“Young people don’t even know the dish…” Disappearing day-to-day dishes in the memories of settlers in Lower Silesia Analysis of selected materials of the Polish Ethnographic Atlas

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the state of knowledge of age-old foods brought to Lower Silesia after the end of World War II by settlers and resettlers from the eastern corners of the country and the Eastern Borderlands. The studied region is a post-migration area, within which – in the post-war period – there were processes of reevaluation, adopting or abandoning elements of the new and found cultural heritage. These processes also involved culinary heritage. The issue of culinary traditions surfaced quite often during conversations with elderly people, who in their recollections reached back to the pre-war period in their hometowns and to the first post-war years after resettlement. The present discussion will focus primarily on liquid dishes – soups/pottages, less often on thick and baked dishes. What distinguished them is the fact that they were still prepared a few years after resettlement, but nevertheless, gradually lost their popularity and eventually were abandoned. Interesting details on the subject are provided by source materials collected during field research, as part of the Polish Ethnographic Atlas project. The source basis will be the information obtained in the questionnaire “People’s material culture.”

Keywords

• lower silesia
• old dishes
• pottage
• soup
• culinary traditions
• post-migration areas
• polish ethnographic atlas