Foreign cuisine in Poland. Adapting names and dishes

Abstract

One of the more interesting layers of vocabulary in Polish are lexical items related to cuisine, sometimes, though rarely, referred to as gastronyms. In this text I intend to mainly discuss the names which exist at the crossroads of languages and cultures, as I believe they may, often after various transformations and adaptations, constitute Polish culturemes. I consider them distinctive indicators of a culture. Those include not only bigos [sour cabbage stew], pierogi and schabowy [pork chop], but also fasolka po bretońsku [“Breton beans”, beans, bacon and sausage in tomato sauce] and śledź po japońsku [“Japanese herrings”, pickled herring, hard-boiled egg and pickle salad], as well as bogracz [a stew], a word which despite having Hungarian origins does not operate in Hungarian as the name of a dish. I shall also focus on the methods of Polonising some borrowed names. The problems which I shall discuss offer an opportunity for teachers of Polish as a foreign/second language to help their students more easily accept the cultural differences at the intersection of Polish culture and their own cultures.