Early Chinese Views of Taiwan

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia's Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle p. 243:

Some of those Austronesian ways and skills could be found too among the peoples of Taiwan – except the sailing ability. Taiwan remained almost completely off the trade map despite the fertility of its western lowlands, its proximity to the China coast, to Okinawa and the Japan trade, and, via island stepping stones, to Luzon. Geographically Taiwan is linked to the Asian mainland, of which it was once a part, while separated from Luzon by the deep waters of the Bashi channel. But in other ways it was much closer to Luzon. Many of its peoples shared language and culture with those of the Philippine archipelago. Why was it that the inhabitants of this large island, unlike those of the Philippines and Ryukyus, turned their backs on the sea and made their living from the land and forests? There is no ready explanation. Although evidence of some overseas trade dating to around 2,500 BP is provided from discoveries of Taiwanese jade elsewhere and Indian glass beads on the island, the identity of the traders is not known. As in the archipelago, there was not a specific bronze age, iron- and bronze-working arriving about the same time.

Even Chinese annals had very little to say about Taiwan despite its proximity. There were occasional traders and fishermen visiting from the mainland, but almost nothing written about it. One of the few who did write was Ma Duanlin, a compiler of knowledge about China’s neighbours. Writing around 1300 and using varied sources, he described characteristics of the people including hair and dress styles, crops, foods, animals, intertribal wars and the freedom of the young men and woman to choose partners without parental consent. They were not literate and followed a lunar calendar but were strong and good fighters. Ma noted that in around 606, during the Sui dynasty, the emperor had sent a mission to learn more about the place and demand the king send tribute. This was refused, so the emperor sent forces which killed the king and many others and destroyed his palace. But thereafter ‘all communication with the country ceased.’ (Ma referred to the island as Liu Kiu (Ryukyu), but the size and position clearly meant that he was referring to Taiwan.)

The early seventeenth century saw a Chinese expedition against (mainland) pirates using Taiwan as a base, which gave rise to An Account of the Eastern Barbarians by Chen Di, written in 1603. Chen noted a matrilineal kinship system, and the easy relations between young men and women. He remarked on the ability of the men to run down and catch deer. They ate all parts of the deer including the intestines and their contents, which appalled the Chinese, but they in return were appalled by Chinese eating chickens. ‘Strange indeed are the Eastern Barbarians,’ wrote Chen.

Philippines Under Japan

From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 51-54:

At least initially, few of the elite saw reason to confront the Japanese. A majority of senators joined the Executive Commission; others kept a low profile. A few were enthusiastic, including Laurel who admired Japanese order and devotion to the nation. Laurel could reasonably claim that some cooperation with Japan was necessary for the good of the people. Accepting the Presidency of the supposedly independent republic, however, was another matter given that the elected president and vice-president had a government-in-exile in Washington.

Another key collaborator was Benigno Aquino, a lawyer and landowner from Tarlac, who had been Secretary for Agriculture under Quezon. The Japanese made Aquino head of a new appointed assembly, known by the acronym Kalibapi (the Association for Service to the New Philippines). Also banging the drum for Japan was the MaKaPili, the Patriotic Society of Filipinos, led by former Sakdal leader Benigno Ramos. Former revolutionary general, Artemio Ricarte, who had always refused allegiance to the US, returned in late 1944 after thirty years in exile in Hong Kong and then Japan. Even Emilio Aguinaldo resurfaced, urging close cooperation with Japan.

Spanish citizens, who were still numerous and influential as priests or from the old elite, were divided. Many had supported the Falangists during the Spanish Civil War and were thus prone to be sympathetic to Japan, but Andres Soriano of the giant A. Soriano Corporation stuck with Quezon as a member of his cabinet even though he had been the local leader of Spain’s Falangists. Others played an equivocal role. Manuel Roxas, who Quezon originally favoured as vice-president over Osmena, was captured by the Japanese and became an adviser to Laurel. The Japanese hoped to make him president in 1943 rather than Laurel but he declined. Late in the war Roxas may have provided intelligence to the Americans.

Whatever its notion of Asia for Asians, the occupation had several problems which fed on each other. The first was the arrogant and often brutal behaviour of the Japanese military for whom easy-going Filipino ways were alien. There was also a demand for comfort women for the soldiery, for which there was little local consent. Second was the quest for raw materials by Japan, combined with the inevitable shortages of a wartime economy shorn of foreign trade. The Japanese needed local resources to feed a 400,000-man army in the Philippines. Food shortages and unemployment were caused by Japanese demands for materials and the collapse of export industries which had been focused on the US market. A third factor was that antipathy towards the Americans was found more among the elite than lower down the social order where the US was associated with progress and aspiration. In exile, Quezon and Osmena provided a focus for resistance, there was pride in the Filipinos’ sacrifices in Bataan, and before long an expectation that the Americans would return.

Guerrilla activity developed, in many cases led by former soldiers, and provided some support brought by American submarines. As only Americans could defeat the Japanese, many Filipinos now longed for their return, past sins forgiven. They provided information and help to the Americans while appearing to be loyal to the puppet government. As resistance grew, so did reprisals and fear of the kempeitai, the Japanese military police. Disorder reigned too with some supposedly anti-Japanese activity becoming a cover for settling feuds between rival families. The resistance spawned many heroes but also, in the aftermath, many bogus claims to it. The most significant resistance, at least in the longer term, was provided by the Hukbong Bayan Laban na Hapon – the People’s Anti-Japanese Army – or Huks in Central Luzon, heart of rice and sugar cultivation, and of big haciendas. Feudal and paternalist tenancy systems, which at least provided stability for families, had been significantly replaced by sharecropping and small farmers, reduced by debt, into becoming wage labourers. As anti-landlord as it was anti-Japanese, some of the movement’s leaders drew inspiration from Mao Zedong. The movement was headed by Luis Taruc, a protégé of early nationalist and convert to Marxism, Pedro Abad Santos, brother of the Chief Justice. Taruc, who had been a full-time peasant organizer for the Socialist, then Communist, Party since 1934, was the leader of several thousand members from the sharecropper and landless workers, mainly in Bulacan, Nueva Ecija, Pampanga and Tarlac. The Huks were, however, predominantly a peasant organization born of injustice more than ideology.

...

Post-war tales of Japanese atrocities and Filipino suffering during the occupation helped provide a focus for the nation in the early years of independence, which finally occurred on 4 July 1946. Yet not far under the surface of this massaged history was the reality that the elite recognized. There was little instinct for retribution against collaborators. Aquino was charged with treason but released on bail and died the following year. Laurel was likewise charged with treason but never tried. In 1948, as President, Manuel Roxas, whose own cooperation with the Japanese remained questionable, declared an amnesty. Only five years later, Laurel stood unsuccessfully for president as the Nacionalista Party candidate winning 37 per cent of the vote. The victor was Elpidio Quirino who, despite the deaths of many family members in the Battle of Manila, pardoned the Japanese convicted of war crimes. Vargas went from the puppet republic’s ambassador in Tokyo in 1945 to head of the National Planning Commission in 1946.

