What Polish foods do foreigners generally not take to?

Red barszcz for uszka is prepared with a fair amount of pepper, dried mushroom extract, and just a few drops of vinegar. It is not dull or bland, but delicious.

Jon, Jon. Let me educate you. We made bigos in Poland before Napoleon was a wet dream in his father's ball sack.Bigos, AKA Hunters Stew, existed in Poland
as long as hunting, which is a very long time before Poland existed as an organized entity. Accept that there is no need to subtract from what is rightfully ours.

As the French made choucrout.

No, it is not, not even close. There were no Jews in Poland then, and bigos at the beginning was tightly connected to hunting (Hunting Stew). It probably existed before the Piast dynasty. I listen to the so-called experts, and all of them are wrong in one crucial area, namely deer or wild boar meat. Some in Poland
use rabbits as a substitute. I hate the pungent meat nothing like deer.Deer is mild almost good equality beef, which I use abundantly, Pawian's contraption is an abomination, one of the worst.

Jon, I am talking about bigots. I could care less what the French are doing; they have plenty of dishes of which to be proud, so don't try to steal one of ours.

Remember that nowadays, France and Poland are a day's drive away and dishes tend to come in families depending on available ingredients and economic need. Sometimes looking for a single origin for a type of food is fruitless; the best you can do is look for its first written mention.

But Jon, We were talking about Polish bigos, primeval forest covering the whole country, and hunting as a necessary tool for survival, not hunting as a sport, and days driving would take you to your grandmother's cottage for dinner, probably a bowl of Hunters Stew, not France

Not for millennia and pretty well everywhere in Europe was covered by that once.


Not that chasseur has ever been a hunting term.

As I say, dishes come in families. Things like gołąbki exist in their own way in many countries, borscht we know about and it's much the same with cabbage/processed pork dishes.

gołąbki are a northern version of dolma, which can plainly be seen when you go north from Turkey and pickled cabbage replaces grape leaves (Romania) or sauerkraut is added to the cabbage rolls when they're baked (Hungary) to the blander Polish version with no strong acidic taste.

You can draw a similar route perhaps with Greek tzatziki through Bulgarian tarator to Polish mizeria or chłodnik (the version without beets).

I think choucrout and bigos are more independent creations that have some similarities.

It's a real continuum. You sometimes get similar thing in North Africa. Maybe the continuum ends in Alsace with choux farci.

Always nicer with kasza than rice too.

My ultimate gołąbki (mix of different practices that I approve of).

Whole pickled cabbage leaves (romania).
Kasza rather than rice (where?)
Spicy paprika tomato sauce (Hungary or Romanian Hungarians)
Big dollop of sour cream on top (ditto).

I don't have the skills or time to make gołąbki myself but a closeby store has pretty good ones. I serve them with passata (paprika added) and sour cream on top.

Read this article in a Ukrainian paper just now:

life.pravda.com.ua/health/na-bukovini-sim-ya-otrujilasya-gribami-307008/?

A mother is dead, and a father and son hospitalized after picking some poisonous mushrooms over the weekend.

In Russia we have these idiots too. Every spring we have dozens of people that die from eating poisonous mushrooms.

I once read an article in a Russian paper, where the journalist interviews a Russian mycologist (person who studies fungi). The mycologists spends a lot of time arguing that it is virtually impossible for people
To differentiate between certain types of poisonous mushrooms and edible ones. Then, when the journalists asks the mycologist if he is planning to go "mushrooming" on the weekend - he replies "yes, of course". Hahaha!

The journalist asks the mycologist why he goes mushrooming if he knows it's so dangerous, and the person begins to explain that he can tell if something is poisonous or not by licking it. If it's toxic, a lick would not be enough to kill you, but instead only
make you vomit profusely and have potentially hallucinatory seizures. At this point the journalist concludes that mushroomers are mentally sick people - and so did I.

Is this a popular mental illness in Poland?

'Guess it all depends once again on the foreigner. Me? I can
digest just about anything in whichever country I've either visited or
lived in for more than two or so months.

Certain Polish seafood dishes I found an acquired taste, I must admit!
However, I can honestly say that there is no Polish food I haven't
thoroughly enjoyed when I got used to it:-)

I'd go with that (if the pickled cabbage leaves are anything like Turkish pickled cabbage).

Definitely kasza, plent6 of herbs and some chilli or at least black pepper inside. Possibly no tomato at all for the sauce. Ajvar could be a base, or those tubes of Czech pepper paste that works nicely instead of tomato paste. The sour cream would work well.

Red cabbage could work (I prefer it to other types) in which case some finely chopped apple would go well as an ingredient for the filling.

Sorry, I can`t believe such an interview with a "mycologist" was published in Russian papers. Because it proves that Russian papers are published for imbeciles.

Source: kommersant.ru/doc/153729

Russia's leading business journal. Author - famous Andrei Kolesnikov. Year - 2000.

Quote:

"Here I finally find the person I have been looking for for a long time - Antonina Ivanovna Rtishcheva, a famous Voronezh mycologist, that is, a specialist in mushrooms. Antonina Ivanovna is an associate professor at Voronezh State University, the author of several books on mushrooms and an international specialist.

She will explain everything.

Antonina Ivanovna admitted that she cannot stay in the city for long, because, like a wolf, she is always looking into the forest. She needs to be as close to her mushrooms as possible. And we went into the forest."

So I was wrong it was a man - it was a woman.

Continued:

"...

- and you, you have never tried poisonous mushrooms?

*I shuddered* - Haven't tried it.

- Oh but I know them all by heart. True, they don't like it, but I'm very careful... I clean some part of the mushroom from the soil and lick it. Some don't feel anything or feel only some kind of bitterness. But I feel something completely different! I have a very special relationship with them, but I probably shouldn't tell anyone about it, because, you know, people are different and may not understand it correctly.

See, here is the mycologist which licks toxic mushrooms.

The whole article is about how Russians get poisoned by mushrooms, and yet continue eating them until they finally die. In the article there are numerous examples, where people are dying from poisoning by mushrooms, and attempt to escape their hospital bed to go find more mushrooms.

I think you do not understand how much Russians love mushrooms. Ukrainians love mushrooms too.

Makes a change from novichok and Polonium 210.

About wild mushrooms in Poland, one thing I've noticed (and this is probably more good than bad) is that they pick them when they're still tiny. Very different from the ones on sale further west which tend to be as big as possible.

It is not dangerous at all if you learn to separate edible and poisonous, best learned hanging to your mother's apron at age 4. Besides, dangers are vastly overstated. Yeah, there are a few deadly ones, but most so-called poisonous ones will result in vomiting, discomfort, and diarrhea, not death.

Hey, you didn`t mention she was also a mystic who talks to mushrooms!!
You misled us with your original post on her.


Of course I do coz we are the same in this matter.