Changes

Grilling season, which is Poland's equivalent to the American BBQ season, is now in full bloom, having started, as always, during the national holidays of early May. The coronavirus pandemic hasn't stopped people from grilling meat in their backyards. So it's a good occasion to say something about the condiments that are indispensable at any grill party: mustard and ketchup. We're gonna start with a little bit of history and then, together with fellow blogger [https://www.facebook.com/michalgoreckipl Michał Górecki,] we'll try to make both condiments according to old recipes recipës and see (and taste) how they compare with their modern, store-bought, versions.

As you can see, even back then Polish people knew quite a few mustard varieties, perhaps even more than the typical modern choice of deli, "French", "Russian", brown, horseradish and honey mustards that you can buy in any Polish supermarket. In Stanisław Czerniecki's ''Compendium Ferculorum'', the oldest printed cookbook in Polish, there's only one recipe recipë for this "''niepospolity condiment''", or "uncommon condiment" (it calls for mustard seeds, wine, vinegar, pears, raisins and sugar),<ref>{{Cyt

}}</ref>, but you can find more in other Old-Polish advice books. Curiously, most of them recommend making your mustard sweet. Sweet mustard may not be very surprising (honey mustard is still quite popular in our own times), but the very diversity of possible sweet ingredients could boggle you mind. What has caught my attention is an 18th-century recipe recipë for mustard flavoured with pears and honey cake (a kind of gingerbread), which you will find at the end of this post.

As new mustard recipes recipës were being developed, so did novel ways to serve the mustard on the table in an elegant way. You may remember [[Epic_Cooking:_The_Last_Old_Polish_Feast#The_Centrepiece_Masterpiece|Adam Mickiewicz's poetic description of the elaborate centrepiece of Soplicowo]]. According to Jędrzej Kitowicz, an indispensable element of such a centrepiece were spherical receptacles he called "bubbles", sitting snugly in metal rings welded to vertical parts of the structure.

But by the time the English could first sample something the locals in Indonesia referred to as "''kecap''", this word had already expanded its meaning to cover all kinds of sauces; in fact, modern Indonesians use it mostly when talking about soy sauce. The English borrowed the word and used it for condiments that were meant to last long, as opposed to sauces, which were prepared just before a meal. Ketchup, or catsup, could be bottled and stored for months or even years. One 18th-century British cookbook contains a recipe recipë "to make ketch-up that will keep twenty years".<ref>{{Cyt

}}</ref> Apart from fish and mushroom ketchups, popular varieties included ketchups made from oysters or unripe walnuts, but recipes recipës are also known for cucumber, plum, gooseberry, grape, peach, pepper, bean, lobster, liver, mussel and even herring ketchups (I need to try out the herring one someday). What did they all have in common? Preservatives – usually salt and vinegar, the latter sometimes replaced with strong wine, stale beer or cider, as well as exotic spices, such as ginger, nutmeg and cloves.

That's not to say ketchup wasn't increasingly advertised in Interbellum Poland itself. What's more, this is when it certain pioneers started to complement the supply of imported ketchup with domestic production. The first man to manufacture tomato ketchup on a commercial scale in Poland was Stanisław Fenrych. In 1919, he purchased an estate in the Greater Poland village of Pudliszki (pronounced: {{pron|pood|leesh|kee}}) where he set up orchards, vegetable gardens and a factory to turn the produce into marmalades, jams and preserves. According to Pudliszki corporate lore, his neighbours expected that pears would sooner grow on a willow tree than his business venture would become profitable, so he defiantly put a pear-bearing willow in his company's logo and soon proved the naysayers wrong. In 1927, Fenrych sent his advisors to Britain to obtain tomato seeds, believing that British varieties would do well in Polish climate. The advisors brought back not only the seeds, but also a recipe recipë for tomato ketchup. Its industrial production began in Pudliszki in the following year. In 1929, the business was visited by Polish President Ignacy Mościcki; at a dinner given in his honour, he was served hard-boiled eggs with ketchup as a starter.<ref>{{Cyt

The press also published recipes recipës for those who wanted to try making "a hot tomato sauce, so-called katsup or ketchup",<ref>{{Cyt

}}.<br>The recipe recipë is almost identical to the one for "catsup" in: {{Cyt

On a sunny May day, I paid a visit to a fellow blogger, [https://www.facebook.com/michalgoreckipl Michał Górecki,] who on that particular day happened to be not grilling, but smoking food in his backyard. But considering that mustard and ketchup go just as well with smoked meat, fish, even cheese, as with grilled, we decided to try two old-time recipes recipës for these condiments. Marcin, yet another food blogger, would then come along to take part in the tasting session.

As I wrote above, mustard used to be rather sweet in the past, so this is what we did: pear-and-gingerbread-flavoured mustard. In Toruń, Poland's gingerbread capital, you can easily buy [http://www.zasmakujregionu.pl/sosy/129-musztarda-piernikowa-200g.html gingerbread mustard,] and you can find a recipe recipë for "''grusztarda''", or pear mustard, in the [https://www.jadlonomia.com/przepisy/grusztarda/ Jadłonomia vegan blog;] but I bet you've never had mustard flavoured with both pears and gingerbread before. This is the original historical reciperecipë:

So then we had to peel, core and dice the pears, and then stew them with a little water, while adding small amounts of vinegar to keep it bubbling (we used apple vinegar, but wine vinegar would be best). Once the fruits were soft, I added crushed gingerbread cookies that had been left over from last Christmas. The recipe recipë calls for "honey cake" and then various spices, but the gingerbread already contained honey and the same spices (cinnamon, cloves, pepper, ginger and cardamom). After this pear-and-gingerbread mixture had cooked down to a homogenous paste (you can hasten the process with a blender) and cooled down, there remained only one more step: combining it with the mustard paste in roughly equal proportion. We also added a pinch of turmeric to give our mustard the familiar mustard-yellow colour (no cheating here; mustards have been dyed yellow with turmeric for ages). We did wait a little for the flavours to develop, but we didn't wait for the mustard to ferment.

And what about the ketchup? For this, I picked an early-19th-century English recipe recipë which has the characteristics of a transition period in ketchup history: it already contained tomatoes, but still contained fish. The fish, in this case, was anchovies.

The original recipe recipë says you should first cure the tomatoes in a frightening amount of salt. We opted for a quicker solution using much less salt (actually, no salt at all except the heavily salted anchovies) and with vinegar providing the tart taste. We started by sautéing a few shallots in oil. Then we added three little jars of anchovies; the smell that wafted then in the air made all dogs in the neighbourhood bark like crazy. Once the fish was cooked down to a paste, we added some peeled tomatoes and then stewed a little more, while seasoning the mixture with allspice, nutmeg, ginger and coriander, as well as (this was my own idea) lovage and summer savoury. And, to make our ketchup at least a little more like the ketchup we're used to, we sweetened it with a ''soupçon'' of sugar. One thing we didn't have was cochineal, so we couldn't dye our ketchup red and had to settle for the orangish tinge typical for tomato soup. Once the whole thing cooled down, it was blended and enriched (according to the original reciperecipë) with a glass of brandy.