Beata Parczała, chef and owner of Ogniem i Mieczem in Kraków, began dreaming of her own restaurant at 20 with photocopies of a 17th-century Polish cookbook. Her kitchen is built on slow marinades and old Polish feasts.
My name is Beata Parczała, and I am the chef and owner of the restaurant Ogniem i Mieczem, By Fire and Sword, in Kraków. When I was 20, I started to dream about my own restaurant with real, old, traditional Polish cuisine. I had photocopies of an old Polish cookbook, written in the 17th century. In this book you can find really unbelievable recipes. This style of cooking became my inspiration.
That’s why the most important thing in my kitchen is the marinade. Twice a month we make a ham marinated for two weeks, the way it was done in the old times. We keep it in a cold place, covered with a linen cloth, and once a day we turn it over. Polish cuisine is really slow. It’s important not to hurry, to be patient, to be able to wait. That is what I love, because the results are beautiful.
My best memories of 13 years of work in a restaurant are of cooking for well-known people such as Roman Polanski, Adrien Brody and Jon Voight.
Of course, my first love is Polish cuisine: pierogi, żur, the traditional Polish rye soup, and red borscht. The funny thing is that everyone in Poland makes it in a different way. My second love was fresh, soft Mediterranean cooking: Italian, with tomatoes, pesto, basil, pine nuts and of course pasta, and Spanish, with spicy chorizo, paella and seafood. I also love Japanese food. Now I’m in love with Thai and Indian cuisine: spices with fresh lemongrass, cardamom, turmeric and coconut milk. At the moment I’m cooking dishes from Rajasthan.
My hobby is traveling: finding new kinds of cooking and new tastes, bringing them back and trying them at home. My husband and I have seen a lot of places, including Mexico, Cuba, Indonesia, Egypt, Cyprus, Greece, Spain and France. We always talk to local people, and they are our best teachers.
I wish all readers to live their lives very tastily: sometimes spicy and crazy, like Thai tom kha soup, sometimes smooth, like aglio e olio sauce, and warm and steady, like Polish broth.
For the photo I made the Feast for Gentlefolk. I chose it because it best shows how people ate in 17th-century Poland, and that is how it is eaten in my restaurant today: forgetting about the modern world and going back to the times of the nobility and the kings. Baked meats, roast ribs and roast ham, farmyard fowl, three kinds of pierogi and fish: our retainers serve them in wooden bowls and on platters brought to the center of the table, so that the guests can choose one dish or try several. Our custom goes back to the traditional Polish feasts, with tables laden with all kinds of food and drink.
