A Polish Christmas Vigil
Dec 01, 2024 09:00AM ● By Teresa Banik CapuzzoWhen I was a child, and until I left for college, every new year had the same happy rhythm: Plow through winter, look forward to summer vacation, look even more forward to the first day of school (a milestone event: the excitement of new books coupled with getting off the farm and away from all those—five!—brothers). But the best day, bar none, was Christmas Eve. The whole 365 days of the year indeed seemed on some sort of a slightly tilted plane, and the apex was that evening and the Polish Catholic feast called Wigilia, the vigil, the wait from sundown for the birthday of Christ.
We had a bunch of aunts and uncles, all local, and a passel of cousins, and enough of those families made it to our house religiously on that magical night, so much so that Dad built a family room onto the back of the house that would seat dozens. My brothers dragged up from the basement (or the barn?) chairs and folding tables Dad had made. My sister and I rolled out the yards of red tablecloths Mom had sewn from bolts of fabric and set those long festive tables with candles and dinnerware. And no matter what the head count, in keeping with the Polish tradition, we laid an extra place setting for a stranger, Christ himself perhaps in the guise of the needy. That place at our Wigilia table was often filled by a widow or widower, or someone my parents knew had nowhere to go on this sacred night. There was always room for a stray in our stable.
The meal—like all of those Fridays in Lent per the Catholic tradition of abstinence—was a meatless one. And even though our people immigrated from the hills of Poland, on the other side of the country from the Baltic Sea, we did have some baked cod or haddock on the table. My mom and grandmothers would work a virtual pierogi assembly line in advance of the feast, stuffing them with farmer’s cheese (my personal favorite), or potato sharpened with cheddar. Swimming in butter and sauteed onions, they were the centerpiece of a meal that included our Bushi’s chałka (the celebrated braided egg bread, golden from an eggy wash and lightly scented with orange rind that would make such fabulous toast on Christmas morning, such a beautiful sandwich bread for the leftover Christmas ham), Aunt Carrie’s rutabagas in cheese sauce, Aunt Ann’s kapusta (braised cabbage with sauteed onions and copious amounts of butter), Mom’s famous buttery mashed potatoes to carry the kapusta, wild mushrooms Dad would pick in the woods, also sauteed with onions and butter. (Are you sensing a theme here?) It was, overall, a pretty blonde meal (except for Granny’s poppyseed roll and cousin Janey’s “secret” molasses cookies), and my ex dubbed it the Great Banik Starchfest.
But it was, in its own butter-gilded way, magnificent.
Decades and hundreds of miles later, the first food story I ever wrote was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer on this very topic. Krystyna Eljasz, who had brought her Wigilia traditions and recipes from her native Poland to Northeast Philly, shared her stories and recipes. As a child in Poland, she and her brothers and sisters would wait outside on Christmas Eve, scanning the skies for the first star to appear. They had fasted all day while the grownups readied the banquet. Sighting the star was the signal that the wait was over, and the feasting could begin.
Krystyna’s Wigilia meal was different from ours: It had color! Beet recipes aren’t as plentiful in my Polish cookbook as are cabbage ones—cabbage beats them (sorry) by just a whisker. They are, after all, a sturdy root vegetable, so they are a natural on a Polish table. I’m not a big beet lover. But I do love this ruby-colored soup, the acidic sweetness of the beets brightened with lemon and redolent of mushrooms.
Before any Wigilia meal begins, the head of the household offers to the company a plateful of oplatki (a Christmas wafer, whose translation is angel bread) which have been blessed by the priest, and the crowd mingles, sharing oplatki along with three wishes for the new year. The illustration (left) is a painting of a Wigilia celebration by the late Polish-American artist Alice T. Wadowski-Bak. On the Niagara River downstream from Niagara Falls (where Alice was born and died) sits the Christmas Wafer Capital of the World, the little town of Lewiston, New York. This illustration came from a packet of oplatki from the Christmas Wafers Bakery in Lewiston. It has graced countless envelopes of oplatki across the country.