Whatever mixture of class solidarity, family relationships, Catholic notions of forgiveness or common nationalism, the quick post-war healing was in sharp contrast to experiences in many other countries occupied during the 1937–45 wars. There were also cross currents. Lingering Spanish and Church sentiments were in favour of the Spanish dictator, General Franco, as a bastion against atheistic communism and hence highly critical of the anti-clericalism of leftist nationalists. Those with Chinese affiliation, on the other hand, were influenced against Japan by its invasion of China. Nationalists came in different colours with some interested in sustaining the status quo but without the Americans. Only those on the far left were consistent in being anti both Japanese and US imperialism and even they were sometimes divided between middle class Marxist revolutionaries and rice farmers fighting landlords.

Forster's About the Breadfruit

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 276-278, 282-283:

‘I would be far more useful to the world if I were to embark on another great voyage,’ he told a friend in November 1783, a few months after leaving the Rosicrucians. Weren’t there enough people who could sort, classify and regurgitate what had already been discovered? But if he couldn’t travel to distant continents and islands, he could explore them with his mind and imagination—and in Kassel in early 1784 he published his groundbreaking About the Breadfruit. In what was ostensibly a botanical treatise, he illustrated how the tendrils of botany reached into culture, ethnography, history, linguistics and human migration. A brilliant and original piece of scholarship, About the Breadfruit reveals George’s visionary thinking, the work of a man way ahead of his time.

George had first encountered the breadfruit during the Resolution voyage.* It was a tropical fruit which grew on large trees on many of the South Pacific islands they had visited. He had enjoyed the dishes made with the abundant breadfruit—cooked on hot stones or fermented into a dough which was baked like bread—but he had also noticed that they had been seedless. With no seeds, the breadfruit trees on Tahiti, Tonga, Tanna and Malakula, George explained in his essay, could only be propagated by cuttings from suckers that grow off the tree’s roots. During the many months they had spent in the region, George had not seen a single wild breadfruit tree—all of them had been planted by humans.

That made him wonder where breadfruit trees originated and how they had arrived on the islands. Searching Göttingen’s vast library, George had then discovered several botanical volumes which contained descriptions of wild specimens with seeds and small fruits with little flesh from Indonesia and the Philippines. If Tahiti, Tonga, Tanna and Malakula had no indigenous breadfruit trees with seeds, the only explanation was that they must have been exported from Southeast Asia, travelling thousands of miles across the ocean to the South Pacific islands. For George this proved two things. Firstly, the sophistication of the islanders’ agricultural methods—as there was apparently no seedless variety in Southeast Asia, they must have bred and transformed the originally small fruit into the large nourishing crop he had tasted. Just as cereals and fruits had been domesticated through selective breeding in Europe, so the South Pacific islanders had used cuttings from trees with larger fruits to facilitate the slow changes over the centuries—‘bit by bit’.

His second conclusion was even more striking, for the history and movement of the breadfruit enabled George to develop a stunning understanding of Polynesian migration. The breadfruit’s journey, and its cultivation from a small fruit with spiky skin, seeds and little flesh, to the larger seedless variety found in Tahiti, Tanna and the other islands, was proof that the Polynesians had migrated east from Southeast Asia across the Pacific—a theory confirmed more than 200 years later by DNA and archaeological studies. As people had boarded their canoes to travel to distant islands, they had packed their most valuable crops and animals. ‘The breadfruit tree,’ George wrote, ‘could only have been brought eastwards by humans.’

About the Breadfruit also illustrates how differently George thought from other scientists and explorers of his day. During the Endeavour voyage Joseph Banks had also taken note of breadfruit trees but his interest was economic. Struck by the ease of cultivation and rich harvests—‘Bread fruit is procurd with no more trouble than that of climbing a tree,’ he had written in his journal during the Endeavour’s stay in Tahiti—Banks lobbied both George III and Parliament to send an expedition to the South Pacific to transfer breadfruit tree seedlings from Tahiti to the West Indies in order to feed the slaves on British sugar plantations. Where Banks saw a nutritious high-yielding food plant that could fuel the engine of the British Empire, George Forster saw evidence of Polynesian migration.

...

The differences George observed in the people of Vanuatu and New Caledonia, compared to those on more easterly islands, was the result of intermingling between the descendants of the first migration wave and later Polynesian settlers. George could have not known the complex details of these migration patterns, but more than two centuries ago he worked out the broad outlines by studying the diaspora of Polynesian languages and the history of the breadfruit tree. He could only guess their reasons—‘oppression by their own people, or foreign conquerors, or superstitious legends, or some other cause’—but he was convinced that these great ancient navigators and their families had set out on purpose to find new islands to colonize and had not drifted there by accident. ‘I cast a glance at a map of that part of the world,’ he wrote in About the Breadfruit, ‘I survey the vast Pacific Ocean, and find that the most distant, solitary, and scattered islands are not only inhabited by people, but occupied by the very same people… I confess, I cannot convince myself that a storm, or a series of similar coincidences, is sufficient to satisfactorily explain this widespread dispersion of one and the same people across such a vast ocean from New Zealand to Easter Island.’

The people of the South Pacific, George realized, were connected rather than separated by the ocean. Where others saw tiny islands spread across the vastness of the Pacific, he brought them together with the threads of migrations. Building on what he had seen as a young man, George had matured into a bold and original thinker. It would take more than two hundred years for the world to catch up with him.

• As the first to publish the botanical description of the breadfruit from the South Pacific islands shortly after their return in 1775, George and Reinhold had their name attached to it for posterity—Artocarpus communis J.R. & G. Forst.

Changing USSR Nationality Policy

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 18-21:

The USSR began its life with massive affirmative action for the non-Russian cultures outside the Russian Federation. But cultural Russification of the borderlands returned in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Stalin emerged as Lenin’s sole successor and began preparing the country for war. One reason for the change was industrialization, which, given Russian control of the all-Union party, came with the advance of Russian as the language of administration, science, and technology. Another reason was accommodation of the Russians as the largest nationality in the now Soviet empire, along with concern to integrate the non-Russian nationalities culturally so that they would not switch sides in the coming war.

In Ukraine, the largest non-Russian republic of the USSR, the change of nationality policy was signaled by show trials against the Ukrainian intelligentsia. The first such trial, which took place in 1929, was followed by an attack on the Ukrainian party cadres and the peasantry, which reached its peak during the Holodomor, or the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33. A number of key Ukrainian communists committed suicide, while others were dismissed from their positions and jailed. As many as four million people were starved to death as part of a concerted campaign to crush the peasant resistance to the collectivization and maximize grain delivery for Soviet industrialization. In the month leading up to the start of the famine, Stalin warned his associates that such measures were needed to prevent loss of control over Ukraine. The Holodomor turned Ukraine, previously known as the breadbasket of Europe, into a land devastated by famine.

