The most gala dinner of the year is approaching fast. In just a few days we will break the wafer and sit at the elegantly laid tables, where a great variety of dishes will be waiting for them. Some of them ... very strange.
We all know the "standard", unified set of Christmas Eve dishes:borscht with dumplings, dumplings with mushrooms, carp and the like ... In many homes, however, we eat something completely different. Among my friends, colleagues from work and people from the broadly understood catering industry, I conducted a small survey, asking what the strangest Christmas Eve dishes they know. As it turns out, there are quite a lot of them…
Siemieniotka
Although I have been dealing with the history of the kitchen for a few years now, it was on this occasion that I first heard about siemieniotka. At the outset, it was explained to me that this is a typical Christmas Eve dish of Silesian cuisine. I have never tried it myself, but the person who married into an Upper Silesian family at the mere mention of this dish ... paled a bit.
Linseed, the most important component of the linseed (photo KirstentB, license CC0)
So what is behind this "sinister" name? The term comes from the seed, i.e. grain. The seed is cooked with hemp or linseed (there are different versions), thickened with roux or semolina, and served with buckwheat.
Herring water
From a real Warsaw foodie, which recently opened a restaurant serving Asian cuisine, I heard about… herring water. He learned the recipe from the manager of his restaurant, who comes from the Łódź Province. To make the herring water, take Bismarck pickled herring (named after the Prime Minister of Prussia) with the vinegar brine in which they are pickled, and then mix it all with milk, cream and scalded onion.
This creates a soup that is eaten with hot potatoes. Someone added that he knows a similar recipe, but on salted herring. Grate the dandelion, onions and pieces of herring with a mortar of water, vinegar, onions and pieces of herring. Then you have to set it aside and ... wait a few days for it to mature. On Christmas Eve they are served with potatoes. Unfortunately, the sources are silent on whether all household members run blue because of the smell that surrounds this dish.
Łazanki with cabbage
A colleague from the editorial office, where the cuisine of the Lachy Sądecki family reigns at the Christmas Eve supper, stated that in its parts, the dish that does not fit the "canon" is łazanki with cabbage. Usually, this dish cannot do without a solid piece of good bacon, but December 24 requires some sacrifices.
Dumplings but… with plums
The vicinity of Limanowa and Nowy Sącz has never been one of the most fertile lands in the country, but local farmers have learned to deal with it perfectly, for example by focusing on horticulture.
Christmas table. And what is on yours (photo:Zaczuta, GNU FDL license)
As on this special day one eats mainly crops from one's own farm, there could be no shortage of fruit. One of the dishes is therefore sweet dumplings with prunes. Interestingly, these are the same fruits that were used to cook dried compote on Christmas Eve.
Maczek without poppy
Skipping a bit further east, towards the border with Ukraine, we come to my homeland. Only there are a few dishes eaten, at the mention of which the interlocutors open their eyes wide with surprise. First of all, a cake. No, I didn't make a typo, and it's not about the dough at all. And no, there is not a single poppy seed in this dish! Instead, there is a whole bouquet of forest mushrooms.
A decoction of forest mushrooms, which will become the basis of poppy seeds in just a dozen hours (photo:private archive)
When cooking mushrooms for other dishes, do not pour out the stock, but set it aside for use later. We start preparing the flour by roasting the wheat flour on a dry frying pan. It is important to keep an eye on it all the time, because the line between what it should look like when it is ready and the appearance of a burnt smell is really thin. We still need vitrified onions and spices, and we already have all the ingredients. A very simple dish with an extremely intense mushroom flavor.
Stuffed cabbage, but with… potatoes
Another "strange" Christmas Eve dish are cabbage rolls with buckwheat and potatoes. In my home country, they prepare them exactly once a year. Cooked, un-drained potatoes are mashed with raw buckwheat, onions, salt and pepper and wrapped in cabbage leaves.
On Christmas Eve, they are served in a fasting version, with a little bit of fried onion at most. There is a volte at Christmas - they are fried richly and greasy on a country "homely" bacon. It's hard to say which option is tastier.
Garus or plum-based soup
Apart from Greek-style fish, on Christmas Eve tables we meet another "Greekism" (the Polish Language Council is looking for the roots of this name in the south of Europe), namely the garus. This dish can be found on the tables of Kielce, Lesser Poland and Silesia.
Ukrainian Pampuchy. The ones on Christmas Eve, with poppy seeds, look very similar. They are only visibly darker, because the filling shows through the dough in some places (photo Kagor, license CC BY-SA 3.0)
There is no one specific recipe for this dish - wandering between regions it changes a bit, but clou remains the same. Garus is a soup based on prunes. In the Silesian version, the plums are boiled until soft, seasoned with sugar to taste and served with cooked white beans (e.g. beautiful jasmine). In Kielecki, on the other hand, there is groats (millet or buckwheat) instead of beans, and the whole is dipped in cream.
Pampuchy with poppy seeds
And finally, one more Christmas Eve dish from Podkarpacie, little known. Pampuchy with poppy seeds taken from Ukrainian cuisine. In a way, it's a combination of two days of Christmas - Christmas Eve and Fat Thursday. They look like slightly flattened donuts. To make them, you need yeast dough with a similar consistency as for donuts, but without eggs. When the dough rises, sweet stuffing can be started.
For this, we need cooked ground poppy seeds, honey, raisins, candied fruit, lemon juice and a little oil. All this is fry together in a pan, and then with a spoon, put on the torn pieces of dough, which you flatten in your hand. Then roll up, stick together and set aside to rise, then fry until gold in deep oil. Pampuchas will not swim because they are heavy.
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The text is based on conversations with people from the farthest parts of Poland who agreed to answer the question "what is the weirdest Christmas Eve dish?" . It is worth noting that they show the extraordinary regional richness of our cuisine, which now various media are trying to cover with borscht with dumplings and fried carp.
Many of the dishes described to me, such as "gray balls in gray jelly", "marinated fish meatballs" or "herring in whipped cream with capers" were not included in this list because I did not get enough information about them . However, I will not close the topic and I will persistently look for more "freaks", the less typical they are, the more interesting.
In the meantime, it's time for you. What's the weirdest Christmas Eve dish YOU know?