pears of autumn, whereas cherry plums and mirabelles lie putrefying on concrete pavements. Their sharp vinegary scent reminds us that it’s time to say goodbye to summer season and put together for the approaching of winter. So, go on! Order a number of kilos of purple plums from the greengrocer’s or deliver them over in crates from the household orchard. Or else you may lug them over from the neighbour’s allotment in reusable grocery store luggage. Their pores and skin should really feel agency beneath your fingers and the juicy, honey-coloured flesh ought to coat the tongue with its cussed, acidic sweetness. That is essential.
Then it will likely be time to name your mates to boast about your takings and invite them to share in your labours, assuring them that the plums are regionally sourced and (virtually) definitely haven’t been sprayed. Simply ensure they carry their very own knives. The fruit is finest cleaned in a single batch, beneath the bathe or within the bathtub. Jars must be steamed in a dishwasher together with knives.
As soon as final yr’s jar lids have been discovered, they’re finest boiled in a saucepan. The rusty ones have to be discarded.
Now reduce the clear plums, take away stones and place in massive, vast saucepans or in a heavy frying pan. Don’t peel or sweeten. Decrease the warmth, have a chat about inflation and, despite the fact that you might be dropping a few of your preliminary enthusiasm, stir the fruit with a wood spatula till the juices run.
Proceed till the combination boils, disintegrates and is remodeled right into a luscious purple paste, which ought to follow your spoon however come away simply from the bottom of the saucepan. A kilogram of purple plums will produce one jar of powidl unfold, presumably two. It’s due to this fact advisable to pre-set some guidelines and divide the spoils equally among the many staff, so nobody goes away empty-handed. Truthful distribution is the very basis of this type of enterprise. Some labourers do the chopping, others stir, others nonetheless gossip. Any person will likely let loose the canine and the kids as a result of they’re so bored, or go to fetch a buddy who’s working late as a result of she overslept after which bought misplaced in a maze of roadworks. The very best, most adroit staff must be despatched to fill jars with boiling plum powidl – ideally armed with a spoon, a large funnel and nerves of metal.
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Powidl: thick, unsweetened plum marmalade. You stick a spoon into it and also you’ve bought a popsicle. It may possibly maintain for years and is crucial for a lot of festive bakes throughout japanese Europe.
Don’t overfill as a result of, when the combination is pasteurized, the jars might explode. Pasteurize your entire batch in a chilly oven, heated regularly – with jars tightly closed – to a temperature of 130 levels centigrade. As soon as the required temperature is reached, prepare dinner for half an hour, then cool within the oven till room temperature is restored. On your personal peace of thoughts, end by putting the jars the wrong way up, on their lids, so they’re properly drawn in.
After that, there’s the clearing as much as do, however the sight of a piece floor lined with jars of powidl might supply some kind of compensation. Slightly just like the thought that someday we’ll all be grateful to 1 one other for having made the hassle. As a result of preserves, time-honoured as they’re, signify the meals of the long run. They’re a easy booster in instances of hassle, uncertainty, instability, shortage, starvation, concern and poverty. They protect life.
Veganism, necessity and wish
The connection between veganism and fundamental human want is powerfully highlighted in Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak’s e-book Peasant Ladies (Chłopki). It makes me flush as I learn it as a result of, primarily, it is a e-book about my circle of relatives. It affords a window into the lives of the aunts and grandmothers of so many people in Poland: ‘robust hard-wearing ladies’ with ‘legendary foresight and a unprecedented capability for sheer slog’ to whom we owe the truth that we’re nonetheless right here.
They labored a full eighteen hours a day, ‘which is to say over 15% longer than males’, regardless of how hungry they had been or how chilly the situations. They laboured within the fields, taken care of animals, cared for kids, cooked for the household, cleaned, mended, span, milked, and embroidered. There was no respite and this went on all through their lives.
Our greatest-loved preserves have an sad historical past, as Kuciel-Frydyszak reveals:
The countryside fed the cities, however didn’t feed itself… you needed to know tips on how to make use of something edible, regardless of how onerous and stringy it was. The costs of nation produce had been continually falling dramatically, and the whole lot else was more and more costly. As meals producers, nation ladies didn’t eat the animals they bred, except they had been comparatively wealthy… Each day fare consisted of potatoes with cornmeal or pulses.
