I used to live in Poland. I worked in a fish-and-chip shop in the western city of Poznań, boning cod and peeling potatoes for £1.50 an hour. With the exception of that job, I enjoyed everything about my time in the country, not least the food. I liked the chicken broth with noodles, the slippery herring, the knuckles of pork the size of basketballs, the cold beetroot soup that beats gazpacho hands down.
One thing I was less delighted by were Polish dumplings – pierogi. It wasn’t that they weren’t nice – they were – it was more that they didn’t seem to warrant the extreme levels of affection and esteem Poles often bestow on the doughy parcels. By being ambivalent about them, I was going against a well-established grain.
