food, drink and feasting talk: polish food

Polish Food: Memories in Deportation and Exile

Monica JanowskiSchool of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

‘We are sort of displaced people And I was brought here, but to me Poland it is my country… To us that country’s precious. But we can’t be there, we can’t live there’.

(Aniela Polnik, 26 January 2009)(Painting: Memories 3, by Alicja Edwards)

Osadniki of the 1920s - peasant settlers building Poland in the

eastern borderlands

Group of military settlers

Church on an osada (settlement)

‘Our place, 84 of them from the same cavalry regiment … got land at Wolyn near Rowno, and was beautiful soil…Poland was 123 years under Russia, and they took from the landowners, rich ones, they took it from them.’ (Danuta G.)

‘Leaving Home’ - painting by Alicja Edwards. Used to illustrate her book ‘And God Was our Witness’.

Deportations of Poles from Eastern Poland 1939 and 1940

Food as portal to memories: Kaz and his mum share holy bread and stories

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Poles on kolkhoz in Kazakhstan, 1941

Destinations East: Siberia, Kazakhstan and beyond the Urals

Aniela Polnik, born 1937.

Jadzia Osostowicz, born 1925.

Danuta Gradosielska, born 1925.

Regina Dyszynska, born 1932.

Irena Miluska, born 1938.

Michalina Pluciennik, born 1922.

‘Sybiranki’ share food diaries and

stories in the 2000s

‘I remember Christmas and Christmas tree and my mother frying fish. And that’s all I remember.’ (laughs) (Regina D.)

‘On weekends when we came from church we had dinner and then something quick in the evening, like pancakes, or placki kartoflane. (Danuta G.)

‘I remember that the food was lovely, very tasty, very nice, and I remember exactly the dishes that we had, it was always meat and always soup. (Jadzia O.)

‘…my mum always made bread.. (Michalina P.)

Memories of food from home

Painting: Memories 1 by Alicja Edwards

Growing your own: peasant pioneers’ food

‘.. it was fresh and healthy, because was everything fresh and made at home, no artificial things added, you know. It was very good. I think that’s maybe what helped me to survive Siberia…’ (Danuta G.)

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March 2013: Visit to Horniman

Danuta Gradosielska, Aniela Polnik and Bolek Polnik

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Home in Poland: parental roles and order

‘..(in the kitchen) my mother was definitely the mastermind… (Jadzia O.)

‘…my father worked in a rafineria… When there was a little bit (of work in the fields) we helped mama, but when there was more she paid people…she fed them well’ (Michalina P.)

‘My father was forester.. in a big estate’. (Regina D.)

Women, food and

family

The obiad meal: ritual of family togetherness

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Rosól z makaronem (broth with noodles)

Mięso z kartoflami i z salatką albo z jarzynami (Meat with potatoes and salad or vegetables)

Chleb (bread): central to all meals

Dairy foods and health

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Biały ser (fresh white cheese) Zupa

mleczna (‘milk soup’ with grains or noodles)

Mleko (milk) Smietana (cream)

Sweet food and hospitality

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Makowiec (poppy seed cake)

Chrusty (fried dough twists)

Babka (yeast cake)

Pączki (doughnuts)

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Bigos (cabbage and meat stew)

Pierogi (dumplings)

Placki ziemniaczne (potato pancakes)

Kiełbasa (sausage)

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Everyday peasant dishes… later to become iconically ‘Polish’

Polish national foods?

Byelorussian pierogi Ukrainian potato pancakes

Nevertheless strongly associated with a Polish home and with

Polskość….

‘Hunger’ - painting by Alicja Edwards, used to illustrate her book ‘And God Was our Witness’

‘I dreamt about bread every night. …we would go several kms away to pick raspberries, …So we had the raspberries. (sighs) We would then pick some nettles, and cook them. But there was

hardly anything else, Monica, hardly anything else (Jadzia O.)

‘(My brother Adam) … killed the dog. So … they put him in the corner… and every time a soldier or a policeman or an NKVD walked past, they would kick him… and the third day he just collapsed and died. He was 16.’ (Aniela P.)

Deportation and starvation

‘Those ones from town, they maybe were clever, but they just didn’t know anything, anything… they had such a hard time’ (Michalina P.)

Tuligany, Siberia: Michalina P’’s father, a peasant osadnik, with a university professor and his sons

Peasants and townspeople

‘We were lucky… we were able to bring a lot with us - sacks of flour, we killed some chickens, we had things to trade…others weren’t so lucky. (Danuta G.)

Danusia G. with friends in the camp at Monastyriok, Siberia, December 1940

‘It was not a normal life at all. .. there was no structure to meals. It was more like animals’ type of feeding. You were hungry, you ate what you found.’ (Regina D.).

Food and family structure in the Soviet Union

‘I would buy a portion of this barley, and they put a teaspoon of oil, they made a little hole and put some oil in the middle. So I would save this oil for Sundays..’ (Jadzia O.)

‘…mother was absolutely crazy how to feed the children so they don’t die.’ (Regina D.)

