Several years ago (around 2015 or so), I purchased a Polish-American cookbook published in 1917 at a garage sale somewhere in Michigan. Since then, I've toyed with the idea of trying to cook the recipes from the book and writing about my experience doing so. I can't guarantee that everything I make will be accurate to the author's intention, but I am going to try to do them at least some justice.
The book, published by the Worzalla Brothers in Stevens Point, Wisconsin (which, much to my surprise, still exists!), is called Kuchnia Polsko-Amerykańska, Polish-American Cooking, with an author given only as A.J.K. The foreword promises to provide ethnically Polish housewives living in the United States with a range of recipes and methods using ingredients and other supplies available in America, emphasizing that by necessity these would differ from what was available in Europe. Of course, this is the Europe and the America of 1917--a very different context and a very different kitchen than what I have available starting out in this project in 2020.
The title of this blog comes not from the book, but from the idea of Polonia--people of Polish origin and ancestry living outside of Poland--being the Fourth Partition. Anyone familiar with even the most basic outline of Polish history likely knows the story of the partitions; from the third partition in 1795 until 1918 there was no country in world called Poland. There were Poles, of course; there were uprisings, there was a developing national identity, but there was no independent political entity. There were three partitions of Poland, ruled by the Russian, Prussian, and Austro-Hungarian empires. The fourth partition, such as it was sometimes called, is used to describe Polonia abroad--those Poles scattered around the world who no longer lived in any of the geographical partitions of Poland.
This book, then, published in Wisconsin in 1917, is a product of one branch of that fourth partition. In some sense, I am also a product of a branch of that fourth partition--born in Michigan in 1991, the American great-grandchild of Polish-speaking people of peasant origin who left a village in what was then the Russian Empire around 1909 to settle first in Massachusetts, and then in Michigan; a few more generations yet removed from Polish-speaking people who left the Prussian partition in the 1870s and 1880s.
Perhaps, through the pages of this book and the creative effort of cooking the food described therein, I can learn a little more of the context in which these ancestors lived and worked. As with any project, this will be a conversation between myself and much of the 20th century--recipes from 1917, adapted to the small mid-2010s kitchen of a house from 1940.
Where the conversation lead, I cannot yet say.
