Marketing in Poland

Southland Times, Issue 21264, 10 December 1930, Page 18

Marketing in Poland

In Poland there is no butcher's boy to bring the meat, no greengrocer's assistant to arrive at the back door laden with vegetables. The cook does all your shopping for you first thing of a morning. With an enormous plaid shawl thrown over her head and wrapped round her gaily striped, voluminous skirts she sallies forth to the market.

Very soon her capacious basket is full of groceries, vegetables, loaves of darkbrown broad. Perhaps to day she will buy a hen, not ready plucked and trussed, but alive and clucking. It has a trusting heart, and settles down comfortably under the arm of the woman who, in an hour, will murder it.

Fish is a great delicacy in Poland, and an expensive item. The cook does not purchase it from among a head of dead ones in a fishmonger’s shop. She enters a kind of aquarium called the fish market, approaches a tank in the depths of which swim fish of all kinds, and having chosen the one she likes the best—whether on account of a pleading look in its eye or because of the inviting way it flicks its tail at her who can tell?—declares that she’ll have “that one!” So the fish, like the hen, is brought into the kitchen alive, where it swims happily in an enamel bowl until the fatal moment arrives. The subsequent cooking of the victims invariably produces delicious results. No doubt if you watched the fish chasing its tail in the enamel bowl and saw the hen strutting innocently about the kitchen floor you would imagine them in a fair way to becoming the pets of the household.

But just come to the table and smell the savoury odours rising from the steaming dishes ... ah! A Polish cook may not be able to read her own name, but she will never produce a meal that is a failure. After all, what more can one want from a cook?