There are novel items to be had in the Polski Sklep, and when I was browsing this week I spotted Hortex Zupa ogorkowa…. Gherkin soup! In the freezer section! That sounded like a good idea, quite sharp and perky, and only £1.09.

Who knew you could freeze a gherkin?

Easter is the time for sour soups in Poland, but to make the authentic version you need to boil a big fat sausage and use the water for soup stock, or make a rye flour sourdough starter and then start lobbing in sausage, its stock, hard boiled eggs, chunks of sausage and assorted veg. So this must be the Lite version. You could definitely jazz it up with the eggs, sausage and whatnot and make a very passable sort-of white borscht.

Sour power

The ingredients are cubed potato, shredded carrot and Hamburg parsley (pietruszka in Polish), chopped gherkins, dill and salt.

Hamburg parsley (or parsley root, as it’s sometimes called) is interesting stuff – it looks a bit like a pallid parsnip, but has a distinct flavour of its own, and you eat the root (though the young leaves are good chopped up in salads). It isn’t sold in any supermarkets in the UK, so if you want it you have to grow it – a couple of the UK seed catalogues, including Marshalls http://tinyurl.com/nu3dfjf, sell it. It’s a winter vegetable, so probably getting toward the end of its season now, but will keep an eye on the local Polski skleps towards autumn to see if they’re stocking the fresh stuff.

I couldn’t quite make out if you were meant to defrost the soup mix before cooking, but it seemed to work OK when half-thawed, which was as long as I could wait. Incidentally, there are those who might think frozen vegetables are inferior and that fresh is always best. They would be wrong – modern blanching and freezing techniques can zap a carrot in a coat of ice faster than Elsa, and properly stored, its vitamins will stay locked in until you cook it, while unless you’re grafting away on an allotment, or paying over the odds at a farmer’s market, the veg you bring home from the shops will gradually lose nutrients until you get round to using them, no matter how well they’re looked after.

This being a basic soup mix, it’s not entirely hassle-free: as well as a litre of water, you have to add chicken stock cubes, a bay leaf, whole allspice and some back pepper. Careful with the salt, it’s already added and the chicken stock will add more. Simmer for 20 minutes and serve with a dollop of sour cream and some chopped dill on top. I didn’t have any dill so parsley had to stand in, and I used a mixture of double cream and yogurt instead of sour cream.

Crunchy soup

What fine stuff! It all tasted very fresh, the dill and Hamburg parsley lifting the flavour right out of the ordinary. The texture of the root veg was excellent, not at all frozen-mushy. All this, and crunchy gherkins too. Frozen food processors of Poland, we salute you. With the sausage-and-egg additions, it would make a pretty substantial meal, without much effort.

Other popular Polish soups include one featuring tripe and another, duck blood. Made, traditionally, with the blood of live ducks. If I see those (the soups, not the ducks) in the freezer section, I’ll let you know…

OK, this looks pretty eww, doesn’t it?

Brawny

It’s Salceson cwaniak, which translates as “brawn”. Most Polish shops with good delikatesy (charcuterie) counters sell several types. I bought almost 100g for 69p.

Old-style English brawn usually features yummy facemeat, hock, trotters, tails; whatever bits of the pig are available. It’s pinker when the meat used is brined, brown if it’s fresh. The two Scottish versions, potted hough or potted heid, feature beef shin or sheep’s head and are, like most Scottish food except herring, cabbage and raspberries, very brown.

Salceson cwaniak is very hammy, like the French jambon persillé (without the persille) or that standby of trendy pig-fetish restaurants everywhere, ham hock terrine (£6 a go, though no doubt very good, at East London’s highly rated Brawn restaurant, http://www.brawn.co). True, some rye bread, a crunchy gherkin or two and a good smear of mustard would make it look cuter, but it’s so good on its own that it doesn’t need a support act.

And if you’re worried that adding a new type of cured meat product to your diet will, as almost-daily headlines insist http://tinyurl.com/m4sshjw, send you to an early grave, read what Rob Lyons, author of top read Panic On A Plate, has to say on the topic: http://tinyurl.com/kvqzgw7 . The people who know what’s best for us is… us.

No apologies for returning to the topic of bread, as this week I have been laughing in the face of low-carb diets with Chleb Wiejski. country bread. I found it at Streatham’s Bartek, where they keep it in a Perspex-lidded bin, wrapped in cling film. You buy it cut into a quarter or half, or if you have a whole houseful of builders and plumbers to feed, as a massive whole loaf, but £1.15 buys you a sizeable quarter chunk of sourdough rye bread with a slightly floury top and a nicely chewy undercrust.

Chleb wiejski – country bread

My Polish mate Agnes, being from the Polish countryside, had never tasted it, of course, but thought it was excellent. According to her, “They don’t make stuff like this in Poland any more, just in London, for homesick Poles, who never ate it at home in the first place!”

