Pomerania Food & Traditional Cuisine

Pomeranian food is the food of a cold sea and a resettled population.

Fish is the foundation: herring above all, along with cod, flounder, salmon, eel and the small Baltic sprat. Smoking is the regional method — alder-smoked fish sold from harbourside smokehouses is the coastal staple — and herring appears pickled, soured, in cream and in oil, in a range of preparations that is genuinely large.

Inland, the Kashubian kitchen is a forest-and-lake cuisine of potato, mushroom, buckwheat, goose and freshwater fish, frugal and heavy.

Over both sits a Hanseatic and German inheritance: sweet-and-sour combinations, dried fruit in savoury dishes, gingerbread spicing, and a fondness for cucumber and dill.

As across northern Poland, the post-war population brought its own cooking from Vilnius and the eastern borderlands, so a Gdansk kitchen may be as Lithuanian as it is Pomeranian.

Smoked fish is the thing to eat here — alder-smoked mackerel, herring, eel and flounder, bought warm from a harbour smokehouse at Hel, Jastarnia or Kuznica and eaten with bread on a bench. Simple, and the regional experience.

Sledz, herring, in every form: in oil with onion, in cream with apple, rolled as rollmops, or soured. A plate of it with vodka and rye bread is the standard Polish start to a meal and is taken seriously on this coast.

Ryba po grecku — fried fish under a cooked carrot, onion and tomato sauce, served cold — is Polish rather than Greek and is a coastal fixture.

Kashubian dishes: plince potato pancakes, zupa brzadowa made from dried fruit, and goose, which the region raises and which appears roasted with apples on Saint Martin’s Day.

Also: pierogi filled with Baltic fish; Gdansk’s goldwasser-flavoured desserts; and szneka z glancem, the iced bun, though Poznan claims that one.

Harbour smokehouses on the Hel peninsula and along the coast are the region’s food institution — small alder-fired smokers selling the morning’s catch warm from the rack. Buying there and eating it outside beats any restaurant on the coast.

Hala Targowa in Gdansk is the covered market, built in 1896 over the foundations of a Dominican monastery that are visible in the basement, selling fish, pickles, smoked meats and Kashubian produce.

Saint Dominic’s Fair in late July and August fills the Gdansk streets with several hundred food and craft stalls for three weeks.

Fish bars — smazalnia ryb — are the coastal fast food: fried flounder or cod with chips, eaten at plastic tables near the beach, and better than that description suggests.

Goose around 11 November is a Kashubian and Pomeranian tradition, and restaurants put on menus for it.

Mushroom picking in the pine forests inland from August.

Pomerania makes no wine, but it produces one of Poland’s most distinctive historic drinks.

Goldwasser — Zlota Woda — is a herbal liqueur first made in Gdansk in 1598, flavoured with some two dozen herbs and roots and containing flakes of genuine 22-carat gold leaf suspended in the bottle. It was drunk across the Hanseatic world, survived the destruction of the city, and is still produced; a small glass of it in a Gdansk bar is a legitimate piece of local history, and the flakes are inert and harmless.

Machandel, a juniper spirit from the Zulawy delta, comes with a ritual: it is drunk in one, followed by a dried plum on a cocktail stick eaten off the glass, and the stick is then snapped.

Vodka and nalewki as elsewhere in Poland, and Kashubian households make fruit infusions from forest berries.

Beer has a strong Hanseatic heritage and Gdansk has a lively craft scene.