If you’ve never heard of eating strawberries and noodles together, I know what you’re thinking:
“Ew.”
That’s what I thought when my wife suggested it many years ago.
She’s introduced me to many foods I’d never had before, from Polish bigos to Szechuan kung pao chicken to Indian vindaloo.
When you grow up in Maine, which was one of our least diverse states in the 1970s, you think that red snapper hot dogs are haute cuisine. And to my mind, they are.
Especially if you wash them down with a bottle of Moxie.
The first time she brought home Chinese hot and sour soup, I loved it.
But it was spicy in ways I hadn’t experienced before.
My eyebrows were sweating. I drank nearly a quart of cold water with it, but I couldn’t stop eating. It was delicious and painful at the same time.
I grew to love it though, and spicy food in general.
For years, we were regulars at a Chinese restaurant who had a 1 through 5 scale of spiciness.
Eventually, they added a sixth level that they called Bill Hot. One waiter said it was so hot it’d burn the hair off your tongue.
There may have been an error in translation, there.,
Strawberries and noodles is such a contradiction in flavor terms that it doesn’t sound good.
And I was skeptical when my wife said she was going to make it. Still, she hadn’t steered me wrong with pierogi or biryani or curried goat. She was absolutely right about the falafel from the food truck near her office. They were all new to me, but I immediately loved them. Still do.
So she told me to make coffee while she boiled some pasta and sliced the strawberries.
She stirred some sugar into the berries and let them sit to “sweat,” as she said. After a few minutes she added sour cream, diluted it with a little milk, and mixed it up. She drained the noodles, put them on plates, and poured the strawberry mixture over them.
It’s an odd combination. Slathering the slightly umami pasta with sweet strawberries soaked in sour cream shouldn’t work, but it does.
The bitterness of the coffee adds another flavor group. Black tea can work, too, but coffee really brings it all together.
It’s one of my favorite meals:
Cold berries…
… On hot noodles:
Too sweet to be an entree, too savory to be a dessert: it hits that delicious confusing middle ground. The puzzling tastes and textures are somehow perfectly satisfying.
My wife said her mother invented this recipe.
Life in a post-war Polish village wasn’t easy, and they mostly ate what they grew.
It made sense that Mamcia threw together what few ingredients she had, and it happened to turn out great.
I imagine that not all of her impromptu barebone meals were as delicious.
Many years later, after my mother-in-law had passed away, we happened to see a YouTube video about unusual food combinations from around the world.
- There was chorizo and Nutella from Spain
- Peanut butter with fried egg from the United States
And, lo and behold:
Pasta with strawberries from Poland.
It wasn’t a family recipe after all. Other Polish people knew about it. The strawberries and noodles featured in the video were slightly different.
It used the same ingredients, but the strawberries and sour cream weren’t mixed together. They were dolloped on top of the pasta separately. Perhaps each family has their own variation.
I did a little Googling:
- Our assumption that it came from simply using available ingredients seems to be correct.
- No one knows who invented it and there’s no documented date or place for its creation, but it appeared during the post-war and socialist decades.
My wife’s family left Poland in 1964, right in the middle of that 1950s to 1980s time frame.
People used whatever they had at hand during those lean times. Strawberries were seasonally abundant; pasta was cheap and filling; and sour cream was available to anyone with a cow.
Known in Polish simply as makaron z truskawkami, it became popular even after the lean times ended…
Probably because it’s just so darn good. It’s a standard school cafeteria menu item, and is a quintessential summer comfort food.
It can be a light lunch, an afternoon snack, or even a full meal in the evening. Adding coffee makes it the perfect brunch, not much different in concept from blueberry pancakes.
If you’ve had pierogi — Polish dumplings — they were probably filled with potato and farmer’s cheese.
They might have had onions or garlic. That’s traditional pierogi, but there are a wide variety.
A restaurant we went to in Krakow had over 40 kinds, with fillings ranging from meat to fruit.
Strawberry was one of the choices. So mixing fruit and pasta isn’t that unusual.
Sweet fruit-based pasta sauce isn’t uniquely Polish.
In the early 16th century, Italians sometimes served strawberries on top of noodles. This was before tomatoes became a staple of their cuisine.
(The tomato is a South American plant. How it became stereotypically Italian is a story of its own.)
Poland’s version, however, places more emphasis on the natural sweetness of the berries and the tang of the sour cream.
It’s a simple — and, for some, nostalgic — dish that’s both a celebration of summer.
Variations abound. Some use yogurt, heavy cream, or quark instead of sour cream. Others might drizzle on a bit of honey or sprinkle on some mint leaves. Sometimes another fruit is added, like banana or blueberries. The pasta can be al dente or overboiled, depending on your preference. Yet the gist of the dish remains the same:
Fresh, sweet strawberries over tender pasta.
I think it’s best to use short pasta. Long noodles would be too messy, swinging from your mouth and splattering the pink sauce over your favorite shirt. Elbow macaroni works but I prefer spirals like radiatori or fusilli, or maybe the wagon wheel shaped rotelle. Anything with ridges to hold the sauce works best.
Makaron z truskawkami remains a seasonal ritual in Poland.
You’ll find it on café menus alongside more elaborate fruit-and-pasta creations.
It’s a comfort food that brings back memories of school cafeterias, vacations at grandma’s, and the fleeting joy of the strawberry harvest. And my mother-in-law.
Guess what’s for dinner at my house tonight?
Please comment below with any odd combinations of flavors from your family. I’d like to give them a try.
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Yum! I’m going to have to persuade Tom to try this. It might not take too much persuasion as both strawberries and pasta are regulars in our kitchen, though usually not together.
That coffee mug was a nice surprise!
It was to us as well. 🙂
It sounds wrong at first but there’s plenty of sweet and savoury combinations out there that work so i guess dont knock it til you’ve tried it. Everyone loves pineapple on their pizza after all.
Funny that this comes up this week. Its Wimbledon time and the foodstuff synonymous with the tournament is strawberries and cream. Marks and Spencers stores have introduced a strawberries and cream sandwich as a tie in which has created quite a stir with polar opposite reactions of must have it / wtf are they thinking. I’m firmly on the side of hand me that sandwich. And going by Bill’s recommendation, why not stick some noodles in there while you’re at it.
Hmm. We don’t have any M&S stores here, but it looks good. I might have to put the kettle on.
Interesting. My Polish wife has had blueberries with pasta, but not strawberries. She has prepared strawberries in a similar fashion to what you described, just not with pasta.
I have had strawberry pierogi, and my wife occasionally buys blueberry ones. Very good.
My favorite are meat or mushroom/cabbage. A restaurant we like that does a modern spin on traditional Polish dishes has a lobster pierogi to die for.
Red snapper hot dogs sounds like haute cuisine to me, and now I want to try one.
That picture of Poland in the 60s looked like the town square in Wroclaw.
Realistically, red snapper hot dogs aren’t really that good, but they’re a childhood thing for me so I like ’em. As we might say in the area, wicked pissah.
Do you eat the strawberry leaves with the dessert rather than cutting them off? (My dog loves them, I’ll add).
We use them as a handle, then they get composted to grow… more strawberries!
I’m a bad vegan. “Curried goat” made me laugh.
So, basically, it’s beef stroganoff, but with strawberries.
Normal eaters probably have too much corn in their diet.
Some vegans probably have too much soy in their diet, like me. Soy as a meat substitute is less expensive than the truly high-end stuff at Whole Foods.
I’m all in.