World War II led to another shift in Moscow’s policy toward the nationalities. Although Russocentrism was not abandoned, more manifestations of Ukrainian and other non-Russian patriotism were allowed. The Soviet takeover of Poland’s eastern provinces following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 was justified as liberation of fellow Ukrainians and Russians from Polish capitalist oppression. It was also celebrated in ethnic terms as the reunion of western Ukraine and western Belarus with the corresponding Soviet republics. The old imperial reunification paradigm was back, dressed this time in Ukrainian and Belarusian clothing. After Hitler attacked the USSR in June 1941, non-Russian nationalism was mobilized once again, especially in Ukraine, to encourage patriotic resistance to the German invasion. Once German forces occupied all of Ukraine with the assistance of their Romanian and Hungarian allies, Moscow did not mind promoting the Ukrainian language, culture, and history to mobilize resistance and inspire the loyalty of more than six million Ukrainians drafted into the Red Army. The Ukrainian card was also played at home and abroad to justify the military takeover and annexation of western Ukrainian lands ruled by Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania during the interwar period.

In 1914 the Russian army had captured the city of Lviv, then under Austrian rule, justifying it as liberation of fellow Russians—that was the tsarist authorities’ official term for the local population. As World War II drew to an end, the Soviets played not the Russian but the Ukrainian national card when they integrated Lviv into the Ukrainian SSR, although the city was largely Polish in ethnic composition, with Jews (largely exterminated during the Holocaust) as the second-largest ethnic group.

While the authorities were eager to exploit Ukrainian ethnicity to justify Soviet westward expansion, they did not welcome or tolerate every expression of Ukrainian patriotism and nationalism. The radical Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), formed in the western Ukrainian lands during the interwar period, was considered particularly dangerous. Its members were known to the Soviets as Banderites: their leader, Stepan Bandera, and some of his followers were imprisoned in German concentration camps after a failed attempt to declare an independent Ukrainian state in alliance with Germany and against the USSR in the summer of 1941. The Nazi occupiers, who regarded Slavs as subhuman, deported more than two million Ukrainians to Germany as slave laborers and persecuted Ukrainian patriots of every description.

The two branches of the OUN, one led by Bandera, the other by his less-known rival Andrii Melnyk, turned against the Germans by the end of 1941. In 1943 the Bandera faction assumed leadership of the 100,000-strong Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a guerrilla force that fought against the Polish Home Army and the Nazis and, later, against the Red Army for control of western Ukraine. The Ukrainian nationalist insurgency was not completely crushed until the early 1950s, the last years of Stalin’s rule, earning the designation of the strongest and longest-lasting movement of resistance to the Soviets anywhere in east-central Europe.

The Soviets did their best to discredit the Ukrainian nationalists by condemning their early collaboration with the Germans and exposing the participation of some OUN members in the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing of Poles during the German occupation of Ukraine. They also made major concessions to the Ukrainian language, which became dominant in western Ukrainian government institutions, replacing Polish. But the Sovietization of western Ukraine was carried out mainly by repression. Not only the captured fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army but also civilians suspected of helping the insurgents were resettled or deported en masse to gulag camps in the Russian SFSR, making Ukrainians the largest ethnic group of political prisoners in the Soviet Union—a phenomenon documented by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago.

Polish Realia: Italian Pizza

Here are some informative paragraphs from the placemats at Tutti Santi, home of "legendary Italian pizza" in Kielce, Poland.

Włosaka pizza to setki lat historii. Na to, jak smakuje, ma wpływ jakość produktów, ale tez wiele lat poszukiwan, odkryc i zaangażowania ludzi, dla których pizza stała się życiową pasją. Zamów swoją ulubioną pizzę i rozsmakuj się w tej wyjątkowej historii.
Italian pizza embodies centuries of history. Its taste is shaped not only by the quality of the ingredients but also by years of exploration, discovery, and the dedication of people for whom pizza has become a lifelong passion. Order your favorite pizza and savor this unique story.

Włoskie Rzemiosło Italian Craftsmanship
Przepis na prawdziwą, włoska pizzę to tajemnica, do której dostęp mają tylko nieliczni. Tutti Santi to jedyna restauracja w Polsce, w której spróbujesz pizzy według receptury Mistrza Włoch i Europy Valerio Valle. Ciasto jego autorstwa jest delikatne, cienkie i lekko chrupiące.
The recipe for authentic Italian pizza is a secret accessible to only a few. Tutti Santi is the only restaurant in Poland where you can taste pizza made according to the recipe of Italian and European Champion Valerio Valle. The dough he created is delicate, thin, and slightly crispy.

Cierpliwość Patience
Ciasto według autorskiej receptury Mistrza Valerio Valle wymaga czasu i cierpliwości. Dojrzewanie ciasta trwa 48 godzin, w tym czasie zachodzą w nim niezbędne procesy, dzięki którym zawsze jest pyszne i lekkostrawne.
The dough, based on Master Valerio Valle’s original recipe, requires time and patience. The dough undergoes a 48-hour maturation process, during which essential changes occur that ensure it is always delicious and easy to digest.

Pomidory Tomatoes
Pomidory nie zostały odkryte we Włoszech, ale to Włosi odkryli ich potencjał i zamienili je w symbol włoskiej kuchni. Nasz sos tworzymy tylko z włoskich pomidorów, które dojrzewają w gorącym słońcu południa, co daje im wyątkową słodycz.
Tomatoes were not discovered in Italy, but it was the Italians who discovered their potential and turned them into a symbol of Italian cuisine. We make our sauce exclusively from Italian tomatoes ripened in the hot southern sun, which gives them exceptional sweetness.

Mąka - Sekret Ciasta Flour - Secret to the Dough
Wyselekcjonowaliśmy specjalny rodzaj włoskiej mąki o odpowiedniej zawartości białka. Mąkę sprowadzamy prosto z włoskich młynów, które od blisko 200 lat należą do jednej rodziny, gdzie przez pokolenia przekazuje się najlepsze tradycje i wielowikowe doświadczenie.
We have selected a special type of Italian flour with the appropriate protein content. We source our flour directly from Italian mills that have belonged to the same family for nearly 200 years—mills where the finest traditions and centuries of experience have been passed down through generations.

Naturalny Ogień Natural Fire
Nasze pizze wypiekamy w specjalnych kopułowych piecach opalanych drewnem. Od czterech pokoleń są one produkowane przez jedną rodzinę Valoriani. Od ponad 100 lat specjalizuje się ona w tradycyjnych piecach chlebowych, wykorzystując moc ognia, właściwości lawy wulkanidznej i widzę na temat rzemieślniczych metod wypieku ciasta.
We bake our pizzas in special wood-fired dome ovens. For four generations, they have been produced by the Valoriani family. For over 100 years, they have specialized in traditional bread ovens, harnessing the power of fire, the properties of volcanic lava, and expertise in artisanal baking methods.

Unikalne Smaki Unique Tastes
Do przygotowania każdej pizzy w Tutti Santi wykorzystujemy selektywnie wybrane produkty, które sprowadzamy bezpośrednio z Włoch od regionalnych, rzemieślniczych producentów. W naszym menu znajdziecie m.in. szlachetną szynkę San Daniele, Mozzarellę di Bufala z mleka bawolego, sery Stracchino, Provolone i wiele innych regionalnych produktów!
To prepare every pizza at Tutti Santi, we use carefully selected products imported directly from Italy from regional, artisanal producers. Our menu features, among other things, premium San Daniele ham, buffalo milk Mozzarella di Bufala, Stracchino and Provolone cheeses, and many other regional products!

