The Universe of Discourse

Polish Spam

Content warning: mass killing of farmed animals

Today I complained that my email provider had delivered a spam message to me that was in Polish. I understand that spam can be hard to identify, but Polish isn't, I don't know Polish, and any message sent to me in Polish can be discarded. Even if it's 100% legit, I don't know Polish, so we might as well throw it out.

This led a colleague to remark:

I'd love to try Polish spam. I wonder if there'd be caraway seed.

I wonder too.

But first I have to tell this story I heard from a Romanian co-worker. He said that in Romania in the 1980s they had a lot of mink farms, for mink fur. When they werre done getting the fur they would have a big pile of dead, naked minks, so what would they do with them? Well, in Romania in the 1980s, meat was scarce, so they would eat them. The trouble is, minks are carnivores, they are tough and stringy and taste terrible. To make them edible, the Romanians chopped them finely, made them into small loaves, and canned them like Spam. Still this "Spink" was only barely edible, it was the variety of meat that was only eaten by Romanians who could afford no other meat.

I told my colleague this, and said “That's the best I can do for you regarding local versions of Spam in formerly Soviet-bloc countries.” Is not Spam and it is not Polish, but at least it is interesting. Maybe.

Thanks to the Wonders of the Internet, it is not hard to find Spamlike potted meat products from Poland. For example, konserwa lisiecka, which is actually a canned sausage:

The label has the ingredients listed clearly. I see garlic (czosnek), white pepper (pieprz biały), and sugar (cukier) but no caraway, which I think would be kminek.

Here's golonka wieprzowa:

This time the ingredients include przyprawy, which is “spices” and could conceivably include caraway, but the label specifies z gorczycą, which means “including mustard”, so if there is caraway it does not get top billing.

From the labels I guess these are something like military-issue rations, which I suppose would be seasoned to the least common denominator. Perhaps someone's grandma makes a delectable potted pork dish with lots of caraway.

I do not speak Polish. If I have made any language errors, I apologize to Maciej Cegłowski.

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