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On Rowanberries and Parsnip On Rowanberries and Parsnip
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Photo by Alexey Elfimov
Good Food

On Rowanberries and Parsnip

Monika Kucia
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time 7 minutes
Monika Kucia:
is a journalist and culinary superintendent at sialababamak.pl. Monika likes to bring words, flavours and people together. She helps foreigners learn about Poland from the tastiest side. She also creates culinary spectacles in which she encourages participants to eat leftovers, breathe in the smells of the basement, and sprinkle food with golden dust.

The fruit of rowans (or mountain ashes) is tart, sour, slightly bitter. I add a tablespoon of orange-colored preserve to the steaming tea. I need to sweeten it because the tartness and bitterness dominate the taste.

The Miracle of Tartness

First, there are pinnate leaves, then foam-like flowers, and between summer and winter—red, beady fruit hangs on the branches. Apart from rowan with its scarlet berries, loved by birds, there are other varieties of this species. The fruit of the mountain ash found in Moravia contains a lot of vitamin C and is less bitter than other rowans. For gourmets, the tastiest variety is S. aucuparia Edulis, with larger and sweeter fruits that grow in heavy clusters.

Their quality improves after the first frost. Due to their high sorbine content, which is responsible for the bitter and tart taste of the fruit, they are not eaten raw, but need to be processed. Parasorbic acid is toxic—it can cause food poisoning in the form of diarrhea and vomiting. Once cooked, mountain ash is our local source of vitamin C (35–45 milligrams per 100 grams, which is comparable to citrus) and beta-carotene. It

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Monika Kucia:
is a journalist and culinary superintendent at sialababamak.pl. Monika likes to bring words, flavours and people together. She helps foreigners learn about Poland from the tastiest side. She also creates culinary spectacles in which she encourages participants to eat leftovers, breathe in the smells of the basement, and sprinkle food with golden dust.
Translation: Joanna Figiel
Publish date: 06.12.2019

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Monika Kucia
Monika Kucia:
is a journalist and culinary superintendent at sialababamak.pl. Monika likes to bring words, flavours and people together. She helps foreigners learn about Poland from the tastiest side. She also creates culinary spectacles in which she encourages participants to eat leftovers, breathe in the smells of the basement, and sprinkle food with golden dust.

At dinnertime, we can choose whatever we fancy. Korean take-out, chicken soup or maybe even avocado salad? Perhaps, however, it’d be better to look around and reach for something grown and produced locally, rather than across the globe.

By nature, humans are omnivorous. They’ll eat anything. They’ll make a pancake of ground cereal grains, ferment seal intestines, pick papayas, currants and hop shoots, press olives, dry seaweed. They’ll milk sheep, turn the milk into cheese, shape the cheese, and even smoke it. Wherever they go, they’ll find produce to process into sustenance. They must process; they must modify. This is, apparently, human nature: “A grape seed I will bury in the warm soil, And will kiss a vine, and pluck a ripe bunch,” wrote the poet Bulat Okudzhava. This great practice leads to many unique culinary inventions, such as Parmesan cheese, Bordeaux wine, miso paste, and proziaki (soda flatbreads from the Subcarpathia region in Poland). It also leads to a growing appetite.

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