Trekking Over Arctic Ice, 1881

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 245-247:

In high spirits, De Long and his men began their long march across the frozen ocean, inching toward the familiar world, or at least a place where other human beings might conceivably be found. Stretched out for miles across the ice, they resembled, said Melville, a straggle of “vagabond insects.” It was numbing, staggering work, and yet they were strangely happy—happy to be free of the confines of the ship, relieved to be moving again, eager to accept the bonds of their common struggle. They aimed for the middle of Russia and the Siberian Arctic coast, but in their minds they were heading home, to wives and mothers and girlfriends, to plump chickens and fresh garden vegetables, to soft beds and warm fires, to gossip and invention, and if not to glory, exactly, then to the cheers of an appreciative homeland.

De Long and Dunbar, equipped with field glasses and pocket prismatic compasses, clambered ahead of everyone else in the foggy distances to mark the way with black flags stuck in the ice. They called their path a “road,” but the route they staked was little more than a suggestion of lesser treachery, a devious course across ever-shifting mazes of fissures, hummocks, pressure ridges, and pools of shimmering meltwater. Which is to say, the captain and his ice pilot—whose earlier problem with snow blindness had cleared up—were merely going on their best hunches.

Keep to the road! they cried. Stay on the road! The men could only laugh at the absurdity of the word. As Danenhower put it, there was only “knee-deep snow” and “lumps of ice that would have taken a whole corps of engineers to level.” Yet they trudged on, sunburned and chapped-lipped, dressed in sour-smelling pelts, wearing slitted ice goggles, singing galley songs as they slogged over the impossible expanses of crust and rubble and sludge.

The June sun, whenever it burned through the fog, had a strange quality of penetrating intensity, as though it were training X-rays on the snow. The light revealed a dirty ice pack at times strewn with signs of life—crab claws, bear scat, mussel shells, bleached bones, goose quills, plant seeds, driftwood, ocean sponges. The gyre of the ocean and the churn of the ice had mixed everything up, old and new, animal and vegetable, into a kind of Arctic gumbo.

Dr. Ambler cared for the sick; Alexey and Aneguin tended to the dogs. But the others spent their days as draft animals, straining against their hemp ropes and canvas harnesses. They pulled more than eight tons of provisions and gear, on improvised sleds whose crosspieces had been fashioned from whiskey barrel staves and whose heavy oak runners were shod with smooth whalebone. In addition to the three battered boats, they hauled, among other things, medicine chests, ammunition, stew pots, cooking stoves, tent poles, oars, rifles, ship logs and diaries, canvas for sails, scientific instruments, the wooden dinghy, and two hundred gallons of stove alcohol.

As for food, they had inventoried, at the outset, 3,960 pounds of pemmican, 1,500 pounds of hardtack, thirty-two pounds of beef tongue, 150 pounds of Liebig’s beef extract, twelve and a half pounds of pigs’ feet, and substantial quantities of veal, ham, whiskey, brandy, chocolate, and tobacco. Every pound, every ounce, had been carefully weighed at the start, then just as carefully apportioned to the different sleds and crews so that everyone, aside from the sick, would pull an equal amount of weight.

There was far too much to haul in one trip, so they had to double back—and sometimes triple back—to bring up everything from the rear. This meant that for many of the haulers, each mile of forward progress actually represented a distance of five miles traversed. A full day of this Sisyphean business could mean twenty-five miles or more of ceaseless struggle. It would have constituted slave labor even on hard, dry ground, but this slob ice, with all its gaping holes and intervening sea-lanes, was the most trying terrain imaginable—as a landscape, said De Long, it was “terribly confused.”

The men often had to launch the boats, cross a narrow lead of water, and then hop right back out again to re-stow the boats on the sleds. Other times, they would use a large cake of floating ice as a ferry, employing grappling hooks and networks of ropes to tow it, and all their belongings, across the water to the icy shore beyond. The “road-building crew” would wield pickaxes to clear a smooth groove through encrusted ice, shave off the top of a high hummock, or fashion what De Long called a “causeway” or a “flying bridge” across emerald pools of meltwater.

Demise of St. Lawrence Island, 1881

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 235-238:

One of Hooper’s responsibilities was to patrol the capes and islands of Alaska in search of rum merchants, whose illicit trade in alcohol was proving disastrous to the natives. It was in the service of that responsibility that in late June, Captain Hooper stopped at St. Lawrence Island, an ice-gouged crescent of volcanic rock set in the middle of the frigid sea, directly west of the mouth of the Yukon River. Part of America’s Alaskan territory, St. Lawrence Island was nearly a hundred miles long and some twenty miles wide. Three years earlier, the island had had a population of more than fifteen hundred Yupiks, living in a dozen well-established villages scattered along the coast. Theirs was an ancient, thriving culture built principally on the walrus hunt. But then, in a single winter, the populace had been nearly extinguished by some sort of disease or famine.

Around six o’clock on the evening of June 24, 1881, Hooper anchored the Corwin along the south coast of the island, beside a small Eskimo village. The captain, along with Muir, Smithsonian naturalist Edward Nelson, and the ship’s physician, Irving Rosse, rowed toward shore in a small boat, scanning the terrain with their field glasses. The island, said Muir, was a “cheerless-looking mass of black lava, dotted with volcanoes, covered with snow, without a single tree.” Landing the lifeboat, they strode across a gravel beach and then a spongy surface of snow-dusted lichen and moss. Here and there, blooming heaths and other bright wildflowers peeked through the snow. But when the men approached the village, there was no one to be seen. “We began to fear,” said Muir, “that not a soul was left alive.”

...

WHAT, PRECISELY, HAD happened on St. Lawrence Island? Many whalers suspected an epidemic of some kind, but others believed the mass death was caused by the complete failure of the Yupiks’ hunt in the summer and fall of 1878—which, in turn, was caused by an abundance of rum and whiskey illegally sold to the St. Lawrence Islanders by American traffickers. With alcohol around, Yupik life had ground to a halt—“as long as the rum lasts,” wrote Hooper, “they do nothing but drink and fight.” Drunkenness, said Muir, had “rendered them careless about the laying up of ordinary supplies of food for the winter.” Indeed, near one of the huts, Hooper counted eight empty whiskey casks.

Then an extremely severe winter followed, with far more ice than usual, which made it harder to find seals and whales. By early 1879, the Yupiks all over St. Lawrence Island had begun to starve. They ate their own sealskin clothing, and the walrus-skin coverings of their huts, and the walrus-skin membranes of their boats. This temporarily satisfied their cravings but made them violently ill. With nothing else left to eat, they butchered their dogs until they ran completely out of food. In twos and threes, the villagers of St. Lawrence Island began to die.

