Mrs A, an
English teacher and a mother of two teenagers - Julka and Maciek - is a regular
feature of our pages. In this issue she uses a lot of food idioms in her diary. If you need any help understanding them, just place the mouse over the
purple ball following an underlined phrase.
17th October, Friday evening
An emergency call from my friend Alina. Patryk’s older brother is coming
all the way from Wroc³aw for a visit on Sunday and could I please help with the
menu for the evening meal. Knowing Alina, I instantly recognized the hidden
message – helping with the menu will boil down to
me cooking for her and
her guests, but what could I do? I agreed. Over supper I asked my family, ‘What
do you think I can cook really well?’ ‘You can cook anything you want, what a
pity you want only twice a year – at Christmas and Easter’, ventured Spouse.
More of a compliment than a reproach? I wondered. ‘Herring!’ ‘Chocolate cake!’ shouted Maciek and Julka
simultaneously. After some discussion we arrived at the perfect compromise. The
menu for Alina’s dinner would be:
Starters: herring in sour cream, herring in sweet sauce,
herring in curry sauce, Russian salad, Greek salad and Macedonian salad.
Main
course: rolled beef with dumplings
or roast potatoes, Coleslaw and cucumber salad.
Dessert: apple pie or chocolate layered cake.
For a moment I had some doubts. What if he is a vegetarian (as I am) and
doesn’t eat meat or fish? Why do I want to feed him ‘foreign’ food? But is it
foreign? Is apple pie as American as could be? Why is Russian salad called
Russian if it is quintessentially Polish? Or is it? What’s the difference
between ‘Coleslaw’ and ‘Coles³aw’? Is there any at all? But it was just a
moment’s hesitation. It would be a pot
luck dinner for him. And anyway, if the worst came to the worst and
Patryk’s brother turned out to be a vegetarian and a non eater, he could
always stick to the booze. I phoned Alina and dictated to her a shopping list
for the next day. ‘Are you nuts? It’ll cost me half my monthly salary!
There’s no need to make a meal of it’, she cried. I read it
metaphorically. Just her way of saying thank you. ‘Patryk eats like a bird
so let’s hope his brother will eat like a horse’, was all I could say.
18th October, Saturday morning
Over breakfast all I could hear was grumbling. ‘Are we going to have cooked meals today?’ ‘When will you be back?’ ‘Can
you bring something nice home? A slice of cake or something?’ ‘Remember the
proverb, too many cooks...’ I’ll
be slaving in Alina’s kitchen all day long and they can only think about
themselves. ‘Phone for tele-pizza. Or maybe Daddy will try a hand at gourmet
cuisine. I’ll be cooking for you tomorrow, anyway.’ And I left.
18th October, Saturday night
I returned dog-tired and totally fed up. Alina had forgotten about the
cinnamon for the cake and the beef she bought had already been cut up, so we
had to make Hungarian goulash instead. The cream was too thin and wouldn’t set.
She ruined her manicure while peeling the vegetables for the salad and cut her
finger slicing the cucumbers. Two of the eggs were rotten,
the cocoa powder got wet when the carton of milk burst open and she had
to run to the shops three more times. But we definitely brought home the
bacon. I hope she’ll have enough sense to put some music on when she starts
heating things up in her microwave tomorrow.
19th October, Sunday
I spent half the day preparing ‘ a proper Sunday meal’ for my family.
Guilty conscience, I guess. Not for a single second did I interrupt my work to
watch TV. At one o’clock Spouse shouted from the living room, ‘What’s
cooking?’ An inappropriate use of the Active Voice, was all I could think
of. But then ... We had Ukrainian borsch, ‘pierogi ruskie’ (Russian dumplings),
and a salad with French dressing. Typical Polish food, though not everybody’s cup
of tea. When I served them cheesecake with blackcurrant topping even Spouse
forgave me yesterday’s desertion and I had a feeling I had proved I was worth
my salt. At midnight Alina phoned me on my mobile and whispered some
praise. ‘Her’ supper was a great success and Robert (Patryk’s brother) is going
to stay until Wednesday. Who’s going to save her bacon now? I only hope
she’s got enough of the leftovers to last her a day or two.
