I didn’t arrive in Poland with any grand plan to understand the country through its food. At first, I was just a foreigner with a rucksack and a handful of words that dissolved the moment I tried to use them. Those early years when my friends stood beside me — guiding, translating, interpreting. They helped with menus, offered suggestions, sometimes ordered for me. They nudged me to try things on my own, and when I managed even a simple “poproszę” or “dziękuję,” I’d be rewarded with that warm Polish encouragement that makes even the most basic phrase feel like a small triumph. Back then, I was still a guest — curious, hesitant, and supported by the kindness of people who wanted me to see their world.
Obiad Day 2
Then I moved to Poland, and the safety rails came off. Food was chosen not for adventure but for survival — whatever I could pronounce without causing a diplomatic incident. Sometimes that meant a safe bułka and a banana from the local Biedronka, my first-ever solo meal in Poland. And sometimes it meant relying on the quiet kindness of friends who fed me when I was too ill to feed myself.
Somewhere between the steam of a milk‑bar kitchen, the glow of a zapiekanka stand outside Katowice station, and the slow shift from being helped to helping myself, a map began to form. A map not of places, but of people — and the meals that carried me from stranger to something almost like belonging.
Krakus Jars to Gołąbki
When I was a child, the only Polish food I knew came in glass jars. My grandmother kept them on a shelf in her pantry — the name Krakus on the label mystified me, declaring it to be a ‘Produce of Poland’. Preserved fruits with a label that looked foreign and slightly magical. Blueberry, or maybe bilberry, I could never quite tell. They went into a pie with other fruits, both sweet and tart, lashings of custard or, a good pouring of condensed milk, which I especially enjoyed. The jars sat there quietly among the tinned peaches, pears, baked beans, a box of Bisto and other long-life foods. Krakus was a little window into a country I couldn’t imagine. Poland was just a name on the far side of my bedroom atlas.
For many years, those jars were the whole of my understanding of Polish food. Even later, in supermarkets, the Krakus jars stood out in isolation — pickled cucumbers that looked nothing like the cucumbers I knew, I recognised beetroot, but not so the foods with labels with names like sauerkraut. In Polish it’s known as kapusta kiszona, but I seem to recall in conversation people shortened it to simply kapusta — which might be unhelpful if you’re trying to buy a fresh cabbage and keep being handed something that’s been fermenting since the late Bronze Age.
Growing up in the North East in the 1960s and ’70s, anything with kraut in the name sounded firmly Germanic — which, depending on who you asked, ranged from “perfectly fine” to “absolutely not.” Sauerkraut felt like the deluxe edition: too much sour, too much German, and frankly I felt horror toward anything pickled. Piccalilli was the worst offender. My grandparents would place a jar of that yellow substance on the table with the casual confidence of people who had survived a war. It glowed with an intensity that suggested it was either radioactive or sentient. I’d stare at it, half‑expecting it to introduce itself.
Pickled onions were marginally less terrifying. My grandmother prepared enormous jars of them — great glass vessels filled with pale, floating spheres. I have eaten them, or attempted to, during that strange British lunch known as a Ploughman’s, a meal that implies a man has taken a lunch break from the fields with nothing but cheese, bread, an apple, a pickled onion or two.
But pickled eggs? Absolutely not. Full stop. The very sight of them — boiled eggs suspended in a cloudy amber fluid of unknown origin — was enough to make me reconsider the entire concept of food safety. They sat on pub counters like minor officials awaiting instructions, each one looking as though it had been pickled mid‑career for disciplinary reasons. Approaching the jar felt like entering negotiations with an entity that might, at any moment, request documentation.
I’m laughing even now at the memory of two of my Polish friends during a visit to Chester, standing in a local fish and chip shop as I encouraged them — with a straight face — to try a pickled egg. I can’t imagine anything worse than the sight of that half-filled jar of mysterious amber fluid sitting on a chippy counter, yet I offered only the vaguest explanation that they were ‘different.’ These were people raised on ogórki kiszone, śledź, and sauerkraut sharp enough to make your eyes water at twenty paces — yet one bite of a British chip-shop egg defeated them utterly. Each managed a single mouthful before politely asking if they were allowed to throw the rest away, as though seeking permission to abandon a diplomatic mission. I can still see their faces now. For months afterwards, they’d mention it at random, shaking their heads in disbelief and reminding me, with great solemnity, that it was the worst thing they had ever eaten in the United Kingdom.
I tried sauerkraut for the first time in Hamburg in 1979, and the acidity hit like an ambush. One bite and I was blinking as if a cabbage had pepper‑sprayed me. It felt like centuries of fermentation had been preparing for that moment — and I walked straight into it. I wasn’t able to eat another mouthful.
Sauerkraut, or to be precise in Polish — kapusta kiszona — the backbone of bigos, a dish cherished in Poland — was something I treated like a hostile foreign power for years. Living in Poland changed that; I not only made peace with it, I learned to enjoy it. My younger self would never have believed it.
What really intrigued me, though, shopping in any of the large supermarkets, was finding huge drum-sized containers holding kapusta kiszona. I understood glass jars and even small plastic tubs of it for sale. Poland didn’t do pickled cabbage by the handful; it produced it on a huge scale. I’d walk into a shop and find vast, self-serve open vats of the stuff. Back home, pickled cabbage came in a jar you could lose behind the HP Sauce. In Poland, it came in something you could bathe in.
And there I’d be, standing in the aisle, staring into these cabbage reservoirs with the awe of a man who once blinked at a single forkful.
After Poland joined the EU, the country began to drift closer. It was Polish people — thousands of them — bringing with them the foods they loved and needed. Polish shops appeared on high streets across the UK — bright signs, shelves filled with things that looked both ordinary and exotic. Even the big supermarkets caught on, dedicating half an aisle, or more to Polish products: pickles, sausages, juices, jars of things I didn’t recognise but would learn to.
Looking back, it’s strange to realise that my first connection to Poland wasn’t a place or a person, but a row of jars in my grandmother’s pantry. A quiet beginning, but a beginning all the same.
I moved closer too. Through my work with clients, and later through friendships, I found myself edging into the world behind those labels and shop signs. To help build community cohesion, I set up a project called Projekt Otwarte Drzwi — The Open Door Project. It was meant to be simple: a space where people could meet, talk, ask questions, and feel less like strangers in a new country.
It was there, in our Friday drop‑in centre that always smelled faintly of instant coffee and photocopier toner, that I was introduced to gołąbki. A woman arrived one winter afternoon carrying a foil‑covered tray, the kind people bring to family gatherings. She set it down with the quiet pride of someone offering a piece of home. When she told me the name — “little pigeons” — I must have looked troubled because she burst out laughing. “No pigeons inside.”
gołąbki — little pigeons — absolutely no pigeons inside.
My Polish friends and visitors to the drop-in stood watching at the kitchen counter, eyes wide open, smiling, they genuinely seemed full of joy to see food they recognised from Poland. As the foil was uncovered, I thought perhaps unfairly, but true to my own experiences — this smelled like a British school dinner from my own childhood — all mince and boiled cabbage. But that first impression was entirely wrong. That first bite — warm, comforting, unexpectedly tender — tasted like something made with care, something meant to be shared. And without realising it, I’d just met one of my favourite Polish foods.
Looking back, it makes perfect sense that my first real introduction to Polish cooking didn’t happen in Poland at all, but in a community hall in the UK. Before I ever boarded a plane, Poland had already begun feeding me.
The jars in my grandmother’s pantry had been the prologue. I just hadn’t known it yet.
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