The numbers across the island were staggering: More than one thousand people—two-thirds of the population—had perished in 1879, the same year the Jeannette had set sail and cruised right past this island on her way to the pole. The conventional explanation addressed only part of the mass starvation. Alcohol and the severe winter were certainly factors—alcohol, especially. But something far larger had been taking place that made this colossal famine a certainty: Over the previous decade, American whalers in the Arctic, seeking to augment the value of their cargo, had turned to harvesting walruses in astoundingly high numbers. Throughout the 1870s, American whaling vessels had taken as many as 125,000 walruses from the Bering Strait region. The slaughter had proved to be a lucrative sideline to the whaling business. The whalers cooked the animal’s blubber into oil and hacked off the tusks to sell in ivory markets as far away as England and China. In a single season in 1876, more than 35,000 Bering walruses were killed.

Compared to the risky rigors of Arctic whaling, “walrusing” could be ridiculously easy. Rather than wielding lances and harpoons from tippy open boats, the whalers had discovered that they could simply clomp onto the ice with rifles and shoot large numbers of walruses point-blank in the head. Then the butchering, flensing, and boiling could begin. Firing up their try-pots aboard ship, the whalers could render more than twenty gallons of oil from the blubber of a single mature bull. In less than a decade, this industrially efficient slaughter had largely destroyed the Yupiks’ primary source of food and the seasonal hunting life upon which it was based. By the 1880s, the walrus was nearly extinct in large swaths of the Bering Sea.

Polish zakąski vs. Romanian zacuscă

My latest compilation from Culture.pl includes some articles about Polish gastronomy, including Natalia Mętrak-Ruda's 2020 article on Zakąski Culture in Poland: What to Eat with Vodka?

The Spanish have their tapas, the Italians have their aperitivo and in the Middle East they feast on mezze. Small plates, which you most often share with friends and which – at least in countries where it’s generally accepted to consume alcohol – are usually accompanied by a fair share of drinks, are a part of many food cultures worldwide. In Poland, these dishes are known as zakąski and go exceptionally well with vodka.

...

Traditional Polish weddings, especially in rural areas, are occasions where the culture of zakąski still reigns supreme. While we’ve observed a cultural shift in past decades, and people in big cities tend to drink more wine and often prefer a more Mediterranean or French approach to banquet canapés, smalec [animal fat, cf. schmaltz], sausages and other cured meats, meat jellies, pickles, and herring are still among the most popular items included in traditional wedding buffets – sometimes known as wiejski stół, ‘a country table’.

... Yet the king of all zakąski was herring, served with a tomato and onion sauce (the ‘Kashubian’ way), with mayonnaise and peas (curiously named Japanese herring), or simply in oil with some onions.

In the last decade ongoing efforts have been made by some Polish chefs, bartenders and spirit connoisseurs to start looking at vodka from a new perspective. Not just as something to get drunk on, or dissolve in a cocktail, but an interesting local product, which has the potential to become as important to Poland, as whiskey is to Ireland and Scotland, or champagne to France.

To do so, passionate chefs started to think about much more refined zakąski, which would go well with artisan vodkas. Chef Aleksander Baron and food writer Łukasz Klesyk even wrote a book about it entitled Między Wódką a Zakąską (which literally means ‘Between Vodka and an Appetiser’, yet also refers to the idiom wcinać się między wódkę a zakąskę – to meddle or interfere).

The authors claim that the most important rules in creating new zakąski are following the contrasts created by the pairing of the sweetness of vodka with either salt or acid. At the same time, keeping in mind that the appetisers should be rich and complex enough to handle high levels of alcohol. It can be achieved by adding fat but also by enriching the flavours by grilling, roasting, adding herbs, spices or mushrooms.

The Russian equivalent of zakąski is zakuski, singular zakuska, with pretty much the same meaning, but the Romanian zacuscă that we Outliers are very fond of is instead a vegetable concoction of roasted eggplant, red bell pepper, onion, tomato, and spices.

Polish Realia: Beer Styles

From the illustrated placemat at Browar Pivovaria, in Radom, Poland.
Najlepsze Piwa z Radomia / Warzone na Miejscu
'Best beer from Radom / Brewed on Site'

Pils Pilsner
Nasz Pils to pełne, jasne piwo dolnej fermentacji w stylu niemieckich pilznerów. Posiada barwę złota i wspaniałą białą pianę, a warzone jest ze słodu jasnego jęczmiennego. W smaku czyste, orzeżwiające, z wraźną szlachetną goryczką i zapachem szyszek chmielowych. Polecane do zimnych przekąsek, dań z drobiu i ryb. Alk. 5% obj. [< objętościowo]
Our Pils is a full-bodied, light bottom-fermented beer in the style of German pilsners. It has a golden color and a wonderful white foam, and is brewed from light barley malt. The taste is clean, refreshing, with a slight noble bitterness and the smell of hop flowers. Recommended for cold snacks, poultry and fish dishes. Alc. 5% vol.

Pszeniczne Wheat 
Pszeniczne to orzeźwiające piwo w stylu weizen. Warzone jest ze słodu pszenicznego (60%) i jęczmiennego jasnego. Piwo to charakteryzuje się słomkową barwą i puszystą białą pianką. W smaku wyczuwa się pszenicę jak również aromat bananowo goździkowy. Poleca się szczególnie do dan serwowanych z sosem śmietanowym, delikatnej wieprzowiny i placków ziemniaczanych. Alk. 5,1% obj.
Wheat is a refreshing weizen-style beer. It is brewed from wheat malt (60%) and light barley. This beer is characterized by a straw color and fluffy white foam. The taste is wheat with banana and clove aroma. It is especially recommended for dishes served with sour cream sauce, tender pork and potato pancakes. Alc. 5.1% vol.

Bursztynowe Amber
Bursztynowe to piwo dolnej fermentacji. Produkowane jest z udziałem słodu jasnego jęczmiennego i ciemnych słodówkarmelowych. Barwa jest adekwatna do nazwy, a smak to mieszające się nuty słodowo - karmelowe oraz wyczuwalna goryczka. Poleca się je szczególnie do potraw z grilla i dań ze schabu. Alk. 5,7 obj.
Amber is a bottom-fermented beer. It is produced with light barley malt and dark caramel malts. The color lives up to its name, and the taste is mixed malt and caramel notes and noticeable bitterness. They are especially recommended for grilled dishes and pork loin dishes. Alc. 5.7 vol.

Polish Realia: Beer Types

From the illustrated placemat at Browar Pivovaria, in Radom, Poland.
Najlepsze Piwa z Radomia / Warzone na Miejscu
'Best beer from Radom / Brewed on Site'

Koźlak Bock
Nasz Koźlak jest mocnym, ciemnym piwem o słodkim zapachu przypominającym ciasto z owocami. Wyczuwa się również woń karmelu, fig is suszonych śliwek. Ma rozgrzewający charakter, a na podniebieniu pozostawia pełny słodowy smak z przebijającymi się nutami toffi i wyraźną goryczką. Poleca cię go m.in. [< między innymi 'inter alia' ] do żeberek i delikatnej wołowiny. Alk. 7,5% obj. [< objętościowo]
Our Koźlak is a strong, dark beer with a sweet smell reminiscent of fruit cake. You can also smell caramel, figs and prunes. It has a warming character, and leaves a full malty taste on the palate with pungent [not 'punctual'!] notes of toffee and a distinct bitterness. It is recommended for ribs and tender beef, among others. Alc. 7.5% vol.