20th October, Monday, early morning
New ideas for the coming week. The Head called an impromptu staff
meeting first thing in the morning to dispatch to us a couple of missives. The
coming week in our school is going to be devoted to Poland’s accession to the
European Union, so we’re asked (he actually said ‘asked’ as if he didn’t
realize his ‘asking’ means ‘telling’ us to do things or ‘making’ us obey his
orders) to prepare a number of lessons on the topic of ‘Polish input into a
European family’. When it comes to the question of Polish accession, the Head
thinks he knows his onions. I
must say I was rather lucky with the assigned theme. Other teachers fared far
worse. My topic is ‘food’; they have ‘family values’, ‘religion’, ‘know-how’
and ‘arts’. I wonder why nobody got ‘drunkenness’, ‘intolerance’, ‘bigotry’ and
‘corrupted politics’. Apparently, poor relatives are not to be criticized, be
definition.
20th October, Monday, late morning (my first lesson with
class IIIc)
My class weren’t keen as mustard about the theme. Food? What’s
interesting about eating? Why can’t we have Polish rock or Polish hip-hop or
Polish techno or Polish heavy metal? Next thing they’re going to tell me will
be that we even have Polish country and western. Suddenly, Kamil shouted, ‘food
is the spice of life.’ That one definitely knows on which side his
bread is buttered. Luckily, Daria, the slimmest girl in class, stormed out,
‘whoever thinks that food is only about eating is an idiot, a real lemon’.
This introduced some peace and quiet and I was able to explain my plan. Half
the class will draw up a list of their favourite dishes – dishes that are
considered traditionally Polish and that have a reputation of being good
quality food. ‘Czysta wyborowa’, shouted Przemek. ‘And before you do it, please look up the meaning of the word “dish”’, I
added. The other half will make a rival list – of the most severely criticized
Polish dishes, such that may not be universally liked in the Union. And we’ll
try to see how they compare. To my amazement more students volunteered to be in
the ‘negative approach group’, but somehow, after a little coxing and
persuasion the two groups were more or less equal in size.
Later that morning (my second
lesson with class IIIc)
On the ‘positive’ list we had ‘top twelve traditional Polish dishes, the
best in the world, so good that nothing in the EU can compare’:
- Flaki (tripe)
- Golonka (pork knuckle)
- Go³¹bki
(stuffed cabbage)
- Fried
carp (Christmas Eve variety)
- Polish
bread
- Zupa
grzybowa (mushroom soup)
- Grochówka
(pea soup)
- Makowiec
(poppy-seed cake)
- Ch³odnik
(cold beetroot soup)
- Schabowy
z kapust¹ (pork chop with cabbage)
- Bigos
(so-called ‘hunters’ dish’ based on cabbage and different varieties of
meat)
- Placki ziemniaczane (potato pancakes)
When the other group (the negative list group) heard the suggestions, a
real riot started. ‘Don’t delude yourselves that Polish food is going to
sell like hot cakes!’ I was barely able to control their outbursts. First
they had formal objections. Polish bread although very good indeed cannot count
as ‘a dish’ and should be crossed out. Poppy seed cake is banned in some places
because of its opium content. Ch³odnik is actually Lithuanian and is even
called ‘ch³odnik litewski’ so it doesn’t count either. And as for the rest ...
According to numerous opinions voiced by many a foreign visitor to Poland:
‘It’s disgusting to eat carp since it is a scavenger and feeds on excrement’,
‘It’s unhealthy to eat pea soup or cabbage because it gives you gas’, ‘It’s not
safe to eat wild mushrooms because many of them are poisonous so you run a risk
of dying a horrible death if you try mushroom soup’, ‘Pork chops are full of
fat so the dish is a killer in terms of healthy lifestyle.’ ‘Foreigners!’, I
thought, ‘they can dish it out but can’t take it.’ My gut reaction
was to exclaim: ‘Ale bigos!’, or to put it equally culinarily, ‘what a pretty
kettle of fish!’ Instead, I asked the group for their list – ‘the most
hated Polish dishes’. They tried to be short and sweet - only five items. The
list was as follows:
- Flaki (tripe)
- Go³¹bki
- Golonka
- Bigos
- Grzybki
w occie (pickled mushrooms)
Philosophically speaking, one man’s meat is another man’s poison.
To put it plainly, there’s no accounting for taste. Maybe the only hope
for our place in European gourmet cooking is ‘placki ziemniaczane’ since nobody
objected to them. But on a more positive note, we still have oscypek ...
Follow-up Activities
- You can try the quiz based on some of the idioms.
- For the full list of idioms used in the diary, click here.
