Polish Diet

“ The diet of the Polish peasantry is meagre in the extreme; they seldom taste animal food, and both sexes swallow a prodigious quantity of schnaps, an ardent spirit resembling whiskey. The Dutch of all ranks are fond of butter, and seldom is a journey taken without a butter-box in the pocket. The boors feed on roots, pulse, herbs, sour milk, and water-souchie, a kind of fish-broth. In England, the edible produce of the world appears at the tables of the nobility, gentry, and opulent commercial classes ”

“ With your permission, honoured gentlemen and guests, those persons whom you see there in countless numbers represent the progress of a Polish district diet, its consultations, voting, triumphs, and disputes; I myself guessed the meaning of this scene, and I will explain it to the company.
“There on the right may be seen a numerous assembly of gentry: they have evidently been invited to a banquet, preceding the diet; the board is waiting ready set, but no one is showing the guests their seats; they are standing in groups, and each group is deep in discussion. ”

“ The Polish people introduce us to a northern climate in which the summers are not so long as the winters. Very few of the people from the cities of Poland come to America. Those we find here are the peasant class. They have lived on farms where they raised grain and vegetables that develop during a short season, such as beans, carrots, turnips, parsnips, cabbage, lettuce, and other summer vegetables. ”

“ To eat no salad, fruit, or vegetables—to drink no beer or wine—to eat no bread. The exceptional cases are rare; hence the provision consists but of sundry preparations of meat, decanters of water, pudding resembling boiled pound-cake, and baskets of small rolls. The latter, made of wheaten flour, are not recognised as bread, but come under the common term, Semmel—the simmel of which we read in descriptions of lordly banquets in our Plantagenet days. The term bread is confined to the large brown and black loaves made of rye meal, the staple of household diet in Bohemia ”

“ The Slavic peasant lives simply enough at home. His food consists largely of a vegetable diet, and meat on the table is the sign of a holiday, a wedding, or of a fortunate excursion into a neighbour’s chicken-coop or pig-sty. Among one large tribe they have only one meal a day, usually at noon. It is cooked in the morning and kept warm under the ashes or under the feather-bed until it is time to eat it.
The main staples of diet among all are, potatoes, black, sour rye bread, cabbage for soups and cakes ”

“ It might seem a bit monotonous to eat such quantities of fish at one meal, but each was served with a different kind of gravy or sauce, which quite changed the taste of the dish. Besides, there were vegetables which accompanied them, each differing from the other with each course: mushrooms, and lettuce [40] and cabbages. Plebeian as it may sound to the ears of American children, who are brought up in such a luxuriant manner, the cabbage is a great factor in Polish menus; not being confined to the tables of the poor alone, either. ”

“ It was the hour of the mid-day dinner—for Polish hours are the hours of the early Victorian meals. Horses and men were alike at rest. The horses nibbled at the thin grass, while the men sat by the water and ate their gray bread, which only tastes of dampness and carraway-seeds. It was late autumn, and the sun shone feebly through a yellow haze. The scene was not exhilarating. The Vistula, to put it plainly, is a dismal river. Poland is a dismal country. A witty Frenchman, who knew it well, once said that it is a country to die for, but not to live in. ”

“ But in hut or mansion, there is gayety abroad this last night of freedom; a short hour, and then, Lent, fasting, prayer for forty days, observed in most rigorous manner.
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Forty days, nearly six weeks, pass after all, and before the Lenten days are two-thirds over, preparations are already begun for the Easter day. Those indeed are busy times in the culinary quarters at the dwór. Such heaps and heaps of food as are prepared in the great kitchens! Such stacks and stacks of bread as are baked in the huge ovens, so different from our own cook-stoves. Gas stoves are unknown in Poland ”

“ Many of the doctors who were with me thought that the heavy eating and large consumption of wine and beer had unfavourably affected the German national character, and had made the people more aggressive and irritable and consequently readier for war. The influence of diet on national character should not be under-estimated. Meat-eating nations have always ruled vegetarians. ”

