Everyone knows that nothing tastes better than home-made, hand-made delicacies served on a beautifully decorated Eastern table.
Publication of the National Museum in Gdansk entitled “Peasants Culture Gdansk Pomorskie” states that “Pork was most appreciated, and goose was the most popular among poultry. (…) Pigs were usually slaughtered once or twice a year – at Christmas and Easter.” Most meat dishes included in the List of Traditional Products of the Pomorskie Voivodeship, i.e. cooked cured sausage or sausage from Hell with black mustard, are very time-consuming and difficult to make on your own.
Using the recipe from 1961, which was written down during a cooking course for housewives in Marzecino, you can prepare something easier and at the same time very impressive, ham in dough: clean the ham, wash it and rub it with spices: salt and pepper, then cover it with bay leaves and sprinkle with garlic. Prepare soft pasta dough, roll it out to a thickness of 0.5 cm and wrap it around the ham. Bake for as many hours as the weight of the ham (e.g. bake 5 kg for 5 hours) at a temperature of 250 degrees.
Covering a piece of meat with dough brings out its proper flavour and preserves the aroma of the spices used. A piece of meat baked in this way is juicy and tender. It can be served both cold and hot.
Sweets cannot be missing from the Easter table. Fans of simple cuisine will quickly prepare carrot cake from carrots, flour and water, which is called “poor cake” by the inhabitants of Kashuby. First, grate the carrots into small pieces and pour off the excess juice, as it will be used to prepare the icing for the cake. Then beat the eggs with sugar, adding flour, oil and a little cinnamon for flavour.
Finally, add the grated carrot to the dough and mix very well. Baking the cake takes about an hour at 170 degrees. Pour the sugar and carrot juice icing over the slightly cooled cake. Over the decades, as the wealth of Kashubian housewives increased, they diversified the composition of the cake by adding dried fruit, cocoa and nuts.
The Pomorskie List of Traditional Products includes proposals for typical Kashubian cakes: cheesecake with potatoes or young “kuch” with crumble. Both of them are quite difficult to prepare, especially in the case of yeast dough, which according to custom and tradition: … if kneaded well, it is shiny and smooth, it gets blistered, like skin after being burned, and it rises better…