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This is Krystyna’s wonderful soup:
Wigilia Barszcz
- 9 dried mushrooms, medium size
- Water for soaking mushrooms
- 1½ quarts salted water
- 2 carrots, cubed
- 2 ribs celery, cubed
- 5 bouillon cubes
- Bouquet garni
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 medium onion, chopped
- 4 Tbsp. (½ stick) butter
- 4 small red beets, quartered
- 1 clove garlic
- Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
- Sugar to taste
- Lemon juice
- Uszka dumplings
Soak thoroughly washed mushrooms in water, cover overnight, and cook in soaking liquid, covered, until tender, about 30 minutes or longer. Reserve soaking liquid; set mushrooms aside to use in uszka.
In the 1½ quarts salted water, cook cubed carrots and celery with the bouillon cubes, bouquet garni, and bay leaf until tender. Strain, reserving vegetable broth. In a separate skillet, fry chopped onions in the butter until transparent. Set aside.
In a separate pot, cook quartered red beets in skins in enough salted water to cover until soft. Drain beets, reserving liquid. Peel beets and grate on a coarse grater. Add the grated beets to the strained vegetable broth and bring to a boil. When the broth becomes deep red, strain out beets.
Mash garlic with salt and add to broth. Add soaking liquid from the mushrooms (approximately ½ cup), sauteed onion, and sugar and lemon juice to taste. Bring to a quick boil. Strain out onions if you want an absolutely clear broth; add some of the reserved beet liquid to taste, if necessary, to increase flavor. Add cooked uszka. Makes approximately eight servings.
Uszka
For the filling:
- 1 small onion, chopped
- 1 Tbsp. butter
- 4 to 8 mushrooms, chopped
- 2 Tbsp. breadcrumbs
- Cooked mushrooms from barszcz, finely diced
- Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
For the dough:
- ¾ c. flour
- 1 egg
- 1/8 c. water (approximately)
- Salt
- ½ Tbsp. oil
To make the filling, fry onions in butter until light gold in color. Add chopped fresh mushrooms and sauté until the mushroom liquid partially evaporates. Add breadcrumbs, the diced mushrooms reserved from the barszcz broth, salt, and pepper.
Mix all the ingredients for the dough and knead on lightly floured board until smooth and uniform. Roll dough thin, less than 1/16-inch thick. Cut in 1- to 1¼-inch squares. Place about 1 teaspoon of the filling in the middle of each and fold each square diagonally, forming triangles. Crimp edges to seal. Overlap two corners of the longest edge, crimping them to form the shape of an ear (an uszka).
Drop into boiling salted water. After uszka rise to the surface, let simmer three minutes. Remove and drain. They can be frozen at this point and thawed later at room temperature for half an hour, or by steaming in a strainer over boiling water for a few minutes. Makes approximately three dozen.
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Kutia is a symbol of prosperity, a traditional dish native to eastern Poland and the Ukraine. Cooked wheat is mixed with raisins, hazelnuts, walnuts, poppy seeds, and honey. In earlier times, the sticky grains would be tossed against the ceiling: The more that stuck, the better the harvest to come. I plan to experiment this year with farro, an ancient Mediterranean wheat grain with a beautiful nutty flavor. Krystyna cautioned that “This is a dish that can’t be prepared more than a day in advance, because the honey and the wheat will start to ferment.”
Here is Krystyna’s recipe:
Kutia
- 1 c. wheat grain
- 2 c. salted water
- 1 can (8 oz.) prepared poppy seeds
- ½ c. coarsely chopped hazelnuts
- 1/3 c. coarsely chopped walnuts
- ½ c. golden raisins
- ¼ c. honey
- 1 tsp. almond or vanilla extract
Rinse the grain and simmer, covered in salted water, stirring occasionally until tender, about two hours, adding a little water if necessary to keep it from sticking to the bottom. When cool, mix it with the remaining ingredients. Keep refrigerated. Makes approximately 10 servings.