APA American Pale Ale
Piwo górnej fermentacji w stylu American Pale Ale. W smaku wyrazista, zbalansowana gorycz z wyczuwalnym aromatem chmieli Amerykańskich. Piwo polecane do pikantnych i słonych dań. Alk. 5,0% obj.
Top fermented beer in the style of American Pale Ale. The taste is distinctive, balanced bitterness with a noticeable aroma of American hops. The beer is recommended for spicy and salty dishes. Alc. 5.0% vol.

Czarny Koń (lub inne piwo sezonowe)
Black Horse (or other seasonal beer)
Mocne, ciemne piwo w stylu ALE. W smaku i aromacie wyczuwalna jest słodowa słodycz z nutami karmelu. Znaczny dodatek słodów ciemnych nadaje piwu również aromat i smak ciemnej czekolady oraz kawy. Piwo długo leżakowane. Piwo poleca się m.in. do golonek i żeberek. Alk. 9.2% obj.
Strong, dark beer in the style of ALE. In the taste and aroma, there is a malty sweetness with notes of caramel. A significant addition of dark malts also gives the beer the aroma and taste of dark chocolate and coffee. Long aged beer. The beer is recommended for pork knuckles and ribs, among others. Alc. 9.2% vol.

Evolution of Polish Viticulture

My latest compilation of stories from Culture.pl includes an interview about the history of Polish viticulture. Here are some excerpts:

Monika Kucia: Poland isn’t historically a winemaking country, but we do have a short history of winemaking dating back centuries. When were grapes first cultivated on our territories? 

Wojciech Bońkowski: In the Middle Ages, viticulture was quite developed in our country, also because the climate in our part of Europe was warmer back then. Wine was mainly needed for religious purposes, the celebration of mass, so it was grown on a limited, very small scale. Cultivation collapsed due to the so-called Little Ice Age, a period of cooling in the North Atlantic when average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere dropped by about 1°C. Around the 17th century, Poland began importing large quantities of wine from, among other places, Hungary and Ukraine. After World War II, Lubusz Voivodeship, including Zielona Góra ['Grünberg'], was incorporated into Poland. Before 1939, Zielona Góra was the largest wine-producing region in Germany and specialized in sparkling wines. We took over these vineyards, but they, too, were closed down by the 1960s because the Polish communist authorities promoted the production of fruit wines, not grape wines.

MK: What is fruit wine?

WB: Fruit wine is a cheap alcoholic beverage made from widely available fruit, in Poland primarily from apples. Hence the Polish term ‘jabol’ [slang term for low-quality, wine-like alcoholic fruit beverage derived from the word for ‘apple’, jabłko, trans.]. This kind of wine is much cheaper to produce than wine made from the fermentation of grape must. Fruit wine production was possible in Poland on a large scale thanks to the orchard industry. The Polish People’s Republic saw a decline in wine culture, which had been quite developed in interwar Poland, among the elite of course. The common folk, if we may use that term, drank other alcoholic beverages. This is, of course, a result of our geographical location. We have a different social situation today; changes are affecting the whole of society, and wine has definitely become very popular. Studies show that nearly 50% of Poles declare at least occasional wine consumption.

...

MK: How did it all begin?

WB: Winemaking was first revived in the Podkarpackie ['Subcarpathian']  region thanks to the efforts of Roman Myśliwiec ['Hunter'], who founded a nursery where he propagated vines and supported the establishment of small vineyards and the production of wine in a style we affectionately call ‘allotment garden wine’. Some had 1,000, others 2,000 square meters of vineyard. Back then, no one had a hectare. These were amateur production attempts. 

...

MK: Where did the winemakers get their seedlings?

WB: Partly from Myśliwiec, but of course, seedlings can be easily purchased in wine-producing countries. We have Czechia and Slovakia just across the border. That’s not a problem, just a cost. And these were investors, businessmen who had money they’d made in other industries.

MK: And what about Jutrzenka in the Podkarpackie region?

WB: That was a variety created by Myśliwiec, a typical hybrid. The problem with hybrids was that most of them were of very poor quality. The early ones, such as Bianca and Sibera, were so-called second-generation hybrids that reeked of cabbage and IXI laundry powder; they had no merits.

MK: So why were they cultivated?

WB: Hybrids are developed for two purposes: either to ripen early and be suitable for a cold climate, which was their main function in Poland; or to be more disease resistant. At the time, it seemed that we in Poland couldn’t grow Chardonnay or any other viniferavariety, that the grapes wouldn’t be ripe enough to make wine. This turned out to be untrue. It gets a little warmer every year, which helps. Meanwhile, the discussion about hybrids is currently gaining momentum worldwide. On the one hand, we have the pressure of significantly reducing the use of chemicals in agriculture; after all, winemaking is responsible for a significant portion of soil contamination – in France, for example. There are stories about a winemaker spraying fifteen times, but if he’s planted a hybrid, spraying twice would be enough.

MK: So hybrids aren’t ‘inferior’?

WB: At first, I was skeptical about hybrids. Not from a cultivation perspective, as I don’t know anything about it, or at least I don’t have practical experience, but from the perspective of the market and the quality of these wines. Fourth-generation hybrids, such as Johanniter and Solaris, are varietals that are no longer easy to distinguish in a comparative tasting; they are simply very good. Johanniter and Riesling can be very similar, so the quality argument is no longer relevant.

MK: And can one grow noble red wine varietals in Poland?

WB: In Poland, for example, we have a lot of Pinot Noir; this varietal has recently produced surprisingly good wines in many places around the world, such as Czechia and Canada, which have similar climatic conditions to Poland. It used to be said that this was a difficult grape variety which only performed well in Burgundy, but that’s not true. That’s the great thing about wine – we’re constantly being self-verified. Yesterday, it seemed that only Italian wines were sexy, but today, wines from Greece and Croatia are considered sexy. It’s constantly changing.

