Polish Heritage Cookery by Robert Strybel;Maria Strybel

Author:Robert Strybel;Maria Strybel
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780781811248
Publisher: IB Dave's Library
Published: 1993-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Despite the major inroads made by potatoes over the centuries, Poland continues to rank among Europe's top grain-eating countries. Only quite recently have other European countries and America begun to rediscover the interesting "new" taste and important nutritional benefits of groats, especially the whole-grain variety, which include fiber, minerals, protein, and even alleged anti-cholesterol properties.

But, as this book was being written (1988-1990), America had yet to discover that king of cereals, buckwheat groats, which can rightly be called "Poland's wonder grain"! Buckwheat groats have more protein than rolled oats, farina, barley, or rice, but are less starchy than rice or potatoes, and contain none of the cholesterol of egg noodles. They are also high in calcium, phosphorous, and iron, as well as B vitamins and vitamin PP. In addition, their high fiber content helps promote regularity-a serious problem to those who make a steady diet of "cotton fluff" (American-style white bread) and other mushy, starchy, over-processed foods.

Buckwheat groats are also proof that healthful foods need not taste like medicine. The fluffy kernels of cooked buckwheat have a pleasingly dusky or nut-like flavor that many may prefer to that of today's much vaunted wild rice. Buckwheat groats span class barriers and are equally at home in hearty peasant dishes as well as being the traditional accompaniment to more epicurean fare such as steak roll-ups, braised collops, and wild game.

Also included in this chapter are recipes incorporating barley, oats, rice, and even millet, although its popularity is now a mere shadow of its former self. The unusual cooked-wheat pudding, flavored with poppyseeds, honey and nuts, is traditionally served on Christmas Eve, to Poles the most festive day of the year. It is known as kutia or kucja.

If this book had been written a decade earlier, before the cholesterol scare and solublefiber craze had shaken American eating habits, we probably would not have included any dishes of the praiucha, kulasza, lemieszka, or mamalyga variety. These old-fashioned mushes, once eaten by the poorest peasant families, would simply have seemed too rustic and obsolete. Now, however, they may prove beneficial to those who are modifying their eating habits to include more cereals and vegetables in place of red meat.

Growing health awareness has also turned yesterday's "cheap cereal fillers" into today's healthful high-fiber additives. We have therefore included a number of ways to prepare traditional ground-meat dishes (meatloaf, meatballs, minced cutlets etc.) that are lower in cholesterol but every bit as tasty as the original.

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