This model of veganism was impressed by necessity, not alternative. It was badly balanced – with ‘soups’ made solely of water and sorrel, for instance – and sometimes based mostly on merchandise that had gone off, resembling overboiled noodles or pancakes comprised of rotten potatoes. Stuff like this might be used up at residence as a result of nobody would purchase it anyway.
Between 1918 and 1939, within the Second Polish Republic, many ladies had little concept about tips on how to make preserves, however virtually all households ready for winter by making sauerkraut … Neighbours would come over with their well-used barrels which typically leaked or had lacking staves … A broken barrel must be mended after which the ladies set to work. After the cabbage has been properly salted, they’d go searching for a kid with clear ft which might match into the barrel and do job beating down the contents.
A century on, Marta Dymek printed her e-book Meals the Polish method [Jadłonomia po polsku] which has come to be considered a plant-based cookery bible in Poland. When presenting her sauerkraut recipe ‘for up to date cooks’, Dymek wrote:
A number of years in the past, if anybody had informed me I must be making my very own sauerkraut, I’d have dismissed it as absurd. How a lot are you able to do, in spite of everything?.. However the consequence proved scrumptious. It may be served on sandwiches with hummus, in a bagel with pâté, or straight out of the jar. House-made is totally completely different from the variability offered in outlets, and even on the highest high quality greengrocer’s. It’s agency, aromatic and crunchy, like treading on freshly fallen snow. Pickling cabbage is easy and requires no particular tools or situations at residence. You possibly can pickle in a studio flat or an IKEA kitchen, and you may definitely do it for one.
Dymek’s recipes mix cabbage with turmeric, cinnamon or recent cranberry – however not for the needs of culinary gentrification. Her intention is quite to revive dignity to dishes and culinary practices which have come to be related to poverty, for the reason that time communism fell and ‘world meals’ sections appeared in city grocery outlets. In dreaming up cabbage recipes ‘for up to date cooks’, Dymek seeks to show that pickling is greater than only a boring, and gruellingly work-intensive, relic from a previous marked by relentless meals shortages. It’s a treasured cultural legacy. It might be a pity if the sauerkraut custom vanished solely to get replaced by kimchi.
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Tradition wars: sauerkraut versus kimchi within the intercontinental contest of cabbages.
The deficiencies of nation life
How is it that the labour-intensive, lacklustre dishes which as soon as served as staple meals for the poorest in Polish society, have moved into the repertoire of city cooks to be served up at dinner events given by middle- and upper-class literati? It appears to me that Kuciel-Frydyszak might be on to one thing when she factors out that, because the granddaughters and great-granddaughters of peasant farmers’ wives, we affiliate the style of pickles much less with starvation and poverty, than with a nostalgia for childhood.
We bear in mind summer season expeditions to the allotment and winter descents deep into the cool, clammy darkness of the cellar. We recall the heat and safety of a grandmother’s cooking, that feeling of fullness and satisfaction.Think about Maciej Jakubowiak’s account of his grandmother’s life in Dwutygodnik (coming quickly in English in Eurozine!), written as he was making an attempt to unravel the cultural and nationwide story behind his household’s susceptibility to weight problems:
Albina knew about need. And so, when she grew to become a mom, she promised herself that her little one would by no means go hungry. She fed it (that’s to say Hanka) with cartloads of meals, so nobody would ever see the kid’s ribs, so the kid would develop, so it might have vitality and fats to spare. And, certain sufficient, it did.
No shock then that Jakubowiak’s childhood, like that of so many people, was outlined by gathering and preserving meals merchandise:
There could be kilo after kilo of inexperienced beans, new potatoes, peas, cabbages, area cucumbers, raspberries, strawberries. Every little thing was introduced down from the allotment beginning late spring and all through the summer season months. As the top of the vacations approached, there could be a surge of exercise. The produce needed to be preserved and bottled, the cucumbers pickled, and candy syrup poured over the strawberries and raspberries.
