Sunday Without Chicken Soup is not a Sunday: A Polish Food Tradition

​It’s noon on Sunday on a hot summer day in the 1960’s. The sun is pouring into the kitchen. There are pots boiling on top of every burner of the stove.  We are still in our church-going clothes sitting down to our big Sunday meal after mass. Everybody is sweating buckets. What does my mother serve up?  Hot soup. Not just any soup but hot chicken soup.

 
Little did I know back then that hot chicken soup on Sunday was a Polish tradition.  There’s even a Polish saying:

​Niedziela bez rosołu to nie niedziela. Sunday without chicken soup is not a Sunday.

How did chicken soup come to be so closely associated with a Polish Sunday dinner?
Let's start with the name. The Polish word for chicken soup is rosoł. It means bullion or broth or a clear soup made from bones and meat. The word comes from the distant past, when meat was preserved by salting and drying. To make it edible it had to be desalted by soaking and cooking in water.  The broth from cooking the meat was called rozsół (or rozsol) from the word rozsolić, to desalt. The end result was a brine, a salty water.​

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  In the first cookbook published in Poland in 1682 titled Compendium Ferculorum or Collection of Dishes by  Stanisław Czerniecki, we find a recipe for utilizing the resulting salty water that comes from  long-term boiling of meat.  He called it Polish broth.
 
"The method of cooking Polish broth is as follows. Take beef or veal meat, hazel grouse or partridge, pigeon and whatever meat can be used for cooking. Soak…arrange in a pot, cook. Strain the broth through a sieve and pour (back into) into the meat, put in parsley, butter, salt (wow! more salt!)…. And when it is ready, serve hot on the table. You should also know that you should put in every broth what is needed so that it does not stink of water or wind, that is, parsley, or dill, onion, or garlic, nutmeg flower, or rosemary, or even pepper, according to taste or preference, and neither lemon nor rosemary will disfigure the broth." 

One wonders what the “stink of water or wind” might mean…but maybe best not to know…

​Interestingly, the seventeenth-century broth was served not only with "Polish and Italian noodles", but also with croutons, figatella (meatballs), sorrel, peas, gooseberries, or "garden things", i.e. vegetables and herbs.  At the time it was considered a meat dish, not a soup.

By the 19th century, no one seemed to remember Czerniecki's recipe. It lost its role as a meat dish and became a dish where the broth was the central focus and the meat and bones became secondary. It became a hot liquid dish…a soup.  In Cieszyn Silesia, the broth was made from lamb, and in Upper Silesia from pigeons. By the turn of the century, perhaps when pigeons were harder to come by, Polish cookbooks recommend the addition of beef to make a rich, delicious, healthy broth.

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While such a dish may have been common among the wealthy, chicken soup was considered a luxury among the poorer population.

For one thing, in the barnyards of the less well-to-do, chickens were kept for their egg laying abilities, not to eat but to sell in order to buy things like salt and/or kerosene to light lamps. When the chicken got “old” and not laying as well, it was sacrificed to make soup for a special occasion like a Sunday dinner.
Because making the broth required long, slow cooking to release the flavors, it had to be made on a day when there was time to prepare such a dish, most often on a Sunday when there was no work in the fields.
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←Sierpc, Poland. Photo by Edward Knab
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​← My cousin Johanna’s chicken coop in Poland

Poland’s  Narodowy Centrum Kultury (National Centre for Culture) whose role is maintaining and promoting national and state traditions writes: 

"… cooked long and slowly, so that it barely, barely blinked, gaining flavor from marrow bones, fatty roosters and firm pieces of beef, enriched with vegetables, browned onion, lovage and sometimes other spices, served most often with small noodles, but sometimes with poured dumplings or potatoes  it became our “national soup.”  

Growing up, I distinctly remember the chunks of beef with marrow and chicken parts when my mother made it. We had the hot broth with noodles, carrots (sometimes a gizzard floating on top) as the first course.  The cooked chicken and beef, served with potatoes (sprinkled with dill) and a vegetable became the second course. This is still how my cousin in Poland recently served up chicken soup for Sunday dinner. It was a hot that summer Sunday, too!

     It is one of the most beloved soups of all Poles and remains inseparable from the Sunday menu.  Whether sweltering on a hot summer day, or cozy around the table when it’s snowing, in Polish tradition, Sunday without chicken soup is not a Sunday.

For more about the history and traditions associated with Polish cooking see: Polish Country Kitchen Cookbook, Hippocrene Books, Inc. 2012
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https://nck.pl/projekty-kulturalne/projekty/ojczysty-dodaj-do-ulubionych/ciekawostki-jezykowe/rosol-,c,.ajax

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