Mysterious Pies of the Baltic (Part 2)

The pie-making entrepreneur of Gdynia in 2006

Last week, I recounted a strange 1994 encounter with Australian-style meat pies in Gdańsk, Poland. Next, in futuristic 2006, I meet their maker...

Gdynia is - how shall I put this? - not blessed with the charms of its neighbours in the coastal Tri-City, seaside resort Sopot and historic Gdańsk.

It’s the ugly sister of the three, a functional port city whose straight, no-nonsense streets are lined with blocky concrete buildings, evoking the gloomy stereotype of communist-era architecture.

But none of this was evident in the charmingly art deco setting of the Willa Lubicz. Here I met Beata Zielińska (pictured above), the fast food entrepreneur of the Baltic coast.

As we sat at a table in the hotel’s genteel cafe and ordered coffee, she explained why the paj.

Pies vs pies

“I couldn't make them under the English name, because ‘pies’ [when pronounced pee-es] means ‘dog’ in Polish,” she explained disarmingly. A sound reason, I agreed.

“In Adelaide, I went to a very nice pie factory, run by a Dutch man, and said ‘I want to learn how to make pies’,” she said. “I worked with him, and learned so much.

“We brought the pie tins over to Poland because they're specially shaped tins; if I'm running out of the tins, my family brings them on the way to visit me. If I'm going to try making a new flavour, I ask my son Martin ‘Can you bring a different shape?’”

Changing tastes

The venture was an initially successful one, but there’s no accounting for local tastes. Though she’d started out with a traditional Australian recipe, Beata found she had to tinker with perfection.

“I had to change them to suit Polish tastes,” she shrugged. “The paj australijski had a lot of gravy, but here they like it to be all meat.”

So could anyone achieve success in a similar way, by taking a unique Aussie foodstuff and adapting it to the palates of a foreign population?

Beata shook her head. “I meet a lot of people who come back from Australia, but not many stay. They think it'll be easy to make money here, but it's not. Just like in Australia, you have to work hard for your money.”

Émigré energy

I’ve never migrated to another country myself, but I have Sudanese friends who’ve settled in Australia via the long and stressful route taken by political refugees, and I marvel at the energy and drive they've applied to adapting to their new home.

Despite our relaxed chat over kawa and cake, I sensed something similarly determined beneath Beata’s surface.

Australia has benefited from its many Polish migrants over the years - from explorer Paul Strzelecki to the Solidarity refugees of the 1980s - so it was nice to imagine some of that migrant energy being traded back to its source.

As we left, I took a photo of a bumper sticker on Zielinska’s car, despite her protestations about its need for a wash.

“Paj jest dobry i tani”, it read: “The pie is good and cheap”. Well, indeed. And my 1994 mystery was finally solved.

This post was sponsored by AFerry.co.uk.

Mysterious Pies of the Baltic (Part 1)

Gdańsk was beautiful, sure... but who
was cooking up its mysterious pies?

It looked like a pie. It tasted like a pie. But what was a dinky-di Aussie meat pie doing in a Polish city on the Baltic coast?

The place: Gdańsk.

The year: 1994, only five years since the Solidarity trade union had swept Poland’s communist regime from power.

The month: November, in the week containing All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day.

As most of the week was a public holiday in Poland, Narrelle and I had some time off our English language teaching jobs to visit the Baltic port city of Gdańsk.

Enter the paj

And this is when we came upon the pie, at one of the many food kiosks scattered around the centre of the city. Or I should say the paj, for that was its Polish spelling, close to “pie” in pronunciation.

Intrigued by the sight of these familiar-looking objects in what appeared to be classic pie-warmer ovens, we proceeded to a taste test. They were much – but not exactly – like an Australian meat pie. 

Square or round, the right size, but with slightly thicker pastry and solid mince fillings sans gravy. And presumably made of pork rather than beef... but still eerily similar.

Pie mania

I’m ashamed to admit that in the following days we went on a paj-eating frenzy, consuming significant numbers of them. Call it research. But more honestly, call it nostalgia – we’d been away from Australia for two and a half years at this point, the sort of time period that has expats’ eyes inexplicably moistening at the thought of Vegemite.