Polish Realia: Brewery Operating Steps

On the occasion of Śmigus-Dyngus:
From the illustrated placemat at Browar Pivovaria, in Radom, Poland.
Najlepsze Piwa z Radomia / Warzone na Miejscu
'Best beer from Radom / Brewed on Site'

Słód 'malt'
Mielenie Słodu / śrutownik 'grinding the malt' / 'grinder'
Zacieranie / kadż zaciera + woda 'rubbing / mash tun + water'
Filtracja / kadż filtracyjna 'filtration / filtration vat'
Gotowanie / kocioł warzelny + chmiel 'cooking / boiling kettle + hops'
Schładzanie Brzeczki / wymiennik ciepła 'cooling the wort / heat exchanger'
Fermentacja / tank fermentacyjny + drożdże 'fermentation / fermentation tank + yeast'
Leżakowanie / tank leżakowy 'aging / aging tanks'
Butelka 'bottle' or Keg 'keg'

Food Rationing in Scotland, 1945

From Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 61-62:

In Scotland the food allowance each person had to get by on at that time included the following: 2 ounces of bacon or ham, a finger of cheese (1.5 ounces), 7 ounces of butter or margarine, 2 ounces of cooking fats, 8 ounces of sugar, 2 ounces of tea (about 20 teabags), 4 ounces of sweets and 1 shilling’s-worth (5p) of meat. It doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Except this wasn’t a day’s ration – it was for one full week. Except for the bacon. That was two weeks’ allowance. Other staples such as bread, bananas and even potatoes (throughout 1947) were also rationed. As for fresh eggs, you could have one a fortnight – if you could lay your hands on one. Most urban families made do with the vile-tasting powdered version for the skimpy amounts of baking they could eke out of their precious rations of flour and sugar. On the plus side, people were allowed three pints of milk a week.

In fact, milk was just about the only commodity with which the Attlee government was generous; as part of its drive to maintain the nutritional health of the country’s children, in 1946 free school milk was introduced for all pupils up to the age of 18. This was later reduced to primary schools only. A quarter of a century later, free school milk was finally phased out by Margaret Thatcher. She was dubbed Thatcher the Milk Snatcher by her political opponents.

Those of us of a certain age well remember the crates of one-third-of-a-pint bottles which had to be humped in from the playground into the classrooms. For some unfathomable reason, once indoors, the crates always seemed to be stacked next to the school radiators, ensuring the milk was lukewarm by the time it was dispensed. It is one of life’s ironies that, despite food shortages and rationing, the children of postwar Scotland were better fed than many of their modern counterparts. That, in large part, was down to the free milk ration and free school meals (about half the UK’s pupils qualified for them), plus daily doses of free cod liver oil and concentrated orange juice which mothers determinedly rammed down the throats of protesting offspring.

Polish Easter Foods

My latest compilation from Culture.pl includes an article by Mai Jones listing 10 Traditional Dishes of Polish Easter. "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."

Here is an abbreviated list of the dishes.

Biała kiełbasa: "This white sausage is made of unsmoked minced pork, with the addition of beef and veal, covered in a thin layer of pork casings and seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic and marjoram."

Żurek or żur: "a soup made of homemade or store-bought sourdough from rye flour. It's garnished with boiled white sausage and boiled egg halves."

Eggs: "Whether served boiled, stuffed, fried or with mayo, there's no getting away from them. The decorative devilled egg is a hard-boiled egg, halved and filled with a mixture of the yolks, mayonnaise, mustard, onion and horseradish cream."

Śledź: Herring "is served gutted and filleted, in pieces that have been marinated in vinegar and oil, with or without vegetable. It's typically smothered with chopped, raw onion."

Chrzan: "produces pungent vapours and makes the eyes water, but white or red horseradish relish pairs well with the variety of cold cuts. The fiery relish draws out more of the meat flavour. The red type is called ćwikła and its colour is due to the addition of beetroot."

Mazurek: "The flat shortbread can be made of different kinds of dough and toppings – for example, marmalade, chocolate glazing, dried fruit or nuts."

Sernik: "a rich creamy baked cheesecake that differs from its American counterpart in cheese. You could try to replace the exclusively Polish cheese called twaróg with country, cottage, quark, curd or ricotta cheese, but it won't do the trick. Twaróg is more dense, sweeter, and less wet than those cheeses and less smooth than ricotta.... The Eastern Orthodox Church has a twaróg-based equivalent – the truncated, pyramid-shaped paskha."

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."

Makowiec: " a poppy seed roll spun like a strudel. With poppy seeds as the main ingredient, it uses the same type of dough as the babka."

Easter lamb: "Made entirely of sugar and shaped like a lamb, this is the traditional centrepiece of the Polish Easter table and Easter basket. It often has a miniature red flag with a cross."

Polish Realia: On the Farm

Vocabulary from Muzeum Wsi Radomskiej 'Village Museum of Radom'

dom wiejski 'farmhouse, country house'
dom ludowy 'people's house' (community center?)
dworek 'manor house'
chlew 'pigsty'
kurnik 'henhouse'
obora 'cattle barn'
stajnia 'stable (for horses)'
stodoła 'barn'
strzecha 'thatch (roof)'
sławojka 'outhouse privy' (named after 1928 PM Felicjan Sławojka Składowski)

ciągnik rolniczy 'farm tractor' (cf. ciągnąć 'pull', pociąg 'locomotive')
brona 'harrow' (and 'portcullis'!)
grabie 'rake'
kosa 'sickle'
kosiarka konna 'horse-drawn mower'
pług konny 'horse-drawn plow'
sierp 'scythe' (cf. Sierpień 'August')
widły 'pitchfork' (cf. widelec 'food fork')
zgrabiarka konna do siana 'horse-drawn hay rake'
żniwiarka konna 'horse-drawn harvester'

pszczoła 'bee'
pszczelarstwo 'beekeeping in apiaries'
pszczelarka 'beekeeper' (pszczelarze 'beekeepers')
bartnistwo 'beekeeping in wild beehives'
bartnistka 'beekeeper'
pasieka 'apiary'
ul 'beehive'
ule rozbieralne 'movable beehives'

wiatrak koźlak 'post windmill' (which swivels on a post)
łopata wiatraka 'windmill blade'
wał wiatraka 'windmill shaft' (blade axle)
wiatr 'wind'
młyn wodny 'watermill'
koło wodne 'waterwheel'
koryto 'trough, chute'
żuraw studzienny 'crane well, shadoof' (cf. żuraw ptak 'crane bird')

Polish Realia: Mushrooms

Jaki to Grzyb? What Mushroom Is This?

Goryczak żółciowy 'yellow bitter, bile bitterness' (edible), Tylopilus felleus

Pieprznik jadalny (kurka) 'Chanterelle' (edible), Cantharellus cibarius

Lisówka pomarańczowa 'orange fox' (inedible), Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca

Muchomor sromotnikowa 'green fly agaric toadstool' (poisonous), Amanita phalloides

Mleczaj rydz 'milk thistle' (edible), Lactarius deliciosus

Borowik szatański 'red bolete' (poisonous), Rubroboletus satanas

Koźlarz czerwony 'red lectern' (edible), Leccinum aurantiacum 

Krowiak podwinięty (olszówka) 'curled cowhide' (poisonous), Paxillus involutus

Borowik szlachetny 'Boletus edulis' (edible), Boletus edulis

Muchomor czerwony 'red fly agaric toadstool' (poisonous), Amanita muscaria

Podgrzybek brunatny 'brown bay bolete' (edible), Imleria badia

Maślak zwyczajny 'common butternut squash' (edible), Suillus luteus

images here

Food Fair in Kielce, March 13-15

Ekspedycja Smaku na Rynku w Kielcach
Taste Expedition in the Market Square of Kielce

Impreza organizowana przez Ekspedycję Smaku potrwa przez cały weekend.
A party organized by Taste Expedition will last the whole weekend.

