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== Beets ==

Another vegetable, which seems indispensable to traditional Polish peasant cookery, but which actually appeared in Poland relatively late, is the beetroot. Beets were grown in the Mediterranean Basin already in antiquity, but more for their leaves than for their roots – which at the time were whitish, long, tapered, bitter and considered inedible. The beet variety with a dark red, round and sweet taproot did not appear in southern Europe before the 12th century and it only reached Poland in the 16th. Ukrainians may have discovered it even later:

== Croissants ==

One blogger, who signs his posts as "bfaure", displays quite a healthy approach to this kind of legends. This is how he prefaces another one of them:

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== Bagels ==

This legend has its Jewish variant as well, which says that Viennese Jews, in gratitude to the Polish king and his Winged Hussars, baked special rolls in the shape of a stirrup. And as the German word for "stirrup" is Bügel, the rolls have been dubbed "bagels". The bagels would later travel all the way to New York, where a sandwich of a halved bagel spread with cream cheese and covered with a slice of lox (smoked salmon) became the favourite snack, first among American Jews, and in the second half of the 20th century – among Americans in general.

}}</ref> the association between King John III and the bagel is not entirely unfounded, if not as romantic as the legend would have it. As it happens, the saviour of Vienna was the first king of Poland who did not confirm a privilege, first issued by King John Albert in 1496, which gave the Cracovian guild of bakers (Christian only) a monopoly for baking wheat-flour bread and ''obwarzanki''. What it meant is that Jewish bakers could finally bake their bagels legally and sell them openly to both Jewish and Christian customers. No wonder the Yiddish phrase in ''meylekh Sabetskis yorn'' (literally, "in King Sobieski's time") is synonymous to "good old days".

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== Coffee ==

Let's return to the croissants for a while.

That's right, what better to wash down you croissants, bagels and myths with, if not coffee? And if we're talking about coffee, then we cannot forget Georg Franz Kolschitzky (or Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki in Polish) who served the Christian coalition forces as a spy and interpreter. If you're not interested in biographical details, please skip the next paragraph.

In this costume and thus armed, he left Vienna on 13 August

and passed through the Turkish camp to the camp of the duke of Lorraine,

That's all for today, but do let me know in the comments section what you would like to read more about. Is it borscht, bagels or coffee? So long!

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