Saturday 30 May 2015

The end of the holidays - regional dishes

        Our wonderful holiday time on Kashubia is going to end. I cannot come to terms with it. ,,Let’s put the brake on moaning, and do something creative!” – says Lama. And I find an old cookbook by chance, glancing through the book collection in a bedroom. It has got semi-torn off front cover, but I still can read the title: ,,Kashubian cuisine”.  I page through it; yellowed pages are full of recipes for all kind of meals.
         Fishes are typical for kashubian kitchen: herrings with onion or braised, fish soup, smoky trout. It’s of course related to the site of this region, with plenitude of lakes. Very popular here is also goose meat (for example stuffed goose) and dishes made from mushrooms (they add it even to scrambled eggs!). I hit on a recipe for  a cooked tongue of cow – it sounds creepy, but tastes delicious! Leavened cakes seems to preponderate in relation to other baking – yeast cakes, drop scones… They are fluffy, tender and very tasty.


         I showed the book to Lama. ,,But why don’t we use red currants from the garden? Bushes are full… Maybe some cake with it?” – proposes Lama. I hit on another idea: we will cook jams! We buy 3 kilos of sugar (just in case!) and turn to picking up fruits. They are ripened and full of juice. In the midday, we are ready to cook – I wash currants precisely and Lama puts it to the pot. We braise it and after 15 minutes we add sugar delicately. Boiling jam starts to smell wonderful.


         Next day, I open one of jars, standing upside down on a counter. We sit together in front of a house and celebrate our last day in Kashubia. Jam is acidulous and tasty, sun shines, but by now not as strongly as 2,3 weeks ago… Holidays peters out… But I’m sure, we will come back here in the close future…

_____________

photos comes from my own

No comments:

Post a Comment