Curated playlist
Polish cuisine
- Smetana (dairy product)Smetana, a Slavic sour cream, does not curdle in a hot pot. Its fat can run from 9% to 42%, depending on the producer.
- SorrelSorrel, known to botanists as Rumex acetosa, sits at the center of a famous plate of fish. In 1962 the Troisgros brothers invented a dish of salmon escalope in sorrel sauce, and it became an emblem of French nouvelle cuisine. The flavor…
- PierogiAt the 2007 Pierogi Festival in Kraków, visitors ate about 30,000 pierogi every single day. Pierogi are filled dumplings. A cook wraps unleavened dough around a filling and drops the parcels into boiling water. The dish is a traditional…
- Corned beefAstronaut John Young once hid a corned beef sandwich in a pocket of his spacesuit and sneaked it aboard Gemini 3. It was contraband. Corned beef is salt-cured beef, known as salt beef in Ireland and across Commonwealth countries. It sounds…
- Head cheeseIn the stores of Alberta, Canada, the typical jellied meat on sale is labelled head cheese, whether or not any part of a head went into it. Head cheese contains no dairy at all. It is a cold meat terrine, normally made from the flesh of a…
- BörekBörek, burek, byrek, brik: one family of pastries answers to all of these names across the Middle East and the Balkans. The recipe starts with a thin, flaky dough such as filo. Cooks wrap or layer it around meat, cheese, spinach or…
- SauerkrautSauerkraut is finely cut raw white cabbage that lactic acid bacteria have fermented into something sour, with a remarkably long shelf life. Captain James Cook trusted it enough to take it on his first and second Pacific voyages, hoping it…
- AspicAspic is a savoury jelly, and in the 9th century the poet Ibrahim ibn al-Mahdi thought one such dish deserved a poem. He described a gelled preparation of Iraqi carp as "like ruby on the platter, set in a pearl... steeped in saffron thus,…
- BagelThe bagel first appears in writing in 1610, in the Community Regulations of Kraków, Poland. That rule book lists it as a gift for women in childbirth. The linguist Leo Rosten points to this entry in his book The Joys of Yiddish, as the…
- Steak tartareSteak tartare, also called tartar steak, arrives at the table as a mound of raw ground beef, very often crowned with a raw egg yolk. This is a French dish. The plate usually comes with onions, capers, parsley or chive, salt, pepper and…