A Taste of Memory: Journeying Through Kraków and My Mother's Kitchen
Gołąbki, Kuchnia Domowa Sasiedzi, Kraków, Poland
Kraków surprises me. I don’t expect to feel such a strong emotional connection to my adopted Polish mother, Maxine, when I arrive in Poland for the first time. My mother was a smart, faithful, a good listener, and loved to laugh. She went through multiple bouts of cancer but somehow stayed strong through all of it. She had dozens of VHS tapes that she watched all the time with comedies on them. She knew laughter was the best medicine, and her videotape stash was legendary.
But I didn’t grow up with any attachment to her Polish heritage. I’d more closely aligned my heritage to my birth parents, who both were Italian, which seemed much more exotic.
We lived in a Polish section of the suburbs of Buffalo, and school was a melting pot of European cultures. My adopted father was German with a very narrow palate of foods he liked to eat—meat and potatoes, plus the breakout Italian spaghetti sauce my mother had perfected despite not having a drop of Italian blood running through her body. My mother was an excellent cook, but there were fewer than a handful of ethnic Polish foods that she would prepare. Stuffed cabbage rolls (called Gołąbki) and Polish sausage are the only two that come to mind. My only exposure to rice outside of the cabbage stuffing was when I was a teenager eating Chinese food at the food court at the neighborhood mall.
My mother and father, Maxine and Walter in my childhood kitchen
When we head to Old Town Kraków for our first lunch in Poland, I am unexpectedly overcome by childhood memories. My brain swirls back to decades ago when my mother and her sisters would speak a few Polish words they picked up from their parents so my siblings and cousins and I wouldn’t understand what they were saying. I can picture my grandmother with her swollen ankles and orthopedic shoes overseeing the preparations for Thanksgiving dinner. Several of the women would be cleaning multiple turkeys and making turkey stuffing the night before our huge Thanksgiving dinner where all the family would gather. I recall cutting the crusts off of loaf after loaf of white bread that would eventually become one of the most flavorful parts of the meal the next day. Grandma was the true matriarch of the family and pulled no punches about how things should be done. The little folding table from when I was very young comes into view and I see back to Christmases past when my uncle would latch a meat grinder onto it because it had the best edge to hold it in place. My mother and aunts prepared kielbasa filling and he and my father would stuff the sausage into its casing.
All these memories make me curious about the foods that were on my mother’s plate when she was a child. Unfortunately, it was a subject that never came up. My mother was busy raising a family and we didn’t carve out nearly enough time for her to share her childhood stories. So many things I’ll never know. But as I continue walking through Old Town, I breathe deeply and consume the connection to family and tradition. Eventually we stop at a place to get the stuffed cabbage and tomato sauce of my youth. The sight and the smell and the taste create the magic to transport me to my mother’s cheerful lemon yellow kitchen and I am a child again surrounded by the flavors of love.
This is what travel gives to me.
If you’d like to check out our full video on the tastes of Kraków, head over to our episode, Polish Food Tour of Kraków: An Unexpected Restaurant City.