“ The great demand for grain in Western Europe and Poland’s new and easy access to world markets led to a revival of Polish agriculture, resulting in a more intensive cultivation of the soil, increasing exports of agricultural products, growing prosperity, and in new deepening interest on the part of the Polish nobility in agriculture rather than in war. ”

“ Poland is a soup-eating nation; although to our uninitiated eyes, the different materials of which they are concocted seem inharmonious.
Barszcz.—A favourite Polish soup is Barszcz. Put 4 lb. beef, 1 lb. smoked ribs of pork, 1⁄4 lb. ham, and 12 button mushrooms, onions and leeks into a large stewpan. Add 1 pint expressed juice of beetroot. Cook until the meat is tender, then add a hare, a fowl, and a duck, previously roasted to colour and give it a good flavour, and again some beetroot juice. Boil 1⁄4 hour, and add some whites of eggs beaten with a little water to clear the soup. ”

“ Lines of beehives find place near these cheerful homes, where the surroundings generally are suggestive of thrift and industry.
In passing through Poland the country presents almost one unbroken plain admirably adapted to agriculture, so much so that it has been called the granary of Europe. The Polish peasants are extremely ignorant, if possible even more so than the Russians proper of the same class; but they are a fine-looking race, strongly built, tall, active, and well formed. ”

“ Under wheat that land will feed forty-two people; under oats, eighty-eight; under potatoes, maize, or rice, one hundred and seventy-six; under the banana, over six thousand. The crowded nations of the future must abandon flesh-eating for a diet that will feed more than tenfold people by the same soil, expense and labor. How rich men will be when they cease to toll for flesh-meat, alcohol, drugs, sickness, and war! ”

“ The average Russian peasant does not taste meat more than a few times a year. He is able to live on this diet because his black rye bread contains everything necessary for complete nutrition save fat, which he gets from a meager ration of salt pork. ”

“ The large number of stores in which meat is offered for sale, although undoubtedly [131] reflecting the general wishes of the group, offers constant suggestion to the individual purchaser to buy meat. The naïve belief that much meat must be eaten by men doing manual labor is said to be another factor.
Excessive use of coffee is said by visiting housekeepers and others familiar with dietetic problems to be one of the most serious faults of the diet of many groups, especially the Slavic groups. ”

“ The Polish children and those of the other Slavic peoples come from a sturdy race. Upon arrival in this country they have round, well-shaped heads, rosy cheeks, and strong bodies. With their kerchiefs over their heads, they make fascinating pictures of health. They have had an abundance of milk and fresh air in their own countries. ”

“ They are unfit for the modern economic world for want of education and for Western society because of their habits and want of cleanliness. They are devoted to their strange old religion but as they grow rich their piety, as the Chief Rabbi told Capt. Wright, is destroyed by wealth and they take too little interest in their poorer brethren. No one who knows Poland can be surprised at the Polish attitude or the desire of the Poles to be rid of this corrupting influence. ”

“ This disadvantage, apart from the fact that the eating-rooms provide for people more than hand-to-hand distribution, has its compensation in this, that by the introduction of new, cheap, and wholesome articles of diet, such as lentils, pease in various forms, oat-kisel, beets, Indian meal kasha, sunflower and hemp oils, the quantity of bread used may be diminished and the food itself improved. ”

“ The greater part of the peasantry who, in every country, form the most vigorous portion of the people, eat very little flesh-meat. The Russians have multiplied periods of fasting and days of abstinence, from which even the soldiers are not exempt; and yet they resist all kinds of fatigues. The negroes, who undergo so many hard blows in our colonies, live upon manioc, potatoes, and maize alone. The Brahmins of India, who frequently reach the age of one hundred years, eat only vegetable foods. It was from the Pythagorean sect that issued Epaminondas, so celebrated by his virtues ”

“ Due to the removal of all commercial barriers and obstructions and a good and convenient channel of export, such as the Vistula was, Poland’s commerce grew by leaps and bounds, bringing unprecedented prosperity to the country.
To meet somewhat adequately the demands of trade and at the same time to take advantage of the unusual opportunities for gain and enrichment, the Polish landowners turned to agriculture in dead earnest. This caused a change in the method of agriculture and created a great demand for more land and for more labor. ”

