As you may know, I am originally from Poland and this year, we will be celebrating Christmas time and New Year’s Eve here in Warsaw with my family.
Polish people begin the celebration of Christmas with a festive supper on Christmas Eve, 24 December (Wigilia), and continue celebrating for two more days (!). The traditional Christmas Eve fare is meatless and differs from the food served on the 25 and 26 December.
Known as Wigilia supper, the meal is the biggest culinary event on the Polish calendar. Generations of women come together to proudly prepare the 12-course feast – one dish for each of the 12 apostles – and tradition has it you must try some of everything to ensure prosperity for each month of the year ahead.
Bigos
As a result, culinary preparations for Polish-style Christmas can be quite time-consuming. Some dishes need to be prepared well in advance, like Bigos, for example. Its basis is sauerkraut and fresh cabbage, which is cooked slowly for a long time (preferably a few days) with meat, and on Christmas Eve it takes the form of a fasting day meal and includes mushrooms.
Another time consuming typical dish for Christmas Eve are Pierogi– filled dough pockets or dumplings, are an indispensable part of the Christmas Eve supper in as well. In past, each housewife had her own recipe that had been in the family for many generations. This is why Poles have so many recipes for the perfect Pierogi dish. In my family, Pierogi with sauerkraut and mushrooms are a variety that is always found on the Christmas Eve table.
Pierogi
As Poland is more than 80 per cent Catholic, the Wigilia meal is meat-free with a main course of fish, most famously Carp, which is meant to bring good fortune. The Polish karp zatorski even has EU protected designation of origin status.
When I was a child, my daddy used to go to the shop and bring back one live carp for Wigilia. We kept the fish in the family bathtub before ending up on the dinner table. I was quite happy to see a fish in the bath swimming, but was some time later on, that I figured what was happened to it. In Poland, many carp are still sold live in supermarkets (to the dismay of animal rights protesters), but days though, there’s a gradual change in attitudes about buying carp alive. The new generations don’t do this anymore.
Karp sma?ony
Polish cuisine is famous for its soups, which is why they have to be on the Christmas table. The most popular is Barszcz czerwony (red borscht) – sour soup made of beetroot. It is served with small dumplings filled with cabbage and mushrooms.
Typical soup served on Christmas Eve include a mushroom soup. In the past, traditionally, Mushroom soup was prepared on a sauerkraut base fermented in a barrel. The secret was an excellent combination of two tastes: sweet and insipid mushrooms, which burst between the teeth, and sauerkraut.
Usually, only one type of soup is served on Christmas Eve. In my family, we eat the red borscht (barszcz czerwony) on the Christmas Eve and the mushroom soup on December 25th.
Kompot Wigilijny
Dried fruit compote –Kompot Wigilijny
This dish cannot be absent from any Christmas Eve dinner table in Poland, although in some parts of the country it takes on the form of dried fruit soup. Dried apples, plums, pears and apricots, and sometimes almonds, are soaked with water and served for better digestion. This is the only Christmas Eve dish praised by dieticians for its fibre, vitamin and mineral content. Of course, this is assuming that no sugar is added during the process.
On Christmas Eve, December 24th, the appearance of the first star on the sky marks the beginning of one of the most beautiful evenings in the year. An entire day of fasting ends with a prayer, singing Christmas carols and the sharing of the Christmas wafer and wishes of good luck.
After that, supper is served – and although it is meant to be a fasting meal, it will likely lead to heavy overeating!
After devouring the twelve dishes, families leave the dinner table to unpack presents, which are placed under the Christmas tree.
Finally, children can enjoy their gifts together with their parents and the evening turns into long magic night filled celebrations of exceptional family moments.
