(JEWISH GROUP) The challah that changed everything: Tracing Jewish baking back to Poland

[Behind the Aegis]

Laurel Kratochvila was a 23 year-old from Sharon, Mass. living in Prague, working as a bartender, when she crossed into Poland with her boyfriend, entered a village bakery, and bit into a loaf of braided bread that the baker called chalka.

Then her life changed.

“I ripped into the still-warm loaf and stuffed long strands of fragrant egg bread into my mouth,” she writes in her new cookbook, Dobre Dobre: Baking from Poland and Beyond. “How was it that we’d traveled little more than an hour and suddenly, in this little bakery in this little Polish town, I felt more at home than I had in a year?”

That chalka — a variety of challah made with milk — led Kratochvila, beginning in 2009, on a years-long journey to uncover a hidden truth: the Jewish baking traditions that Americans know and love — bagels, rugelach, babka, kichel — didn’t just happen to resemble Polish baking. They are Polish baking, created by the Jewish bakers who once dominated the trade in pre-war Poland.

Her beautifully-illustrated 329-recipe cookbook reads at least partially as an archaeological expedition, as she excavates how deeply Jewish bakers shaped Polish cuisine — and how their legacy survived even after most of the bakers themselves did not.

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