Ekspedycja Orientalna to kulinarna podróż przez azjatyckie smaki i aromaty. W sercu Kielc zapachnie trawą cytrynową, imbirem i chili. Spróbujemy między innymi pho, banh mi, koreańskich przysmaków i malezyjskich dań prosto z Azji.
Oriental Expedition is a culinary journey through Asian tastes and aromas. In the heart of Kielce will waft the smells of lemon grass, ginger, and chili. We will try things like pho, banh mi, Korean spices and Malaysian straight from Asia. 

Ekspedycja Słodkości to świat deserów. Na stoiskach znajdziemy puszyste churrosy, belgijskie gofry, kolorowe makaroniki, lody rzemieślnicze i mnóstwo innych słodkich niespodzianek. Sweets Expedition is a world of deserts. At the stalls, we'll find fluffy churros, Belgian waffles, colorful pastas, artisanal ice cream, and plenty of other sweet surprises.

Ekspedycja Piwa i Wina to podróż przez świat rzemieślniczych trunków i tradycyjnych receptur. W sercu Kielc spotkają się pasjonaci piwa, wina i nalewek. Na Rynku znajdziemy rzemieślnicze browary z całej Polski, wyjątkowe winnice i starannie wyselekcjonowane wina, tradycyjne nalewki i autorskie kompozycje smakowe, beczki, aromaty słodu, chmielu i dojrzewających win. To wydarzenie dla koneserów, odkrywców smaków i wszystkich, którzy chcą poznać tajniki produkcji trunków oraz porozmawiać bezpośrednio z ich twórcami. Beer and Wine Expedition is a journey through the world of artisanal drinks and traditional recipes. In the heart of Kielce, enthusiasts will encounter beer, wine, and liqueurs. In the Market Square, we'll find artisanal brewers from all over Poland, exceptional vineyards, and carefully selected wines, traditional liqueurs, and original taste pairings, barrels, aromas of malt, hops, and aging wine. This event for connoisseurs, taste explorers, and all who want to learn the secrets of drink production and talk directly with their creators.

Ekspedycja Rzemiosła i Cudów to wydarzenie, gdzie tradycja spotka wyobraźnię, a każdy przedmiot opowie własną historię. W sercu Kielc odkryjemy unikatowe wyroby rzemieślnicze, artystyczną biżuterię, naturalne kosmetyki, ceramikę, świece, ilustracje, dekoracje i cuda, których nie znajdziemy w masowej produkcji. Crafts and Wonders Expedition is an event where tradition meets imagination, and each object will tell its own story. In the heart of Kielce we'll discover unique artisanal products, artistic jewelry, natural cosmetics, ceramics, candles, drawings, decorations, and wonders, which we do not find in mass production.

Nie zabraknie też strefy rodzinnej, w której znajdziemy dmuchane atrakcje dla dzieci i kreatywne inspiracje dla małych i dużych oraz mnóstwo muzyki. There will also be family zones, in which we will find inflatable attractions for children and creative inspirations for young and old and plenty of music.

Wydarzenie trwać będzie w godzinach:
Event to last the following hours:

• Piątek 15–20 Friday 3–8 pm
• Sobota 12–20 Saturday 12–8 pm
• Niedziela 11–19 Sunday 11–7 pm

Polish Realia: Health Foods

Żywność Bezglutenowa 'Gluten-free foods'
Kamienie i Kryształy 'Stones and crystals'

Makarony 'Pastas'
Mąki i Mieszanki 'Flours and mixes'
Napoje Roślinne 'Plant-based drinks'
Słodycze i Przekąski 'Sweets and snacks'
Oleje i Oliwy 'Vegetable and olive oils'
Superfoods Bio 'Organic superfoods'
Produkty bezcukrowe 'Sugarfree products'
Probiotyki 'Probiotics'

Sklep Zielarsko Medyczny 'Herbal and Medical Store'
Dary Ziół 'Herbal offerings'
Eko Żywność Bezglutenowa 'Eco gluten-free foods'
Przyprawy 'Spices'
Kosmetyki Naturalne 'Natural cosmetics'
Herbaty Świata 'World teas'
Witaminy 'Vitamins'
Oleje 'Oils'
Produkty Certyfikowane 'Certified products'

Wellness
Zdrowy styl Życia 'Healthy Lifestyle'

Niezwykle możliwości 'Extreme possibilities'
Super Roślin 'Super plants'

View store image

Dokarmiaj Ptaki Mądrze / Feed Birds Wisely

Nie karm ptaków chlebem! Don’t feed birds bread!
Nie podawaj produktów przyprawionych i solonych!
Don’t serve spiced and salted products!
Resztki jedzenia, przetworzona żywność, w tym pieczywo, szkodzą ptakom i przyczyniają się do wielu chorób. Zawarta w nich sól jest szkodliwa i może prowadzić do ich odwodnienia i chorób nerek.
Leftover food, processed food, including baked goods, harms birds and contributes to many diseases. The salt contained in them is harmful and can lead to their dehydration and kidney disease.

Czym dokarmiać ptaki? What to feed the birds?
Ziarna zbóż: słonecznik, pszenica, kasze, kukurydza, płatki owsiane, otręby.
Cereal grains: sunflower, wheat, groats, corn, oat flakes, bran.
Gotowane warzywa bez soli: pokrojona marchew, buraki, ziemniaki, kapusta.
Vegetables prepared without salt: sliced carrots, beetroots, potatoes, cabbage.

Jak dokarmiać ptaki? How to feed birds?
Nie wrzucaj jedzenia do wody! Don’t throw food in the water!
Pokarm podostaw ptakom na brzegu, w miejscu spokojnym, czystym i suchym.
Leave food for the birds on the shore, in a quiet, clean, and dry place.

Source photograph

Polish Realia: Multigrain Bread

Chleb Wieloziarnisty 'multigrain bread'

pieczywo pszenno-żytnie na naturalnym zakwasie
'bread wheat-rye on natural sourdough'

z dodatkiem ziaren, krojone
'with added grains, sliced'

Składniki: 40% mąka pszenna, 15% zakwas żytni (9,4% mąka żytnia, woda)
'Ingredients: 40% wheat flour, 15% sourdough rye (9.4% rye flour, water)'

mieszanka nasion (2,2% siemię lniane, 2,2% ziarna pszenicy lamanej
'seed mixture (2.2% flaxseed, 2.2% cracked wheat grains,'

2,2% nasiona słonecznika, 2,2% prażone lamane ziarna soi)
'2.2% sunflower seeds, 2.2% roasted cracked soybeans)'

ekstrakt słodowy jęczmienny jasny, drożdże, sól, gluten pszenny, mąka sojowa,
'light barley malt extract, yeast, salt, wheat gluten, soy flour,'

olej rzapakowy, środek do przetwarzania mąki (kwas askorbinowy)
'rapeseed oil, flour processing agent (ascorbic acid)'

mąka słodowa jęczmienna, posypka : 4,4% nasiona sezamu, 4,4% siemię lniane.
malted barley flour, sprinkles: 4.4% sesame seeds, 4.4% flaxseed