Polish Delight–A Mid-Century Recipe Test - Mid-Century Menu (2024)

Tom and I just got back from a trip to see his sister graduate from medical school (go Maggie!). The trip had it’s good and bad parts. Good parts: We got to visit family. The weather was pretty good. We got to spend a lot of time together. Bad part: We BOTH got a cold. Ugh.

So, this week’s recipe test is going to be abbreviated due to the fact that I feel like my head is going to pop like a tick any second.

This week I am bringing you a “traditional” recipe from the Clark family archives. It is traditional in the fact that Tom’s grandma always used to make it, his grandfather loved it, and it is now served every year at the obligatory extended family get together.

This is Tom’s chicken-scratch handwritten copy of the recipe. I will translate for you:

Polish Delight

3 lbs Pork butt, steak or roast

2 cans Cream of Mushroom soup

1 pkg dry onion soup mix

1lb fresh sliced mushrooms

1-12 oz pkg cooked kluski noodles (*Polish egg noodles)

1 large can kraut

Cube meat, brown and mix with dry soup mix. Bake meat/dry soup mix at 350 degrees for 30 mins, adding water if necessary. Add noodles, mushrooms, cream of mushroom soup and kraut to the cooked pork. Bake an additional 30 mins.

We did a bit of research on this recipe and ended up finding a couple of other recipes called “Polish Delight Casserole” online that were pretty much the same as the Clark family one, all indicating that this was a recipe from the 1950’s or 1960’s. Add to that the fact that it contains cream of mushroom soup, and its most definitely a mid-century creation.

So, the real reason that we decided to make this, besides the fact that Tom was hungry for it, was that we had a big bag of kraut that needed to be used up before it went bad.

Mmm…porky.

Here are the cooked kluski noodles. We get ours frozen from a local Polish restaurant called Krysiaks in Bay City that are sold at our local grocery store. If you can’t find them in your grocery store, you can substitute regular egg noodles.

Warning: Stay clear of this dish if you hate mushrooms and kraut!

And here it is, straight from oven. It’s very…beige. And it smells like kraut. Most definitely.

Ah! This is proof of how sick I was: I forgot to get a picture of Tom tasting this dish! The horror! However, he loves this stuff, so I found this video to give you an approximation of what watching him eat was like.

The Verdict: I thought it was pretty good, and Tom thought it was great. I think the flavors needed to bake together a little more. At the Clark family Christmas, the huge vat of Polish Delight is transferred to a large roaster to cook slowly and keep warm, and I think that this recipe really isn’t the same without that long, slow cooking at the end. Next time I make this, I am going to plop everything but the noodles all in the crock pot for a few hours and then add the cooked noodles right before serving. Overall though, it was pretty good!