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During holidays, you can overeat, you just need to know how to do it. By following a few rules, we can enjoy tasty dishes, avoiding overeating and indigestion.
According to Polish tradition, the Christmas Eve dinner is fast. Which does not mean that we are to sit down to supper with an empty stomach. Fortunately, there is no such obligation. In the morning you can eat an easily digestible meal, then a small snack, as long as it is actually small. It’s just about not overeating during the day, we should feel unsatisfied.
Not for hungry
When we sit hungry for Christmas Eve dinner, it is difficult to suppress the first reflex to start eating. Then we eat greedily and make the most mistakes, for example, we eat hard-to-digest dishes. Meanwhile, from the beginning you should eat slowly, chewing the food thoroughly, savoring and tasting every bite. We have time, we don’t have to hurry anywhere. The whole evening is ahead of us – full of culinary attractions.
How we start eating may depend on the Christmas Eve supper, and perhaps even the entire feast. Many people exaggerate their food during Christmas Eve, and then have stomach problems and over the holidays. What is needed most is vigilance and common sense. This is also the meaning of the word vigilia: it comes from the Latin vigilare, which means: to be vigilant, to be vigilant. Of course, religious people know that you need to be vigilant to welcome the coming of Jesus and the feast day with dignity, but it is also worth being vigilant in the festive gluttony.
How not to overeat
During the holidays, the most important rule is to eat often, preferably five meals a day, for example every 2-4 hours. It is forbidden to feast for many hours without a break, because then even a long walk, dried fruit or mint tea will not help us. If we also abuse alcohol and smoke cigarettes, which worsen the blood supply and contractility of the stomach, we can be almost sure that we will contract indigestion.
Let’s not overeat bread, especially those prepared with sourdough. We unnecessarily stuff our stomachs, besides, we have rolls, baguettes and hard-to-digest wholemeal bread every day. There is also no need to overdo it with although healthy, but quite common potatoes.
Let’s eat as the tradition dictates, i.e. start with red borscht with dumplings, then other dishes, so that the dessert is at the end. This is important not only for tradition, but also from a dietary point of view. When we return to the mushroom in vinegar or the carp in jelly after the poppy seed cake, a revolution may occur in the stomach.
It’s also better to limit foods that lead to gas, such as beans, peas, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and radish. If this is not possible on Christmas Eve, then at least we should remember about it on holidays.
We do not drink carbonated drinks and carbonated water because they cause gas. It is also worth limiting the consumption of still water during meals, as it reduces the secretion of gastric acid and slows down digestion. In between meals, herbal teas, mint or chamomile are best.
During holidays, we can eat cold cuts and meat dishes as much as we want. However, it is worth making sure that they are not too fatty and high-calorie. Fatty foods, especially fried foods, slow down and interfere with digestive processes, and are the most common cause of indigestion and digestive ailments. It is better to cook the meat or grill it on an electric grill. Also, do not eat too much raw vegetables and fruit, because the fructose contained in them intensifies the fermentation processes in the intestines. Sweet milk is better to replace with yogurt, kefir or sour milk. In general, it is better to eat less, but the dishes are exceptionally tasty and of the best quality.
Not only carp
Fish cannot be missing on Christmas Eve. In Poland, we don’t eat too much of them, so Christmas is a good opportunity to make up for it at least a little. A very valuable dish is traditional herring in cream or tomato sauce. We should be proud of him. Herring would not be ashamed of Mediterranean cuisine, as it belongs to the fish in which there are significant amounts of extremely valuable omega 3 fatty acids. Christmas carp is also a tradition, which appeared in Poland in the XNUMXth century, when it was started by the Cistercians.
Carp made its way to Polish Christmas Eve tables at the turn of the 1880th and XNUMXth centuries, when its breeding developed in our country (wild carp comes from the catchment areas of the Black, Caspian, Aegean and Aral seas or from China). The Christmas Eve delicacy of the Polish nobility was the so-called gray carp (in a sauce made of the blood of this fish, gingerbread, caramel, wine and roots). At the end of the XNUMXth century, the Polish-bred royal carp (the so-called mirror carp) was prepared, which is one of the most famous varieties of this fish today (it was first presented by Adam Gasch from the Kaniów farm near Biała Krakowska at an agricultural exhibition in Berlin in XNUMX r.).
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However, carp is slowly disappearing from Polish festive tables. We have a growing selection of fish, so we are more eager to reach for salt and cod, and even salmon and halibut, which have long ceased to be expensive and exquisite fish. No matter what fish we choose; it is important how it is prepared.
It’s best not to serve it in breadcrumbs. Frying fish deprives them of valuable nutrients, such as omega-3 fatty acids. Moreover, such fish is mostly fat, high in calories and low in nutritional value. Typical of Old Polish cuisine is steamed fish in an aromatic broth, with lots of parsley and garlic, tinted with saffron, seasoned with coriander, sprinkled with lemon juice and served with olive oil and young carrots.
Bogusław Deptuła in his book Literature from the Kitchen suggests steaming salmon and serving it in green mayonnaise. We can prepare this mayonnaise ourselves. All you need is a glass of plain mayonnaise, a tablespoon of spinach or sorrel pulp, a tablespoon of chopped parsley, a tablespoon of chopped capers, and a teaspoon of lemon juice.
Solo is great for experimenting. Larousse gastronomique lists over 30 recipes for this delicate fish. One of them is sola `a la Walewska, served with white wine or champagne. The fish must be submerged for 2-3 minutes in boiling fish broth (eg obtained from salt residues). Then you have to throw it into an oven heated to 300 ° C. The original recipe says that you should put lobsters and truffles on the fish, which is achievable in Poland, but expensive. Instead, you can use other ingredients, depending on your preferences and abilities. Sola will definitely be tasty.
