When I began writing these pieces, I thought obiad would anchor everything — the midday meal, the table, the rituals I learned in Polish homes. But as the memories returned, I realised that food in Silesia spilled out into gardens, orchards, roadside trees, cellars stacked with jars, and the quiet generosity of people who believed that feeding someone was a form of welcome.
So although this chapter begins outdoors — on a cherry‑lined road, under a netted tree, with a bowl of fruit that startled me — it still belongs to what I like to refer to as “Obiad and Other Meals”. These were the “other meals”: the unexpected ones, the ones that taught me as much as any plate set on a table. A glass of kompot, a handful of cherries, a jar opened with a soft pop — they were all part of the same grammar of hospitality, a lesson I learned on my second visit to Poland.
Cherries
I arrived in my friend’s village by a road lined with open fields, scattered trees, and the kinds of buildings I didn’t yet know how to read: some old, some renovated, some strangely modern-looking, despite clearly having stood there for decades. A beautiful cherry tree stood on the roadside directly outside their home — close enough to feel like part of the garden, though it technically belonged to the street. Its branches were heavy with fruit, the kind of abundance I had only ever seen in photographs. I asked my friend if the tree belonged to her family. She explained — though she wasn’t entirely certain — that she believed it and others had been planted many years ago “for the community,” part of an old tradition of creating fruit tree avenues. Years later, I discovered this to be true. It felt like the right kind of welcome — generous, unhurried, rooted in the land.
The abundance didn’t stop at the roadside.
Their house sat in a large garden, which included another very large cherry tree. It was so big it needed to be netted, a great canopy stretched over it to keep the birds from stripping it bare. I had never seen a cherry tree before, not in real life, not growing. My childhood cherries came from tins of fruit salad, floating in syrup, one red jewel per bowl. My grandmother baked with glacé cherries — too sweet to eat alone, but perfect in a scone, or atop a coconut haystack treat. As an adult, acquiring cherries meant a small supermarket punnet during a brief British season. Here, they were abundance itself. Even the family pet, a huge but gentle Bernese Mountain Dog, spent its afternoons beneath the tree eating windfalls as they fell. I casually mentioned to my friend that I adored cherries, a rare treat, and I’d never seen them growing on a tree either in a garden or by the roadside before.
Inside the house, I moved carefully, shy in borrowed slippers, trying to learn the quiet rules of being a guest. And then her mother placed a bowl on the table: not a polite dish, not a handful, but a harvest. The biggest bowl of cherries I had ever seen. My British instincts panicked at the sight of so much fruit. In my grandmother’s kitchen, a bowl placed in front of you usually came with a task attached: peas to pod, beans to trim, apples to peel. So when my friend’s mother placed this enormous bowl of cherries in front of me and disappeared back into the kitchen, I briefly wondered what work I was supposed to do first.
But the explanation was beautifully simple:
“He loves cherries.”
And in that kitchen, that was enough.
And the welcome didn’t end there.
Later, I was shown a large glass jar lifted from the cool dark of the cellar.
“Kompot,” my friend said. “It’s a drink. Very refreshing.”
The liquid was a deep, ruby red — nothing like the artificial syrup I knew from tins. I tilted the jar and poured it into a glass. The scent rose immediately: summer, sugar, sun‑warmed fruit. I took a sip and was startled by how honest it tasted.
Then I noticed the cherries resting at the bottom.
“What about the fruit?” I asked.
My friend looked at me with gentle amusement.
“Oh… eat it.”
As if there was any other choice.
That was the joy of kompot — a two‑part ritual so simple and so delightful it felt like a small revelation. First came the drink, bright and refreshing. Then the spoon, diving down to feast on the soft, plump fruit from the bottom of the glass. In later years I bought commercial jars of kompot; it was good but never as good as that first taste of a homemade version.
Later that evening, I was asked if I would like to see how the cherries were preserved; I was delighted and agreed that I would. I followed my friend and her father, down into the cellar — cool, almost cold, lit by bright, modern lamps that made the space feel more like a quiet extension of the house than anything underground. It didn’t smell damp or musty; if anything, there was a faint wooden warmth to it, the kind of neutral scent that comes from shelves that have held jars for years. Rows upon rows of glass jars lined those shelves: vegetables, pears, pale‑pink gooseberries, and deep crimson cherries that looked less like food and more like small works of patience. They looked like summer held still — colour and sweetness waiting behind glass. Enough for winter. Enough for guests.
My friend’s father chose a jar of cherries, a couple of bottles of beer, and we went back upstairs. The jar’s seal broke with a soft pop — a small, familiar sound releasing a breath of cool air into the warm kitchen. Nothing dramatic. Just a quiet gesture of care, the sort that stays with you precisely because of how ordinary it is.
But Poland wasn’t only orchards, kitchens and cellars — when I stepped away from the quiet rhythm of the village and into the urban rush of Upper Silesia, the landscape fractured into something entirely different.
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