Polish Baked Cheesecake; ‘I would know my shadow and my light …’

I asked ‘Mr. Kaktus’ why he gave his shop its name. He replied: it is because we are spiky to our enemies, but soft and sweet inside to our customers.

By his enemies I assumed he meant his competitors, but in Swansea you never quite know. Other than Kaktus, the only other city centre Polish shop is Lolek, both are part of the wave of establishments set up by, and primarily for, the new wave of immigrants looking for a better working life in the UK. There are many good things in both shops and at their best the Polish products have a terrific quality and character that have not yet been totally dulled by the heavy hand of multi-national food giants.

Poppy seed paste – but so much more. Photo: Mr. Edible.

My candidate for the gnomic ‘soft, sweet centre’ of Kaktus is masa makowa – poppy seed paste. Traditionally used at Polish Christmas to fill a crusty Swiss roll-type cake, I first came across it in a ‘first-generation’ Polish deli near where I lived in South London in the 80s. The shop had possibly been there since before the war and, when a tray of its home made cheesecake was in the window, you felt it was your lucky day – even if a slice ‘set you back an arm and a leg’. It was also the first time I’d came across the East European baked cheesecake and I found it very good, more complicated than the sometimes ‘electric’ flavours of the New World version. Where raisins are usually used, this Streatham High St. version of the Polish cheesecake offers its fruitiness in a dark layer of masa makowa.

Darkness and Light. Photo: Mr. Edible.

The sweet, earthy flavoured lower stratum provides strong contrast to the pale, slightly sour baked curd cheese above; dryness and moisture, blandness and intensity, asceticism and indulgence, clarity and confusion, heaven and earth – whatever way you described such pairings, their balance is an important consideration in a dish like this – as it is of life.

Can food give a meaning to life? There is always good and interesting food out there to share. Relationships come and go, good fortune bobs up and down but somewhere around 25 years after coming across this cheesecake it was with a feeling of excitement, but with also something like inevitability, that I stumbled across a tin of the paste in Kaktus last year. Certainly there is one truth in the sharing of food, as a artist friend of ours simply states as only she can; you always have to make it with love.

Masa makowa is much more than crushed poppy seeds; it has a festive addition of dried fruits. Other than poppy seeds (22%) these are the more attractive ingredients listed on the tin; poppy seeds, sugar, dried fruits and orange peel (what artificial honey is I don’t know, and probably never wish to). In Mary Pininska’s The Polish Kitchen (Grub Street, London, 2008) I have since found a recipe for the paste that also includes butter, ‘real’ honey, vanilla, eggs and brandy. The recipe confirms my hunch that poppy seeds are as hard as rocks (the initial preparation before grinding involves two soaking sessions in boiling water followed by one in milk, ); so for now I’m glad to have access to the tinned paste, complete with its ‘artificial honey’. However I’ll store my second tin upside down to redistribute the citrus syrup that I found out too late had settled to the bottom. It would be a sort of heresy to suggest that the poppy seed paste is in some way better than the British Christmas mincemeat, but given the opportunity I would fill some seasonal mince pies with it and let people tuck in without prejudice or preconceptions.

Heavenly, sieved curd cheese. Photo: Mr. Edible.

This time I followed Mary Pininska’s Polish cheesecake recipe but it was universally deemed not so flavoursome as the previous recipe I that I had tried from Lesley Chamberlain’s Russian, Polish and German Cooking (Hermes House, 2004) that has addition of soured cream and some vanilla essence to the dairy layer. (ROR – Recipe on Request!)

I baked it in a springform mould with only a pasty base. This is a image of the emerged, and intact, result – as the full quote goes I would know my shadow and my light, for then I shall be whole. – even if, in this case, it passed too long near the flames of that inferno known as gas mark 4.

… so shall I at last be whole. Photo: Mr Edible.

(I could mention so many good things that discovered from browsing in Kaktus, let alone Lolek: varied, high quality charcuterie; commercially produced, but delicately flavoured, soft cheese; preserved sorrel; terrific gherkins and, occasionally, delicately preserved Russian tomatoes and earthy chocolate – yes, I agree, that’s all for another post.)

Kaktus Delicatessen, Mansel Street. Image: Mr. Edible.

Kitchen conjunction no. 1 – Gugelhupf.

A kitchen conjunction; life is often like an one-armed bandit (discuss), the drums keep revolving and, momentarily, they inexplicably line-up on a combination that is a culinary jackpot, in this case it was:

one cheap Lidl cake mould + one breadmaking machine + one Lesley Chamberlain recipe = gugelhupf.

Eat it? I didn’t know whether to put the magnificent shape on my head and declare myself king, or bow down and worship it …

Adapted from Lesley Chamberlain’s The Food & Cooking of Eastern Europe, Bison Books, 2006.

Gugelhupf.

1 teaspoon dried yeast

200ml (half a pint) milk

350g strong white flour

pinch of salt

50g sugar

lemon peel

1 egg yolk

70g melted butter

I choose this recipe as it seems most adaptable to a bread machine (usually the domain of Prof. Edible). The technique was very simple; I placed the ingredients in the bowl as recommend by the instruction leaflet, i.e. dried yeast first, the rest of the dried ingredients followed by the ‘wetter’ ones. When the dough was ready (the machine’s ‘dough cycle’ took 45 mins.) I had to face a problem that I should have addressed at the beginning, how to get it around the central tube of the mould. In the upshot I merely pulled open a hole in the centre of the dough and slipped it over. The final proving was a longer period than I planned (about an hour) however by that time it had filled the mould to the rim. Placed in a pre-heated medium oven (gas mark 4) for about 40 minutes, after which an inserted skewer came out clean.