“ Why, then, might not this country very well maintain the vast number of its inhabitants, being in every part so productive of either milk, corn, wine, oil, or honey, which are the principal food of these eastern nations, the constitution of their bodies, and the nature of their clime, inclining them to a more abstemious diet than we use in England and other colder regions? ”

“ The peasantry in many parts of Russia live on very coarse bread, with garlic and other vegetables, and, like the same class in Greece, Italy, &c., they are obliged to be extremely frugal even in this kind of food. Yet they are [for the most part] healthy, vigorous, and active. Many of the inhabitants of Germany live mainly on rye and barley, in the form of coarse bread. ”

“ These few unvarnished facts may suffice to give the reader a faint conception of the present state of domestic and social life in Poland. The child, bred from infancy in accordance with certain specific national customs and habits, in disposition, speech, thought, sentiment, and expression, moulded in a decidedly Polish, Roman Catholic, West-European form, is, upon its admission to school, forced not merely to reject all it has imbibed with its mother's milk, but to accept the very opposite of what nature and duty have taught it to hold sacred at home. ”

“ Among the Syrians, Armenians, Greeks, and Turks we usually find the children well nourished, with plenty of growth-promoting material and mineral matter in their diets. Milk is not given in as large quantities as it should be, and fruit is also found by them to be expensive.
The undernourished children need more milk added to their diet. Wheat is used extensively, either whole or cracked, cooked in water until nearly done; then milk is added for the last few minutes' cooking. The green-leaved vegetables are not used in cream soups, but are cooked in stock. ”

“ Although, according to my idea, Polish culture at present must thus be limited to an extremely prudent and wary evolution, it is evident that the year 1863 marks an epoch in the intellectual life of Poland. The follies and horrors of this year, the frantic chaotic rebellion, with its tragic result, has made the nation sober. Too sober, it may seem to some, for while before 1863 it was the wont of the Poles to see all merits united in their own people, since that time it has become the fashion to speak sorrowfully and depreciatingly of Poland. ”

“ For some reason the general reputation of German cookery is not very high in this country: in fact, not a few think that the German diet consists chiefly of boiled beef and dumplings, milk soup, peas pudding, sauerkraut, and sausages. ”

“ If the North Pole is ever reached by our people, they will do so only when they can eat walrus-meat and get plenty of it—at least that is my belief—and, knowing now what the diet is, I think the journey to that hyperborean ultima is a long one, though there is plenty of meat and many men who want to try it. ”

“ In many cases, the workers do not even have a piece of bread. When some do bring breakfast, it is only coffee and one or two pieces of dry bread or raw potatoes; at the worst time, they did not even have this, but raw carrots, which were then roasted on a stove during work.”
I continue my quotation on Page 150 of the same document:
“In this connection it could be stated that on visiting the mines, it appeared that nearly 10 percent of the Polish workers went to work underground with only dry bread, or raw potatoes cut in slices which they warmed afterwards on a stove.” ”

“ They have no regular time for meals, but the members of a family help themselves when they please from the boiler which always hangs over the fire. It is scarcely possible to name the variety of diet to be found among the Russian tribes; but even in cities, and at the tables of the opulent and civilized, late accounts mention the appearance of several strange and disgusting dishes, compounded of pastry, grain, pulse, vinegar, honey, fish, flesh, fruits, &c., not at all creditable to Russian gastronomic science. ”

“ Jules Virey estimates that four-tenths of the human race subsist exclusively on a vegetable diet, and that seven-tenths are practically (though not on principle) vegetarians. Virchow estimates the total number at eighty-five per cent.—Oswald.
“The matter is this: in a cold climate we can not thrive without a modicum of fat, but that fat need not come from slaughtered animals. In a colder country than England, the East-Russian peasant, remarkable for his robust health and longevity, subsists51 on cabbage-soup, rye-bread, and vegetable oils. ”