Manufacturing on this scale would have been inconceivable for a homemaker engaged on her personal, regardless of how decided or expert she was. The extra in order she would have been dwelling in a rustic solely that was solely partially electrified and, in lots of locations, with out sewers. Underneath these situations, as Małgorzata Szpakowska explains in To need and to have (Chcieć i mieć), all work associated to managing a family expanded ‘to epic proportions’.
The shortage of fundamental infrastructure in villages and small cities meant that complete communities needed to be concerned in managing and preserving regionally sourced produce. Each technology was known as to contribute: ladies, males, grandparents and grandchildren, to not point out the neighbours and work colleagues.
Szpakowska emphasizes the integrative impact of this type of grassroots teamwork in a rustic decimated by the Second World Conflict and scarred by pressured migration. The manufacturing and trade of home made and ‘homegrown’ preserves, definitely helped feed the household in instances when rampant inflation and shortages had been rife. But it surely additionally tamed post-war city actuality, created new social hyperlinks, and helped change a misplaced previous. It supplied individuals a way of residence in an alien world.
Because the Polish Folks’s Republic established itself, after 1947, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers acquired allotments and moved, or had been forcibly transferred, from rural areas to cities. In an unfamiliar city surroundings, they had been anticipated to prepare dinner in a different way, in ways in which had been more healthy, extra diversified, but nonetheless ‘conventional’. That’s to say, in the way in which servants armed with juicers, meat grinders and meals mincers as soon as cooked for the richest sector of pre-war Polish society. Kuciel-Frydryszak leaves us no illusions:
Taking pleasure in meals was historically a privilege of the the Aristocracy.
Peasant ladies ate to not benefit from the expertise, however to have the power to go on working. Insofar as they ate in any respect, that’s, as a result of males, kids and animals at all times had precedence.
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Cultural heritage in combined media: bitter cherries, strawberries and paperback. Preserves on a Hungarian family’s bookshelf.
Strategies for preserving meals, which we affiliate with nation dwelling and consider as ‘conventional’, had been actually learnt from educated city ladies: landed gentry, regional campaigners, former home servants and mentors of nation wives’ teams, who went into the countryside within the Thirties with a mission to ‘civilize’ rural communities. Extra lately, the cookery writer Marta Dymek visited related nation wives’ teams whereas engaged on her e-book Meals the Polish method – a handbook of recipes for historically seasonal, plant-based dishes which many people will bear in mind our grandmothers cooking, though the reassuring consolation they provide is illusory as a result of they had been invented in response to poverty and widespread shortages.Marta Sapała writes about these unacknowledged abilities in one other e-book entitled Wasted (Na marne), which examines the astonishing scale of recent meals wastage. The phrases she makes use of to handle one in all her forebears are profoundly shifting:
You could possibly, in the event you wished, run workshops on “cooking for survival” – the type that value at the least 100 zloty to attend, and get publicized in social media or magazines concerning the good life, stuffed with refined graphics… Even now, as you stroll residence by way of the beech forest the place pigweed grows by the lake… you might be tempted to select some. How do you prepare dinner it, individuals would ask? Oh, simply fry it up in oil! It’ll be actually tasty, with a nutty kind of flavour. Or you may have it with eggs, in an omelette if you would like. In spite of everything, eggs are simply obtainable now. They had been uncommon as soon as, a delicacy.
You possibly can learn Marta Sapała’s article on refrigeration and meals preservation in Polish authentic in Dwutygodnik or in English in Eurozine.
Poisons that received’t be rinsed away
Pasteurization was a channel for social mobility. It inspired emancipation: it fermented starvation and disgrace, it bottled emotions of delight and private resourcefulness, it colonized the intestine of a whole social surroundings with bacterial flora and life-giving yeast. This was ecological solidarity of the purest form – washed, peeled, chopped, blanched, and locked in a glass jar quite than a plastic pill.
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Protect show in a personal residence. Jams, marmelades, compotes, pickles and syrups.
Am I exaggerating? Am I projecting my private, trendy sensibilities onto previous practices when the 2 share nothing in widespread? Am I rewriting historical past by way of my evaluation of Polish meals tradition, or in search of enlightenment within the shadow of ignorance? In spite of everything, our grandmothers couldn’t presumably have been conscious of how pickles have an effect on the microbiome, or understood their environmental significance, proper? Proper?