Tasty as they were, these pajs were a conundrum, though definitely bearing an  Australian connection. One of them was handed over in a paper bag bearing the legend paj australijski, which translated to “Australian Pie”. 

At that point I really was intrigued, but there was no time to unravel the mystery, and in any case my Polish wasn’t up to quizzing stallholders on the provenance of their products.

The legend of the pie

But it turned out the puzzle could, like a cheap milk bar pie, be left on the top shelf for quite some time while still staying warm. Twelve years later I returned to Poland, now a travel writer on an assignment for Lonely Planet.

Researching the Poland chapter in the Eastern Europe book, I was obliged to cover the entire country over several weeks in sub-zero temperatures, thanks to the unseasonable dictates of publishing schedules.

The paj was low in my priorities, but not quite forgotten. Before leaving home I’d done a quick Web search, locating, to my mild surprise, the company that manufactured them in Gdynia, north of Gdańsk.

Their mysterious creator and convenience food mastermind

agreed to tell me all about them when we met at the bar of the Willa Lubicz, a posh hotel on a hill with a view of the Baltic Sea...

Next: The story of the Polish-Aussie pies continues, as I learn about the Dutch guru, the trouble with gravy, and the reason why 'pies' isn't a good look in Polish... [click here to continue]

This post was sponsored by AFerry.co.uk.

Signs and Portents: Poland 3

Gone to Hel and back? Or just dying for a pie in the most unlikely of places? This week I continue my survey of curious signs encountered on a Lonely Planet assignment through Poland in the depths of winter in 2006...

1. There’s nothing like that nice Mr Shakespeare to encourage confidence in an English language school... though you might wonder whether Poles are really motivated to speak just like the Bard.

Interestingly, the great playwright used to be styled as 'Szekspir' in Poland, though the original spelling of his name is usually used now. Szkoła języków obcych means 'school of foreign language', by the way, and this example was in the beautiful Main Town of Gdańsk.

The Bard was pleased that his passing mention of Poland in Hamlet had been noticed by the right people.

2. Don’t ever say something will only happen on 'a cold day in hell' if you’re heading to northern Poland. For on the end of a long sandy peninsula north of Gdańsk lies the attractive village of Hel. And when I was there in March 2006, it was very cold indeed. Still, how many people can say they’ve been to Hel and back - and saw a Baltic grey seal in an aquarium on the way?

The tourism bureau wondered why its “Go to Hel” campaign was failing to bring in the visitors.

3. No, this scary metallic fish seen in Hel wasn’t an aquatic offshoot of the robots in the Terminator movie series. It was actually a warning about maritime pollution - the sign reads 'Don't litter the sea'. It was also a tribute, I felt, to the surrealism endemic in Polish poster art.

Newly-released papers revealed that Poland’s former communist rulers had attempted to construct an artificial dolphin for their Socialist World amusement park.

4. This bumper sticker belonged to Gdynia businesswoman Beata Zielińska, a former Adelaide resident who had taken the secret of Australian meat pies back to her homeland and manufactured them to be sold to Polish schoolkids. The sticker reads 'The pie is good and cheap'. Quite right.

The EU was willing to approve manufacture of the Aussie meat pie, but drew the line at Vegemite.

5. This starkly evocative sign was one of many stencilled onto the giant concrete ruins of the bunkers at Wilczy Szaniec, better known in German as Wolfsschanze or in English as Wolf’s Lair. This hidden complex in the East Prussia region of Germany (now the Masuria region of northeast Poland) was Hitler’s wartime HQ from which he directed Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

It’s supremely ironic, I think, that the Führer's nerve centre, where he spent almost all the remaining years of WWII, is now deep within Polish territory. If you’re going to visit the ruins by the way, I couldn’t think of a more atmospheric time to do so than the midst of winter, when the broken concrete blocks and surrounding vegetation are thickly covered by snow.

Von Stauffenberg intended to show the Führer exactly how he felt about him with a surprise novelty gift.

More intriguing signs and portents to come...