This Is Basically Just Porridge But It Sounds So Wrong
This Is Basically Just Porridge But It Sounds So Wrong
Milk Soup in Poland
I love Polish food, but there is one dish I could never stomach: milk soup.
There is just something about milk. Cold, it was barely palatable, but could be eaten with cornflakes. Warm, it was impossible. Just the smell was enough to make me gag. Luckily, my parents never made it, let alone forced me to eat it, so I only had to deal with milk soup at camp. But that was bad enough.
Milk soup is exactly what it sounds like: warm milk, sometimes served with pearled barley, oats, or with zacierki—tiny dumplings made by grating pasta dough directly into the soup.
Milk soup fits into the Polish tradition of sweet soups. Tart cherry soup
was a very popular first dish in my school’s canteen. It was served with pasta. It was delicious, but I wasn’t used to sweet soups because my parents never made them. No wonder milk soup was a no-go for me. To me, soup is just not made to be sweet, and my parents taught me that mixing pasta with fruit was just not done. But then again, I come from a nation that does exactly that: makaron z truskawkami, a Polish dish that combines pasta with cream and strawberries.
When I moved abroad, some of the dishes I knew from Poland became impossible to make because some of the ingredients just weren’t available. And then I had children, and suddenly, it became increasingly important to me to make for my children the Polish dishes I knew, even the ones I never made myself.
At some point, I thought I had to introduce them to milk soup. I didn’t even know the recipe, so I had to look it up. But the recipe for the dumplings was pretty much the same as the one I usually use for my noodles: 100g of flour, one egg, and a pinch of salt. But instead of rolling out the dough and cutting it into longer strips like tagliatelle, or into squares like for Polish łazanki, I just grated them into the hot milk. I also added some honey, because I remembered that though the soup was usually not served sweet, children would add sugar.
I rarely make such elaborate breakfasts for my children. I was just finishing it up when they came back from school.
“What’s that, mama?”
“That’s milk soup. With dumplings. Do you want to try it?”
They enthusiastically agreed. Unlike me, they enjoy milk. They drink it, they eat it with cereal. And now they were about to experience it as a soup.
They ate so quickly that their ears shook, as we say in Poland. And then they asked for more. I was surprised to find that the milk soup, something that I hated growing up, elicited such an enthusiastic response from my children. I thought it must be all the honey I put in there.
When my children were done, my eldest looked at me and said, “This is the best soup you’ve ever made, mama.” Actually, I don’t mind. Because at the moment, my foreign-born children were much better at being Polish than I ever was.