Hidden eggs
Nothing will happen if we eat more eggs than usual on Christmas, although it’s better not to overdo it. They contain large amounts of valuable ingredients, such as choline that benefits the brain, omega-3 acids, various vitamins, for example E, A and B6. They also contain zinc, calcium and phosphorus. But the yolk contains significant amounts of cholesterol.
During the holidays, we eat more eggs, but remember that we eat not only the most visible ones, which we fry, cook or add to dishes. They are also found in large amounts in cakes and various products, which we usually forget. Therefore, even if we are careful not to eat more than 4-5 eggs a week, as recommended, we actually eat more of them, especially on holidays. And yet we also eat meat dishes, also high in cholesterol.
How to drink and not get drunk
Jan Onufry Zagłoba argued that it is worth combining wine with oil, because from this “oleum in the mind of the eater increases”. Oleum – as Sienkiewicz argued in “Deluge” – as lighter, will always be on top, while wine that goes to mind without it, will carry every virtuous substance with it.
It is not without sense. Although there is no more oil in the head just by consuming it, combining alcohol with fat can protect against the effects of alcohol abuse. So a herring in oil or an egg in mayonnaise is good. Only the Italians are not right, who claim that pasta protects against the harmful effects of alcohol. There is no evidence of this.
There is also no justification for saying that “first you should drink wine and then beer, because you will be sick as if it were real”. We can drink the drinks in any order and this applies to both women and men. We might as well start the feast with beer, which will whet your appetite, and then move on to wine. The hangover depends on the amount of alcohol drunk, not on the order in which we reach for each drink. This saying could come from the fact that after strong alcohol we are faster and then we are less in control.
However, there is no certainty whether we get drunk faster and easier with champagne and sparkling wine. A certain logic would suggest this. Well, bubbles can cause the valve between the stomach and duodenum to open faster. Then the alcohol immediately enters the intestines and then into the blood. However, studies do not confirm this. Anyway, only one was carried out, in 1973. It did not give unequivocal results.
And one more thing: ladies do not have to be afraid of drinking drinks through a straw. They don’t get drunk faster because of it. They just need to remember that they naturally metabolize alcohol less well, so they get drunk faster than men. Sweet drinks are very pleasant to drink, but insidious, they can easily lull a lady’s vigilance.
To fast or not – how is it done in the world?
Christmas Eve is a unique Polish tradition. Apart from Poles, only Lithuanians and Slovaks observe it, who also share the wafer and serve dishes similar to ours: sauerkraut soup with mushrooms or dried apples and lentils, carp, Ukrainian salad with beets and other vegetables, cookies with poppy seeds or cottage cheese (so-called bobs).
During their Christmas Eve dinner, Austrians eat carp or duck, as well as gingerbread and roasted chestnuts. The Germans most often eat sausages and potato salad. In Denmark, roasted duck and rice with fruit are served (one serving of rice contains an almond, and the lucky finder gets an extra gift). Instead of dinner, the French celebrate Christmas dinner, during which they serve: pate, oysters, snails, smoked salmon, turkey or a rooster stuffed with chestnuts. In England, Christmas Eve is not celebrated (on the first day of Christmas there is a festive dinner with roasted turkey), while in Belgium, instead of Christmas Eve dinner, breakfast is celebrated in a restaurant (traditional dishes are turkey with chestnut purée and black pudding with raisins).
Polish cuisine
Contrary to popular belief, meat and fatty dishes do not dominate traditional Polish cuisine. Even before World War II, Poles were generally the so-called semivegetarians – little meat was eaten, mainly on Sundays and holidays. In the mid-XNUMXth century, before potatoes appeared on the tables, the basis of the diet was groats – millet, barley, buckwheat, peas and whole grain bread. Large amounts of sauerkraut and pumpkins were eaten, because only a few could afford to eat meat frequently. Pork was obtained mainly in spring and autumn. In summer, the delicacy was rich in fiber, steamed chopped quinoa with buckwheat.
Poland has repeatedly drawn patterns from other regions of the world. Potatoes appeared in our country during the times of Jan III Sobieski. Potatoes, as they were called, never replaced groats, a favorite old Slavic dish. Pork chop
Polish bourgeoisie imported from Germany. It was similar with Viennese eggs – in Vienna no one knows what this dish is, and in Krakow you can eat them in almost every restaurant. Lithuanian cuisine comes from dumplings and Lithuanian cold soup. It is not certain where the tripe comes from, one of the favorite dishes of King Jagiełło and Jadwiga. They were known both in Lithuania and in the Crown.
Many Polish dishes have been adopted in Western Europe. Poland is the home of the vineyard, which has become a rarity of French cuisine. The culinary qualities of these snails in the Middle Ages were known to the Cistercians, who grew them in monastery gardens and parks. To this day, Polish vineyards taste better than those grown in France. Honey and beer also have huge traditions in Polish cuisine. Pope Clement VIII is said to have become a connoisseur of beer made in Warka. When he fell ill after returning to Rome, Piva di Varca demanded feverishly.
The traditions of Old Polish cuisine, especially of the middle class nobility, were taken over by the bourgeoisie in the XNUMXth century. Favorite soups were borscht, broth, cabbage soup, barley soup and pea soup. They ate peas with cabbage, a piece of meat from broth, roulades, seasoned sausages, tripe and sausages. The meat was served with groats, potatoes, sweet or sour cabbage, as well as beetroots, carrots, beans and turnips. In the XNUMXth century, “Warsaw” cuisine was one of the most famous European national cuisines. Contemporary Polish cuisine originates from it, which should still be open to the best culinary practices.
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