Not totally. After I look by way of cookery books about preserving meals, printed between the Sixties and the Nineteen Nineties, I’m struck by how a lot house is given to the popularization of scientific know-how, not nearly fermentation however concerning the ecological surroundings. Take Irena Gumowska’s The solar in jars (Słonce w słoikach) which accompanied my grandmother, yr by yr, in her unceasing campaign to protect meals:
As everybody now is aware of, preserves shouldn’t be made out of fruit grown in a poisonous surroundings. Toxic substances can’t be rinsed away or eliminated, and their toxicity might improve because the product turns into more and more dense. It has been proven that wild berries are non-toxic provided that they develop greater than 30 metres away from the street. In lots of instances the secure distance could be as a lot as 500 metres… Fruit and greens from allotments located in Kraków have been discovered to include 2 to 10 instances extra heavy metals than crops grown in gardens or fields 30 kilometres from the town… Greens grown in Silesia have 2 to 9 instances extra cadmium, and a couple of.5 to 4.5 extra lead, than greens from allotments in Kraków. That’s the way in which it’s.
Everybody now is aware of. That’s the way in which it’s. It’s apparent. Ecological consciousness, and the nous it takes to outlive in instances of local weather change, are scarcely novelties within the Polish context. These abilities didn’t come to us from the West, regardless of how typically we discuss a ‘trend’ for the sluggish life, zero waste, DIY or degrowth. It’s not in France or the UK, however in our grandmothers’ flats, within the huts the place our great-grandmothers lived, and available in the market halls of Ukraine, Georgia and Kazakhstan right this moment, that tables are precariously weighed down by containers brimming with pickled greens, sugary fruit conserves, or conventional Jewish marinades. Preserves are the expression of fermenting regional cultures.
A rural aftertaste of warfare
Olia Hercules writes about this regional ferment fantastically in Flavours of the countryside (Sielskie smakiv) a prepare dinner e-book rooted within the riches of Ukrainian nation summers:
In Ukraine right this moment you could find Transcarpathian villages during which Hungarian, Slovak and Polish dishes seem on the desk beside Ukrainian nationwide dishes resembling borscht and stuffed dumplings (varenyky)… Landscapes change together with the individuals… The northern marshes are stuffed with blueberries, cranberries, sea buckthorn and wild rose… Herbs rising within the Lviv area are completely different from these in southern areas of the nation. You possibly can’t typically get recent coriander, however thyme and marjoram can be found in all places. In June the markets in Lviv show jars of candy wild strawberries lined with fern leaves… Central Ukraine affords a number of meals masking a spread of areas – produce of the north resembling mushrooms and parsnip, or pears, peaches and apricots, which love robust southern daylight. The land round Poltawa is well-known for conventional native methods of preserving fruit, that are most likely probably the most fascinating within the nation…
The Dnieper River is full of lobsters, zanders, carp and catfish. The area can be identified for the large pink tomatoes it produces. Cottage gardens develop aubergines, paprika (each candy and scorching), a spread of herbs, rhubarb, cucumbers and candy potatoes that style like confectionery and scent so good that they are often eaten with out oil… The steppes of Kherson, the place I come from, are famed for his or her watermelons… These get pickled too, as do apples that are principally marinated in brine or pumpkin pulp.
Hercules printed Flavours of the countryside in 2020. Three years later the Russians blew up a dam on the Dnieper, destroying one of many largest irrigation methods in Europe and, with it, numerous kilometres of grain, greens and fruit. Within the Kherson area, Hercules’ residence, over two thousand hectares of forest burnt down.
As Olena Kryvoruchkina, head of Ukraine’s Operational Headquarters for the Removing of Ecological Crimes, has emphasised, soil samples taken from varied elements of the nation have revealed the presence of heavy metals in harmful portions. Air high quality can be in freefall due to toxins emitted by rockets and drones. And if an uncontaminated backyard or orchard continues to be to be discovered anyplace in Ukraine, it’s unlikely that anybody will likely be gathering its harvest or preserving its produce as a result of so many salt and sugar factories have been blown up.
