Curry powder-spiced cabbage rolls
A different take on the Polish staple.
Happy Sunday and welcome to another issue in my unofficial series on Polish cooking.
A lot of cultures have some sort of cabbage roles and the Polish are no different. Ground meat and rice, minimally spiced before being rolled in blanched cabbage and covered in a tomato sauce; my dad has called this an “incredibly boring dish.”
And maybe that’s not totally fair, but he could be haunted by the memories of being forced to eat this as a child. But I think it’s somewhat blandness leaves some room for exploration to make it as exiting as you want. I like the original, but I wanted to give it a more exciting, modern update. Even in the version from my grandmother, there’s not a lot going on, so I thought it could only be up from here.
Polish cooking doesn’t use a lot of spice, but the usual suspects of Eastern European cooking like dill, horseradish, and paprika do tend to show up, and cinnamon and cardamom also show up a lot in baked goods. But instead of being used to pack a major flavor punch, they’re more used to gently enhance a dishes flavor.
I decided to use curry powder because, well, I had some, and it also seemed like a flavor profile not out of the realm of Polish cooking. Most curry blends usually have similar warming spices to cardamon and cinnamon, and more international flavors are starting to show up in modern Polish cooking, so the turmeric and cumin in curry powder felt like a nice fit. Plus, curry ketchup is an elite dipping sauce, so I thought the curry powder would go well with the traditional tomato sauce.
One update I needed to make was making a better sauce than the customary (including in my grandmother’s recipe) canned tomato soup as sauce. I updated it using a bit of cumin and paprika with canned tomatoes to bring a lightly smokey element to the dish.
These aren’t traditional but to me, they fit nicely into the canon of modern Polish food.
