Tag #123853 - Interview #78211 (tomasz miedzinski)

One dish was very popular - mamaliga. Mama always cooked mamaliga in a metal pot: a little salt, a little fat of some sort, sunflower oil, and then you very slowly tipped corn-flour into the boiling water, stirring all the time, until the soup was very thick. When it had cooled, you turned the pot upside-down onto a slat and it came out in a single lump. And you could eat it in one of two ways. Either you cut it into little cubes and ate it with milk, usually for breakfast or supper, and then it was called mamaliga with milk. Or you made slices using a special utensil, a kind of guillotine: two wooden handles attached to a thin steel wire, and you cut the block into slices using the wire. In Ukrainian it was called kulesha. We loved mamaliga with white beet jam, also made by Mama. Sugar beets were very popular because there was a sugar factory in Horodenka, and in fall when the peasants brought them in from the fields on their carts, we would gather the ones that fell off. And we used them to make jam, which lasted the whole winter.