Kartacze. A dish for people, not for plate decorators

A kartacz is not a dish for people who say "food pairing", wear a linen apron and experience caramelised onion as a spiritual revelation. A kartacz is for people who know that a potato does not need a personal brand consultant to matter. In the borderlands they put it simply. Eat it while it's warm. When it's cold, eat it, because your mother worked hard on it. Such was the order of the world. A bowl in the middle, steam under the ceiling beams, the crackling hisses, the onion smells, the kids wait for the grown-ups to stop pretending they'll eat just one. After the third, everyone agreed that family quarrels are important, but not on an empty stomach. That was our diplomacy. No negotiating tables, no live broadcasts and no people explaining afterwards what was actually agreed. A kartacz is supposed to be grey. Not rustic, not earthy in tone. Grey. Like the sky over the Suwałki region when a person begins to understand that humility is not an aesthetic choice. It is supposed to be as heavy as a family's unspoken truths and as honest as the bill after a wedding. Inside, meat. Coarsely minced, not some mush with the consistency of an election manifesto. Onion, pepper, marjoram. And breadcrumbs? You can pour breadcrumbs into your shoes, if you like suffering. In a kartacz they are sacrilege. European pluralism has its limits. A Lithuanian will say cepelinas, a Pole kartacz. One sees an airship, the other ammunition. The history of the region in a pot. They look at the sky; we check whether it can be fired. Over the bowl, agreement. Community begins where people stop asking who invented the dumpling first and start making sure the brother-in-law doesn't take the last one. Kant set out from Königsberg to Gołdap for kartacze. You may laugh, but at least once a philosopher understood life in practical terms. The imperative is all very well, but when the dripping smells like that, you don't debate, you sit down. The taste of childhood was simple. Fatty. Hot. Shared. Nobody asked about intolerances, dietary or ideological. Nobody photographed the fork. Nobody turned dinner into a manifesto, because dinner was the manifesto: we are from here, we eat together, and the only stranger is the one who turns up his nose. And let the moderns take offence. Not for the first time, thin skin loses to a thick crackling. A kartacz does not pretend to be haute cuisine. It looks down on it. From a very full plate. ## Cannon and airship The names of this dumpling are a little lesson in military history. The Polish kartacz comes from the kartaczownica, a cannon firing canister shot filled with chopped metal or iron balls. The Lithuanian cepelinai got their name in the 20th century, in honour of Count Zeppelin's airships, which crossed the sky over Lithuania during the First World War and won admiration for their rounded shape. The heavy, oval dumpling resembled both. A borderland that for centuries watched armies marching in both directions named its dinner after military hardware. Hard to imagine a more candid self-portrait. The dumpling is older than its names. Potatoes reached these lands in the 18th century, under Augustus III of Saxony, and quickly became a second bread, because they fill you up and ask for little. But the Lithuanians already had didžkukuliai, great balls moulded from flour or groats: buckwheat, oats, rye, wheat. The potato invented nothing here. It moved into a ready-made form and occupied it for good. The heritage covers the Suwałki region, Podlasie, Warmia, Masuria and the whole of Lithuania. Tadeusz Konwicki, recalling his childhood in Nowa Wilejka, wrote of cepelinai as an old dish under a new name. The Vilnius table filled them with beef or pork, but also with curd cheese, mushrooms, groats or sauerkraut, and served them with cracklings or sour cream. ## Greyness as a programme The ideal kartacz is made according to rules that sound like the statutes of a monastic order. Only type C potatoes, floury and high in starch. New potatoes are forbidden, too watery. The dough combines raw grated potatoes with boiled ones, in proportions from 70 to 30 up to 80 to 20 in favour of the raw. The raw mass is squeezed through a linen cloth and the juice set aside until the starch settles at the bottom. That starch goes back into the dough. It is the starch, together with the age of the potatoes, that determines the grey colour a kartacz need not be ashamed of. Tradition also demands stirring the mass clockwise. Nobody knows why, and nobody has the courage to find out what would happen the other way round. The filling is made, for instance, from pork shoulder with jowl, minced on a coarse plate, at least three millimetres. Plenty of marjoram, onion, salt, pepper. Breadcrumbs remain sacrilege, and that is the one thing on which Poles and Lithuanians agree without negotiation. Serving divides the schools. The Polish school pours over the kartacze a dressing of bacon cracklings and softened onion. The Lithuanian allows a rich sour cream and bacon sauce that brings out the velvety texture of the dough. Both schools agree that a diet portion is a contradiction in terms. ## An atlas of the dumpling The Suwałki region and Podlasie shape classic grey kartacze like a whetstone, 10–12 centimetres long. Those from Sejny are spindle-shaped like a cigar and somewhat smaller, 8 to 10 centimetres. The Podlasie "byki", bulls, are filled with lentils and a symbolic touch of meat. The Kielce region proudly calls them "kule", balls, and the Lublin region "bulgoty", hiding buckwheat, white cheese and onion inside. Lithuania has its peculiarities. In Samogitia, cepelinai with curd cheese get fresh mint, which cuts through the heaviness. In Klaipėda they receive a fish filling. On fast days they are stuffed with herring and served with thick sour cream. One form, as many fillings as there were in the pantry. ## Gołdap, capital of gourmets A Gołdap legend has it that Immanuel Kant made the longest journey of his life precisely to Gołdap, for kartacze, and recalled their taste with tenderness even on his deathbed. So the philosopher's longest journey had a culinary goal. That says more about kartacze than all the reviews. In 1999 Gołdap was proclaimed the World Centre of Kartacze Gourmets. The role of "Kartaczek" was taken by Maria Czubaszek, Jarosław Słoma became Grand Master of Tradition, and the "Great Secret of Making Kartacze" written down there sounds like a document better guarded than many a state secret. The "Kartaczewo" festival draws thousands of people; a giant kartacz weighing 4.5 kilograms was served there, and the World Championships in Speed-Eating Kartacze decide who has the most capacious patriotism. Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek also received a gourmet's certificate in Gołdap and left an entry in the Great Book placing kartacze alongside Silesian dumplings among the finest dishes of Polish cuisine. Praising the kartacz alongside Silesian dumplings is diplomacy of the highest order. There was a dispute, of course. One Lithuanian food critic called cepelinai a product of Soviet collective farms. History refuted the claim: recipes for potato balls made to the same formula already appear in "Kucharka oszczędna" (The Thrifty Cook) of 1840. The kolkhoz came later. The dumpling came first. ## Potato flowers The Lithuanians used to say: who needs flowers when the potatoes are blooming. The proverb remembers the days when ladies pinned potato flowers into their hair, before the tuber was appreciated. Around the potato harvest, bulviakasis, almost sacred rules grew up. The housewife could not cook potatoes before the harvest was finished, as that threatened a poor crop. Digging had to be done by St Michael's day, 29 September. The tubers were poured into the cellar only at full moon, starting from the southern corner, so they would not freeze and would last until spring. So the kartacz began not in the kitchen but in the field, under the moon, with respect for the tuber that fed the whole borderland. No wonder it cannot stand decorators. It knows where it came from.