If you’ve ever eaten bread from Poilane (www.poilane.fr), well, it’s very much in that style. Only I think it’s much better – it seems very fresh, has a more distinct flavour and the texture is closer. On the rare occasions when I’ve bought Poilane in the UK, it’s tasted a bit past its best, the texture has been a bit too leathery and bitter and the crumb has been full of holes. Très artisanale, no doubt, but that’s expensive air you’re buying there – of course for the locals in Chelsea and Belgravia, sites of the two Poilane shops in London, that’s probably not an issue.

Poland 2, France 1

You get the odd hole in your Chleb Wiejski, but nothing like the lace effect of the Frenchy stuff, which means that the butter stays on your toast (and it makes the best toast I have tasted for a long time). Not sure how easy it is to find it in other Polish shops in the UK, but look for a big bin with huge slabs of bread inside and you’ve probably found it.

You’ve probably spotted Kubus carrot juice, possibly even tried some – Tesco and Sainsbury, among other supermarkets, now sell it in their Polish food sections. It comes in various combinations including carrot/apple/peach and carrot/apple/raspberry, and is v popular with kids, but I had to try this one, a combination of carrot, kiwi and banana.

Looks scarier than it is

(I do not know how they got the carrots to go that colour, but two of the ingredients listed on the label are copper and chlorophyll. Ingenious.) For something that doesn’t come from the chiller section it tastes fresh, and though it looks Hallowe’eny it’s rather good. The strongest flavours are of kiwi and banana, not carrot, if that’s an off-putting thought. If your children don’t like it, mix with vodka and ice and drink it yourself.

Today we commemorate the life of Casimir Pulaski, all-round ferocious fighting machine and hero of the American Revolution! http://tinyurl.com/7wosfxs. My husband has just returned from a business trip to Chicago, where they have a public holiday in his honour on the first Monday of every March.

Rebel with a very good cause

Pulaski was born on March 6^th, 1745, trained to be a soldier from the age of, ooh, about eight, and fought his way around two continents in the name of freedom. He’s worth reading up on. He said of America, “I came here, where freedom is being defended, to serve it, and to live or die for it.” He died for it (of a battle wound, of course), but the King of Poland, hearing of his death said, truthfully, “He died as he lived – a hero, but an enemy to kings.”

Back in south London, Agnes and I went Polski Sklepping at Bartek on the Streatham High Road this week: http://bartek-express.co.uk doesn’t have much more than the address and contacts, but they have a jolly Facebook page, www.facebook.com/BartekExpress.

Making the Streatham High Road a lot nicer

They’ve just had their third birthday and were doing a pretty brisk trade on a sunny Thursday morning. The shop is bright and modern, and had some interesting fresh produce, including…

Green and spiky – ogorek gruntowy

Ogorek Gruntowy, aka pickling cucumbers! Thanks to the wonder of agricultural polytunnels you can now buy these bristly little beauties far earlier than their usual summer season, and these were really fresh, with their flower ends still on. Still a bit expensive at £6.99 per kilo, though, so we’ll be leaving the pickling until later this year. Meant to ask Agnes if you can eat them unpickled, but they look a bit thorny for that.

Proper Polish pickled cucumbers are preserved in brine, not vinegar, and you can buy special pickling salt that keeps them crunchy.

I’d bought some of this sea salt on a previous sklepping trip. At 99p a kilo, it’s cheaper than most of the stuff you’d buy in UK supermarkets, though it’s not claiming to be 100% Polish – the origin actually isn’t specified on the pack. But who cares: if any country should know about salt, it’s Poland.

Poland is home to two of the world’s oldest salt mines, The Bochnia (http://www.kopalniasoli.pl/en) and Wieliczka (www.wieliczka-saltmine.com), near Krakow. These days they’re a health spa and a stunning tourist attraction – take a look at the cathedrals carved into the rock salt by the workers – rather than a huge industrial enterprise, but they still produce a little mineral-rich salt (by the evaporation method, as the flood-prone tunnels are too dangerous to work now. They were too dangerous to work then, but people did it anyway). The salt contains Iodine, Selenium, Magnesium and Calcium, if you feel your levels need topping up.

You should be able to find Wieliczka salt in most Polish shops, but you can also buy it online at www.wieliczka-saltmine.com/e-shop/s/table-salt .

The producer of the stuff I bought, http://www.osole.com.pl, not only produces rock salt for pickling (it’s apparently important to use the non-iodised stuff), but salt with lots of lovely added nitrates for curing sausage and ham, should you come across an obliging pig.

It comes in a pack like the one on the right, but pink, which is a hint: you use this not only to preserve your charcuterie, but to make it look edible. If we didn’t use it in meat processing, everything from pork pies to hot dogs would have that I-am-on-the-edge-of-giving-you-botulism greyish-brown look. Well, make mine pink, please. And salty.