Cooking

I’ve been cooking since I was 13. My mother did a mental calculus in her head when we moved back to Warsaw (after our 6 years in New York): If one daughter cooked one day, the other daughter cooked the next day, the grandmother cooked on Sundays, we ate grandmother’s leftovers on Monday, and we all grabbed something at the Milk Bar on another day, this would leave her with only 2 days of cooking for the family. Or – one, plus leftovers. Good deal. And so the daughters cooked.

The daughters did not take this project seriously. They grabbed whatever was in the fridge, put it in a pot and let it stew for a while. Then everyone helped themselves to whatever was under the lid when they came home. Oftentimes it was so unexciting that various family members felt obliged to continue working or studying and not make it home in time to take advantage of the daughters’ “laboriously” prepared meal.

I did not take cooking seriously until I moved out of the home and traveled back to the States at the age of 19. And I did not prepare a whole meal for a group of friends until I moved into my own apartment as a grad student (I had been au pairing in someone else’s home in college).

I remember cooking that first meal for others. It was a Polish dish – stuffed cabbage. I thought it important that I emphasize my Polishness (I seem to do that a lot…). People ate it. The food stayed down, no one called an ambulance. I remember thinking – hey, this is not bad for stuffed cabbage!

That was also the last time I cooked Polish food for others. I don’t know why. It’s not that I think Polish food is uniformly awful. Yet, my attention has drifted.

Until this week. Something possessed me to check out the Eastern European regions in search of interesting dishes to work with.

Consider these ideas, lifted out of a Polish cookbook:

Beer Soup with Sour Cream and Cottage Cheese
White borsch with kielbasa

Rump of boar
Rump of deer Lithuanian style
Saddle of Mutton in Cream
Carp Polish style in gray sauce

Foamy nut Mazurek
Compote with prunes

I’m excited. Tune in Thursday – my designated Polish-Russian cooking day.