‘..the only thing that we had to eat was some bread, but only some, because it was rationed, and it was a very clayey, heavy bread.’ (Jadzia O.)

Bread in the Soviet Union

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A central ritual: wigilia (Christmas Eve)

Wigilia meal at Nowosiolowo, Krasnojarski Kraj, USSR, 1943

‘..wigilia in Siberia …were without alcohol, but they meant exactly the same or even much much more than now’ (Michalina D.)

‘..my grandmother sent us from Poland Christmas parcel… It wasn’t big parcel, but it was a great help for us. And opłatek was there.’ (Danuta G.)

Escape from the Soviet Union

General Władysław Anders

Future soldiers crossing the Caspian Sea from Krasnovotsk to Pahlevi

Overwhelmed with food

‘It was heaven…’ (Michalina P.)

‘Oh, so much food, is it possible, can there be so much food in the world?…

It was actually quite dangerous, because people, they had starved and so many of them could not eat any solid food’ (Jadzia O.)

Michalina P. at Pahlevi

Distribution of bread to Poles arriving at army collection point in Krasnovotsk

Where our ladies went next

• Danuta Gradosielska: joined 216th Transport Division of Polish Army

• Irena Miluska: Polish Camp, Masindi, Uganda• Aniela Polnik: Polish camp, Lusaka, Northern

Rhodesia (Zambia)• Michalina Pluciennik: Polish camp, Tengeru,

Tanganyika (Tanzania)• Regina Dyszynska: ‘Orphanage’ boarding

school, Palestine• Jadzia Osostowicz: with parents in Palestine;

parents working at Polish schools

Polish children in orphanage/boarding school in Persia after 1943

‘.. I remember that we had hams, we had proper lunches – kotlety, that’s Polish, pierogi, and things like that, Polish food…that was proper boarding school, beautifully kept. Proper food we had.’ (Regina D.)

Regina in the orphanage: children as hope for a Polish future

Meal to celebrate end of driving course for Danuta G. and other girls of the 316th Polish Transport Division, 13 March 1943

‘Mostly we had rice with sheep meat cooked together…That’s what they had, they didn’t have potatoes’ (Danuta G.)

Danuta: into the Army

Irena, Aniela and Michalina: Polish camps in Africa

Aniela P’s friends in Polish costume at Lusaka Camp, N.

Rhodesia

Tengeru Camp, Tanganyika: Michalina P.’s class in the gardens

Irena M. and her school class at Masindi camp, Uganda

‘Except potatoes, we ate everything what you can eat…But you had every day fresh meat, except Sunday.’ (Michalina P)

‘I remember lots of fruit, we had’ (Irena M.)

‘Sunday and Saturday my auntie would try and cook something, you know, something different,

in our hut.’ (Aniela P.)

Transforming alien foods into something familiar

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‘(In Palestine) we used to stuff aubergine.. that’s not Polish at all…I do exactly the same now…and I use exactly the same mixture as for goląbki (cabbage stuffied with rice and meat)’. (Regina D.)

(In Russia) we lived in a hut with another big family, of boys . . . .And they remember picking the green sort of salad—it’s called in Polishlebioda —it’s like salady thing, green. And they chopped, without eggs, nothing. But they made it into kotlety (mince meat patties) and fried it and ate it like that. (Regina D)

After the war: Yalta and displaced persons camps in the UK

Kelvedon Camp. Essex

A return to self-sufficiency?

Vegetable garden in Kelvedon camp, 1950s Back garden turned over

largely to vegetable growing, 1969

I learnt gradually and I cooked a lot, a lot, yes, I took it very seriously then, my duties as a cook, as a Polish mother. I cooked Polish food, but I was always very happy when I was given some English food. …I didn’t really learn properly. (Jadzia O.)

I didn’t have mother or father to teach me to cook… I had to learn from book…. That’s why I don’t feel confident, you see, because I learnt from books. (Regina D.)

Setting up a Polish home in the UK

Maintaining the Polish extended family: meals in the UK

Extended family meal, 1950s Corpus Christi meal, 1950s

Wigilia meal, 2007 Opłatek meal with parish choir directed by Aniela P., 2009

What does it mean to be truly Polish?

When I first went to Poland, I was so happy when people I spoke to didn’t realize that I came from England… they thought I was properly Polish… (Irena M., deported age 1)

People are envious of me, because both my children married Polish people. I’m not so sure about marrying Pole from Poland now, like my son, because we are different… Polishness of us is completely different from Polishness of Poles in Poland. (Regina D.)

‘My first memory is from Siberia. Certain things, vague.. Food… I remember being hungry, and I remember being cold, very cold.’ (Aniela P., deported age 2)

Food as icons of ‘Polishness’

‘The icon is a reminiscence of a celestial archetype…. a window onto a deeper, transcendent world.’ (Paul Florensky, Eastern Orthodox theologian)

Polishness heaped up on a plate: sausage, bigos, pierogi and stuffed

cabbage

Some final thoughts: women, food, belonging

and the moulding of new identities