Consequently, the pink tomatoes, the cucumbers the scale of aubergines, and the candy potatoes that style like confectionery will merely rot. And if, amazingly, something will get preserved and bottled, it is going to find yourself in cellars full of individuals sheltering from Russian assaults, typically for weeks. To assist these affected by the warfare, Hercules now organises fund-raising and cookery workshops, sharing out the income between medicine and meals provides for civilians, and arms and tools for the Ukrainian navy (her brother is within the military).
Her fermentation courses – recorded in her ill-lit London kitchen at night time, after her son has gone to mattress – have generated particular curiosity. On the display screen, Hercules could be seen hugging a number of ripe tomatoes to her breast as, along with her different hand, she imitates the energetic method during which her grandmother would have chopped them, if she had been standing there beside her quite than taking cowl someplace in Ukraine. For 200 zloty a month, you will get limitless entry to her archive of recordings by way of her Patreon web page, and assist the battle waged by Ukrainian ladies in opposition to their occupiers whereas studying, step-by-step, tips on how to pickle aubergines, peppers, watermelon or sweetcorn.
It’s a poignant type of resistance, particularly if one remembers the worn and wrinkled arms that when sliced cabbage into high-quality threads, chopped squash into good cubes, or peeled the damaged pores and skin off pierced and blanched tomatoes. Or pitted cherries. Or slid tiny, agency currants off their skinny, inexperienced stems.
Hope preserved
I can style my grandmother’s seasoned cherries on my tongue, even right this moment. We drank the syrup with our lunch and ate the swollen purple fruit individually. It was slippery, although the feel was uneven, and we at all times most popular to make use of our fingers and eat straight from the jar. Granddad would deliver the bottled preserves up one after the other, as a result of in any other case, the contents would possibly disappear too rapidly. And, lengthy afterward, after we had grown out of our kids’s garments and moved out of Poznań – the place our grandparents stayed to the top of their lives – we would depart their home with a number of, or typically dozens, of fizzing fermented pickles and preserves, relying on whether or not we had made our go to by practice or automobile.
The final batch discovered its approach to our residence in Warsaw in 2008. It had been introduced over by my grandmother’s youthful sister. A number of days after her arrival, I went all the way down to the larder after yet one more sleepless night time, hoping to shake off my woes with a few of my grandmother’s cherries. 1 / 4 of an hour later I heard that my grandmother was not dwelling. She had died as I used to be prying away the lid from a jar she had solely lately sealed. That was once I understood that meals isn’t any cure-all. It heals neither melancholy nor mourning. Nor, for that matter, inflation, warfare, or local weather change.
However preserves can see us by way of. They are going to assist individuals survive one other winter in a rustic overrun by enemy tanks, typically with no electrical energy and never sufficient ingesting water. They proceed to deliver reduction on the Polish-Belarusian border, the place volunteers work to avoid wasting the lives of migrants by distributing scorching preserved soup, despatched from western Poland by individuals who really feel a better affinity with a Kurdish girl who’s anticipating a toddler than with the inhuman migration coverage of the Polish authorities.
Preserving meals may also enhance life in city areas the place – consistent with new suggestions from the United Nations Meals and Agriculture Group (FAO) – we must be establishing extra cooperative farms and neighborhood gardens. These will recultivate soil, enhance water retention, lower the environmental prices of meals manufacturing and transport, and counteract the parallel epidemics of weight problems and malnutrition.
We merely can not afford to proceed treating preserved meals as a ineffective relic of the previous. Go get these plums whilst you can! Name your mates, deliver out the jars, conceal away your favorite kitchen blades, and by no means concern that what could also be coming will show too onerous to swallow!
I assure that our kids will be taught to like what the long run brings, with its tang, the sourness that puckers the tongue. It received’t even happen to them that that is the style of need. As a result of, for them, shortage and want will signify the world in its entirety, because it as soon as did for us.
Translated by Irena Maryniak. Learn the Polish authentic in Dwutygodnik right here, or our different articles in English from Dwutygodnik hereby.