Posted on 04/17/2014 3:46:08 PM PDT by Kid Shelleen
By late Friday morning, the line was nearly out the front door of Stan Swiacki Meats.
That's nothing, said Ed Swiacki, 36, who still smokes kielbasa the same way his grandfather did in 1950. By Good Friday, lines will form before dawn, snaking past the counter stocked with rye bread, babka, and pierogi, down Salmon Street and onto Venango.
(Excerpt) Read more at philly.com ...
Please add me to your Philly Metro ping list, thanks!
I can hear the cholesterol from here.
The delicious, delicious cholesterol.
Oh man, Polish soul food, I know it well.
People know the Last Supper. But what they don’t know is that after He rose on Easter Sunday, Jesus had kielbasa and eggs for the First Breakfast.
Look it up - it’s in the Bible... somewhere...
I think, the next time I find myself in Philly, I need to stop by Swiacki’s and Czerw’s (Cerv’s???) and ship a load of kielbasa back to Texas.
No mention of placzek.
What’s Easter without placzek?
Wow... I’m not of Polish descent (although a few cousins of mine have some Polish in the mix), but if I ever make it to Philadelphia, I’ll make sure to buy some of these ethnic foods. Where I am, one supermarket has commercial kielbasa, but I’m sure the stuff mentioned in this article is much better.
There is nothing quite like having a good butcher shop. My five years in Cincinnati proved that proposition to me.
And, now, we have a good butcher in my small Texas town. He's German -- butchers really need to be Central European. He smokes his own bacon, makes his own sausages, stuffs peppers, makes custom meat loaf mix, wraps chicken cordon bleu, marinates and cuts fajitas, will cut roasts to order and the steaks...ah, yes, the strips, filets and ribeyes...are usually prime. His ground chuck is superior, yet no costlier, than any supermarket's.
Find yourself a good butcher...and support him.
This isn’t something totally unique to Philly. I pretty much grew up in Baltimore and lived a good part of my formative years in a neighborhood with a lot of ethnically Polish folk. My best friends during high school where twin sisters - “The Golembeski Twins” and you don’t get much more Polish than that. :), IIRC, their dad was a 2nd generation American and their mom was 3nd generation. And they were good, honest, hard working people.
At Easter every year their dad and his many brothers would go together to buy fresh pork shoulder and veal, pig casings and all the necessary spices in bulk to make homemade, honest to goodness old world kielbasa using traditional family recipes passed on from generation to generation in their family kitchen for their family and their friends.
What they made BTW wasn’t the smoked type of kielbasa but more like a fresh “German” sausage, i.e. a biała kiełbasa (a white sausage) often served with cabbage or sauerkraut along with homemade pierogi which is nothing like the pierogi you find in the frozen foods section of your local grocery store.
http://easteuropeanfood.about.com/od/polishsausages/tp/Types-of-Polish-Sausage-Kielbasa.htm
FWIW, my mom was from and grew up in central PA and thus knew how to make fastnachts for Shrove Tuesday which she made and introduced to our Polish neighbors along with her famous and delicious homemade chicken pot pie. Then one of our neighbors who was Jewish, introduced us to homemade chicken matzo ball soup, something I still make this time of year. I am all for the “melting pot” when it comes to food. : )
What you get in the supermarket labeled as kielbasa is really nothing like the “real” thing. It is sort of analogous to going to Taco Bell and thinking that is “real” Mexican food.
My wife’s childhood stomping grounds.
I grew up in the suburbs south of Chicago. We also had fresh kielbasa every Easter with hot Polish horseradish. Other times of year, too. :-). I can’t find a good kielbasa here in rural MO, I keep threatening to make my own.
Thanks for posting this. Good memories.
I went that route. I had trouble finding fresh (not smoked) polish sausage commercially of any decent quality. I bought a ~100 year old Enterprise sausage press at an auction and have been making my own. It’s a bit of work to set up and clean up but it is worth it. I’ve also expanded to other sausage types.
Very neat! Would you be willing to share a recipe?
I’m still learning. All the recipes I’ve done so far have come from http://www.lets-make-sausage.com
Also, I get my casing from http://www.makincasing.com/x/home.php
Though it is a large quantity (100 yds) of US sourced casing it is only about double what you will pay for 10 yds of some of the cheap imported junk you will find elsewhere.
Yeah, the photos at the link had me drooling, might have to take a trip over there after the Easter rush, it’s not that far away from me.
Thank you for the link! I’ll give it a look.
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