Making Pierogi

The moment we met Anna, we knew we would enjoy her company.  She was our guide/teacher in our Polish cooking class.  By the way, if you plan to travel and need tips on how to find the best outings with the best pricing too just let me know.  Years of travel have taught us well but I admit, we are still learning.

After a brief tram ride from our apartment, we met Anna outside a bookstore just a short walk from the Stary Kleparz Market.  What a place!  I could not believe we had not already found it.  I usually have a nose for these things.  Open daily except Sunday, the place was a bustling hive of activity with shoppers sampling Highlander cheeses, choosing baskets of wild blueberries and cups of tiny wild strawberries all foraged from local fields and forests.  Wild blueberries in Poland are smaller and more flavorful than those we buy in stores at home, Anna told us.  Bigger ones like the ones we find at home were also widely available at the market but Anna told us local cooks call those “American blueberries.”

Almost every variety of summertime vegetables and fruit was displayed in an appealing, appetizing style.  Cucumbers are a Polish favorite and there were plenty of them!  I repeat, lots of them.  Almost every farmer had a big basket of cucumbers, not the big dark green ones usually available in our supermarkets, these were the small pickling cucumbers.  Polish people love cucumbers, and they are choosey.  Shoppers stood side by side at a vendor’s stand and carefully examined each one as they filled their bag with a dozen or so.  Almost as popular as cucumbers were the mushrooms.  Not ordinary mushrooms but mushrooms just gathered in the forest, big and small, some white and some brown.  What a sight!  There is a science to finding edible mushrooms, I think. One of the ways to determine a safe-to-eat mushroom is that its underside must be solid with no gills when mature.  There are more criteria, I’m afraid. I’m still scared to try to find and eat a wild mushroom on my own but I’d really like to learn how. Some of the mushrooms we saw, Anna pointed out, are good for cooking fresh and can also be dried or frozen, but ones like the chanterelles must be used fresh.  Mushroom hunting is a national sport here – we’ve seen several people on trams with baskets of mushrooms they just found that morning.  We also met a young man carrying a reed basket with only a few inside.  He said it was his first try at mushroom hunting alone.  He laughed and added that for the time and money he spent on his outing, he could have bought a week’s worth of mushrooms at the market. Like great fishermen, great mushroom hunters know where the good holes are.  It comes with time.

At the market, Anna bought fresh Highlander cheese made from milk from both cows and sheep.  She added little decorated patties of smoked cheese, Polish candy, and fermented cucumbers (pickles made only with cucumbers, salt, and water) to her bag.  This type of pickles is one of the most traditional ways Poles enjoy their cucumbers!  Then we caught a bus to her apartment.

A bit about the term, Highlander.  Famous for their cheese and their music, people who live in the highlands of Poland are called the Gorale, or more commonly, the Highlanders.  They are a little like a Scottish Clan but live in the Tartar Mountains in southern Poland, once a wilderness of forests and rocky outcrops.  They are a rowdy bunch who proudly flaunt their colors and culture but their music will make you dance and then cry and their cheeses are the best you ever tasted.  The lowlanders look at them with mild distaste.

At her garden apartment, Anna poured us each a glass of Polish beer and we set to work making pierogies.  I took careful notes so I remember how to make these delicacies sometime in the future myself.  I kneaded the dough, Stan kneaded the dough, and then I kneaded some more.  We had another beer and made the filling while we let the dough rest.  After we rolled out the dough to a very thin elastic stage, we cut it into rounds, filled them, and then carefully pinched them shut.  Anna put exactly fourteen uncooked pierogies at a time into a pot of boiling salted water. When they rose to the top, voila!  Pierogis!

We ate big plates of them with smoked cheese, portions of a Polish bagel, and pickles.  The fudgy caramel candies were the rich dessert.

The several hours we spent with Anna were like being at a delightful dinner party with great friends.  We talked, laughed, and ate.

Anna is a lifelong resident of Krakow and an art history major.  She has traveled extensively. She said, before you leave, you must visit Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine.  It is at the Czartoryski Museum.  She also told us we absolutely must take a train to Wroclaw and visit the Panorama.

We only had two days left in Poland but we did it all.

I have read books about the famous, Lady with an Ermine painting and how it changed hands so many times and how it was hidden and guarded from the Nazis or destruction during the war.  I had to see this painting. Our first stop after leaving Anna was the museum. 

It was indeed all that.  Not only did we see the famous painting that rivals the Mona Lisa, some say, but we also saw many other great paintings by the old masters of Italy and the Netherlands and a glorious painting by Rembrandt, Landscape with the Good Samaritan.

The next day we took a 3.5-hour train ride to Wroclaw.  Our train left Krakow at 6:26 am.  For us, that’s early, very early!

