Hidden behind the casual café tables, the corner-store-like shelves filled with cans of beef goulash, smoked herring fillets and mackerel salad, and glass jars of gnome-like fare (pickled foraged mushrooms and cured sorrel leaves) is the small kitchen. “Like home,” says Bogumila “Bogusha” Pawlaczyk, who has four pots simmering on the black cast-iron stove. One pot is sauerkraut bubbling off its sour bite. Another pot is about four gallons of fresh-sliced green cabbage, which is to cook down by half. Those two pots will be drained and combined with sautéed onions, kielbasa, bacon, and a touch of tomato, and simmered slow and low to make bigos. “More time you heat again, next day better,” she says with her thick Polish accent, her tongue fluttering right behind her front teeth. She explains: “Boil cabbage absorbs good smoke flavor.” In Poland she explains, they cook it long and low for what sounds like days, until all the ingredients just fall apart. “In the US, they want to know what they eat.” So she cooks the stew less and slices the cabbage thicker. The version she makes for her customers is still mushy, but its lack of that razor-sharp edge, its lack of micro greens, of fresh anything, is ironically, quite refreshing. Finally, she says, “We have in our genes to eat bigos.” No matter where we’re from, I think we all do.
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Lindsay Sterling: lindsay@lindsaysterling.com
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