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Post by Bonobo on Apr 14, 2021 22:48:41 GMT 1
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Post by Bonobo on Dec 31, 2021 0:30:55 GMT 1
culture.pl/en/article/polish-peasant-food-for-beginnersFood supply poverty in the countryside The best spice is hunger
As peasant cuisine was dependent on the cycle of nature and the seasons, there were times of great abundance and periods of scant rations, depending on the time of year and the crops. The worst time of year was the time of the so-called the ‘pre-harvest’– when winter stocks were beginning to end and there were still no new crops. This measure of time was rather imprecise and variable. The pre-harvest often coincided with the end of winter and hence the saying: ‘There is never one misery that you have to endure, but misfortunes, as wolves on the day of Candlemas [2 February], always come in packs.’ The second volume of The Peasants by Władysław Reymont includes the following passage:
…and for many the days of starvation which often usher in the spring seemed at hand. So, in more than one cabin warm meals were served only once a day; and people went to the miller in ever-increasing numbers to borrow a few bushels of flour that they were to pay for later in work. He was, indeed, a confounded executioner; but no one had either ready money, or things to sell in town. Other went to Yankel begging him to lend them a screw of salt, or a quart of groats, or a loaf of bread, putting their pride in their pockets; for, as the proverb runs: ‘When it comes to the worst, a good man’s belly comes first.’
The scarcity of food during these ‘days of starvation,’ just as during crop failures or wars, forced people to make do with foodstuffs that wouldn’t normally be consumed. In times of famine, the menu was mostly based on foraging. In lieu of grains, some edible weeds were used. A wild growing genus of grass, sweetgrass, was popular for making groats and flat-cakes. Flour for baking bread was made from yet another species of grass, namely wheatgrass. In especially dire situations, the shortage of flour was tackled by adding dry lime tree leaves, ground birch bark, heather, wood chips, and acorns to food. White goosefoot and nettle were consumed like spinach or added to soups. Young thistles, pigweed, and bishop’s weed were also added to soups – to both polewka and bryja. Mushrooms and all kinds of forest berries and fruits, also an important dietary element in times of prosperity, were used to alleviate the shortages. Water caltrop (known also as water chestnut), practically forgotten today, would be eaten as well as shoots of calamus, which, thanks to its sweet taste, was a snack especially popular among children.
The famine that affected Galicia in the years 1844-1845 was one of the causes of the Galician Slaughter. Zygmunt Gloger, in his Encyklopedia Staropolska (editor’s translation: Old Polish Encyclopaedia), enumerates other famous examples of famine in the history of Poland. Here is a fragment:
After the wet summer of 1627, peasants from Greater Poland ate only acorns. In Podolia in 1638, many people became slaves out of hunger; (…) in Volyn in 1699 and 1700, some people became thin out of hunger and some swelled because of it. In 1710, such a severe famine struck in Lithuania that rye had to be imported to Vilnius from Volyn, and peasants ate horses, dogs, and cats. Sometimes, travellers were killed and consumed by innkeepers. (…) Kitowicz writes in his memoirs that at the beginning of reign of August III, when hunger was prevalent, many starving folks came to Warsaw. (…) The last migration of hungry men we remember took place in 1865, when around a dozen thousand people from the area of Sejny, Suwałk, and Kalwaria went to look for work to Mazovia and Podlasie.
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