Let’s review the Polish language again for a moment.  Wroclaw?  How on earth would one say that name?  Phonetics cannot be used here.  In Polish, it is something like Vro-shalff.  But if you do not roll the r, the pronunciation is not correct.

Wroclaw is a wonderful city!  I’d love to spend a week there doing nothing but sitting by the river with a glass of wine, dreaming, and people-watching.  It has a beautiful river that winds through it with canals off-shooting here and there.

From the Wroclaw train station we jumped on a bus and went to its enormous main square, walked its perimeter, and then found a place for lunch. . . yet another milk bar. . . . good, authentic Polish food with wildly cheap prices. Afterward, we found our way to the Raclawice Panorama.   Public transportation for 70+-year-old people is free here so we needed not to spend time finding a ticket stand.  A little like the cyclorama in Atlanta, the Panorama is a renowned Polish 19th-century painting that wraps the interior of a great rotunda, 114 meters or 374 feet in circumference, 44 feet tall providing a 360-degree panoramic view of an incredible depiction of a battle scene.  It was painted to celebrate the 1794 Battle of Raclawice, which was a key part of the uprising to liberate Poland from one of its multiple foreign rules.  This enormous painting shows soldiers and peasants standing off the Russian Army.  So realistic, the enormous painting evokes emotions of fear and determination. Some scenes are so carefully painted as to appear in 3D.  While Poland won that battle, they eventually lost the war.

The guy at the Wroclaw information office highlighted other great places we might visit in our short time in Wroclaw. We took his advice. After the Panorama, we walked along the very pretty and peaceful river promenade to the oldest part of town, a rustic Medieval market street. The stores there primarily featured souvenirs, but we were distracted by seeing what several families with kids were doing. Using a printed Find the Gnomes map, they were engaged in a city-wide scavenger hunt, a popular activity for people with kids or school groups. Although the exact number is unknown, there are as many as 400 gnomes throughout the city tucked in here and there, and they are wonderful little characters! Most have hats, hands or noses rubbed shiny golden by hands seeking their good luck. I started taking photos of them. We asked about the significance of the gnomes. The two moms and kids we talked with did not know. As we said goodbye to them and parted, a young man overheard our conversation and came running up behind us. He said, “I have an answer!”

Oh my!  He did not have to do that, but he did.

He said he Googled.  He visits Wroclaw several times a year from his home in Poznan but he had never asked the significance of the gnomes. 

Gnomes are the hallmark of Wroclaw.  They are symbols of good spirits but these tiny characters also were at the time a sign of protest against communist censorship.  The tiny brass Wroclaw statues each have a special meaning.  For example, there are hippie gnomes, artist gnomes, and sleeping gnomes. The deaf-mute and the blind gnomes are part of the Wroclaw Without Barriers Campaign which aims at drawing attention to handicapped people.  Oh, I like this!

Oh dear, I praised Polish trains far too soon.  Our first-class return trip from Wroclaw was 30 minutes late and featured a broken air conditioner for our car. We booked first class because other seats on the train were sold out. We could not change cars. Summer heat finally arrived here in Poland; it was a miserable 3.5-hour trip home.  But once home all was good again.

One more note, the people here in Poland are not only very friendly and helpful but also very honest.  On our early morning tram ride to the main train station in Krakow, for our trip to Wroclaw, we accidentally left Stan’s fanny pack on the tram.  No great loss but it held a portable battery charger for our phones.  We knew we’d miss that very useful device.

On Monday when city transit offices opened again, we went to the published address for the Lost and Found office for Krakow trams but the kind lady there said you must go to another address.  She called ahead for us first.  While we waited for the other office to answer, she asked us where we were from.  When we said the United States, she lighted up!  She was even happier when we told her how much we enjoyed our visit in her country.  When someone at the other office finally answered, they told her after a cursory look, they did not have our fanny pack.  She suggested we go anyway.  We did.

At the next office, the man who greeted us spoke not one word of English but we communicated perfectly with Google Translate. We gave him the details of what, when, and where on our lost item. He wrote it down and took the paper to the back. Meanwhile, he showed us his brand-new electric bike parked in the office. Mind you, this man must have been 70. But oh, he was so proud! We chatted and admired his new bike He said it could go as fast as 30 kph and could go as far as 190 km on a charge. He was loving his new beauty. It was a nice bike; we oooh-ed and ahhh-ed as he beamed.

In a few minutes, another man came walking in from the back . . . with Stan’s bright blue fanny pack!!!!! Someone found it on the tram and took the time and effort to turn it in!!! It still had the portable charger inside it! We could not believe it!

Was it God who made that happen?  Or just God’s people doing the right thing? 

I love this place.

Goodbye Poland; goodbye to your wonderful people, fast and efficient trams, and unique and delicious Polish milk bar restaurants. Live well and have peace. We are off to Bucharest in the morning.