I left out from the the original recipe a cocoa filling from anxiety that the dough was already as rich as the bread maker could cope with. As you can see I needn’t have worried, the result was light, brioche-like and delicate. Today, I made up for the missing filling by covering the remaining half of the cake with lemon icing (just lemon juice thickened to a paste with icing sugar) the result is gorgeous. Whose making the coffee?

Stuff and Nonsense – Edward Lear and the Quince.

In my recent post, The Quince Years, I dwelt on the quince in a quince-less year for me here in ‘a small Welsh city by the sea’. Since then Claudia Roden’s new book The Food of Spain (Michael Joseph) has made its way into our kitchen library. Her remark that ‘I adore everything made from quinces’ naturally struck a chord with me, prompting me to look up some old food-related idle thoughts involving Edward Lear which I’ve ‘reblogged’ here – especially as the bicentenary of his birth is now being celebrated in so many places.

Drawing by WN Marstrand of Edward Lear, 1840. (The Guardian)

Lear is known for his nonsense verse, drawings and limericks; however, his ‘day job’ was as a fine artist. He initially made his name producing exquisitely bird paintings from life, he then went on to execute enormous landscapes paintings of remote scenery; to which end, this apparently unlikely adventurer travelled extensively in search of suitable subjects. An endearing but troubled character, much has been written on uneasy life and work (his paintings can seem overly composed, uneventful and ‘sane’ – contrasting with his caricatures that are, for me, rather manic and often disturbing):

Stuff and Nonsense.

‘Never give a sucker an even break’ laughed Hercules as he duped the giant Atlas into undertaking one of his twelve labours for him; what is more stealing the Golden Apples of the Hesperides was an audacious task. From the Western orchard their reflection set up the luminous sky at sunset. ‘Golden Delicious’ would seem to be a likely variety, by its name and colour if not much else, but were these lustrous fruit apples at all? Like Adam and Eve’s temptation and other legendary apples of the Mediterranean it has been suggested that what we might be talking about is quince, a close relation to apples and pears.

As a child, I first came across quince in Edward Lear’s much-loved nonsense poem ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ (published 1871) long before I met one in the flesh. ‘They dined on mince, and slices of quince’, it all seemed good nonsense to me. Touchingly pretty, but pretty incongruent. My first real quinces were a disappointment, a glowing skin on the surface, but the interior was brown with all the diseases ‘that flesh is heir to’. Not an uncommon occurrence in our climate, it seems.

Then I came across carne de membrillo – the meat of the quince. Lying in slabs, it form part of a display of preserved fruit of medieval gaudiness in La Boqueria market in Barcelona. The quince ‘cheese’ had a dark rosy hue and the rather gritty texture of the fruit – boiled, sugared and boiled again it is then air-dried until it can be sliced like Cheddar. Acting on a tip, I cut some onto a juicy pork chop as a sort of deep-flavoured, and rather solid, apple sauce. It was outstanding.

Quince’s role as an accompaniment to meat started the unlubricated cogs of my mind working – I had an impression that I first saw the preserve standing on the counter of a Spanish butcher’s stall; rather incongruent I thought. Was I in danger here of perhaps making some sense of Edward Lear’s nonsense? I looked up his potted biography and found; Edward Lear – artist, writer and extensive traveller in the Near East, the Levant, Egypt among many other far-flung places. His long-standing servant and cook, Giorgio, exclaimed on arriving at the ‘rose-red’ ruins of Petra, ‘we have come into a world where everything is made of chocolate, ham, curry powder and salmon’. These were actually the lands of quince/mince combination. A quince might be hollowed out and filled with a mixture of mince and split yellow peas flavoured with cinnamon and onion.

If he did have this Arabian conjunction in mind maybe it wasn’t exactly to his taste, in other words it was nonsense to him. But, if I catch a fine quince this season I will try it out, as well as a few other things – the infusion of quince is credited to improve everything from apple pie to chicken stock. In his three nonsense recipes Lear makes playful fun of domestic cookery publications of his time, of which Mrs. Beeton was the leading light. I will resist his instruction to cover my dish with four gallons of ‘crumbobblious sauce’, but, being an impatient sort of cook, I may well fall for his most desperate serving suggestion, ‘serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible’.

Some years after I wrote this we took a memorable holiday travelling between the Adriatic and Aegean Seas through what is now Albania, Macedonia and Greece. At the time I had no idea that we were performing largely the same journey, but in reverse, that Edward Lear took in 1848 in an effort to escape Salonica (now Thessaloniki), whose port was closed due to a cholera outbreak. This region was then part of the Ottoman Empire and one telling structure from this time was a clock tower overlooking the market of Ohrid; a historic town by a beautiful inland lake of that name, that was some way beyond the halfway mark of Lear’s journey. The clock was there to remind the busy population of the time for prayers and it still looks over stalls offering gleaming trays of quince, and also the local lake trout whose quality Lear noted were ‘surpassingly fine’ (see pic below).

Edward Lear, Akhrida (Ohrid), sketch 1848.

A tray of quinces, Ohrid market, Macedonia. Photo: Mr. Edible.

A tray of quinces, Ohrid market, Macedonia (2009). Photo: Mr. Edible.

Lake Orhid Trout 2009. Photo: Mr. Edible.

‘…a rural dinner of excellent cold fish (the trout of the Lake of Akhridha [Ohrid] are surpassingly fine) …’ , Lear’s Balkan Journal, 23rd Sept. 1848. – Lake Orhid trout on offer at Orhid market, 2009. Photo: Mr. Edible.