White sausage, rye soup, cakes with poppy seed or cottage cheese: the numerous traditional Easter delicacies in Poland are surprising, sophisticated and inspired by Spring
Żurek is a soup made of homemade or store-bought sourdough from rye flour. It's garnished with boiled white sausage and with boiled egg halves. In the past, żurek and herring were the main pre-Easter Lent fasting food.
Biała kiełbasa - white sausage - is an unsmoked minced pork, beef and veal sausage, seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic and marjoram. It can be served with żurek or- boiled, sometimes with horseradish, mustard, or ćwikła (horseradish-beetroot relish).
Makowiec
is among the wealth of Easter cakes, it's a poppy seed roll spun like a strudel. Its main ingredient is poppy seeds and it uses the same type of dough as Babka. The texture is crunchy and nutty, and it's sometimes covered with sugar icing.
Babka
The tall airy Easter babka is a no-knead yeast cake baked in a Bundt pan. It can be laced with rum syrup and drizzled with icing but custom dictates that it has no filling. The name derives from the word "grandmother" and probably refers to its shape: a grandmother's wide, pleated skirt.
Sources:
http://culture.pl/en/article/10-traditional-dishes-of-polish-easter
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Easter lamb
Made entirely of sugar and shaped like a lamb, this is a traditional centrepiece of the Polish Easter table and Easter basket. It often has a miniature red flag with a cross.
Mazurek.
The recipe is considered to have arrived to Poland from Turkey and started circulating in the 17th century. How mazurek looks- depends on who made it. The flat shortbread can be made of different kinds of dough and toppings, for example marmalade, chocolate glazing, dried fruit or nuts.
Sernik
is a rich creamy baked cheesecake. You could try to replace the exclusively Polish cheese called twaróg with country/ cottage/ quark /curd cheese or ricotta but it won't do the trick. Twaróg is more dense, sweet and less wet than those cheeses and less smooth than ricotta. Sources say that sernik dates back to ancient Greece and Rome.
Chrzan (horseradish). White or red horseradish draws out more of the meat flavour. The red type is called ćwikła and its colour is due to the addition of beetroot.
Śledź (herring) is served gutted and filleted, in pieces that have been marinated in vinegar, oil, with or without vegetables, usually smothered with chopped, raw onion. When Easter comes, home-made herring is very popular.
Eggs.
They're served boiled, stuffed, fried or with mayonnaise.
The decorative devilled egg is a hard-boiled egg, halved and filled with a mixture of yolks, mayonnaise, mustard, onion and horseradish cream.
Polish Easter Dishes
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