Kuron: Here cooks are still perceived as something a little worse - people who somehow failed in life
After a stint at painting apartments and refurbishing antique cars for a living, Kuron decided three years ago to become a professional chef. Having completed courses for chefs at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), Kuron now hosts his own weekly television show called 'Cook with Kuron' on tvn. Last May, together with his publisher, Wroclaw-based Wydawnictwo Dolnoslaskie, Kuron launched the first of a 16-part cookbook series titled 'Let's Cook with Kuron.' The first two books off the press this year, 'Dishes from the Grill' and 'Fish Dishes' have already gone into reprint and the 1999 Maciej Kuron calendar, with an original print run of 40,000 has been selling like hot cakes, according to the publisher. Recently Kuron was signing books in Wroclaw and spoke to the WBJ's Juliet D. Golden about culinary courses at the CIA, grocery shopping in Poland, promoting cookbooks, and his plans to open a restaurant in Warsaw as well as launch his own brand of food products. The following is a translated, edited version of their conversation.
Q: Why did you decide to write cookbooks?
A: The work of a cook is rather fleeting. Sometimes you work a couple of days or many, many hours to create a meal, then a few people come over and after 15 minutes there is not a trace left. It's a little bit like the envy of an artist who creates his work, and after a few centuries, you can say something about that painter by looking at his work. That's why there is the need to extend the lives of certain recipes and concoctions, and that's where the idea for a book came from.
Q: How much time do you spend promoting your books?
A: The first book came out in May for the International Book Fair in Warsaw. We really hurried to publish it than, because events like these present good opportunities to introduce books. That was May, and since then I've finished the third book. (About) once a month in different parts of Poland I sign books. That's the best way of getting to the reader. If someone has a book with a dedication inside, they go and show their friends, neighbors and family. Then they want to get a book like that. That's how it looks.
Q: What's unique about promoting cookbooks, in comparison to other genres?
A: Literature is read by 10% of the population in Poland, while almost 100% of the population cooks. The husband buys for the wife, or the wife buys for the husband, someone for Grandma and we are all somehow mixed up in this method of cooking, I would say. Unfortunately that's not yet the case as far as reading literature is concerned. That's why it's a wider spectrum and promotions turn out better at events that are not book based. At the Dominican fair in Gdansk, in two hours 500 (cook) books went. The publishing house didn't bring more books because they never had nearly so many books go in such a short time.
Q: Is Poland following in the footsteps of places like the United States, where cookbooks are at the top of the best-seller lists?
A: I think that there is a good chance for that to happen. At any moment we will approach 40,000 in print with 'Dishes from the Grill', and we are printing new books all the time. In this case, the book has been on the market for only a half a year. Because we are writing a series of books, the law of series is going to come into play. If someone buys 'Fish Dishes' or 'Soups' and they like them, they are going to want to buy earlier books to complete the series. It's not a situation that the book has its few months and disappears from the market. In this case, we hope that it's going to be a process that grows and there is a chance in this case to reach 100,000, which is a rare thing.
Q: Are your books tied to your television program?
A: For sure. Through a simple accident - on the one hand a father running for president and a son set on becoming a chef - this collision caused a situation where the interest of the media was really big. I was invited to a few television programs for the press. Someone was watching and noticed that I behaved well on television, I didn't get stressed out, I smiled and was relaxed. The fact that my name is Kuron and my father is Jacek Kuron, gave me a very good start. It goes without saying that the situation intensifies when television comes into play. TV is for sure a power, and gives a rare kind of popularity. We reach people all over Poland, even though my station, tvn, is not received all over Poland. But people get it, some from cable, others from satellite. I am recognized, I sign autographs. That's why the outlook is so good for the book. I am not so conceited to say that it is such a good book that people are throwing themselves at it.
Q: Who is your competition on TV or in the book market?
A: I would put it this way: For sure, I don't see a person on the market who is a direct competition for me. Watching culinary programs in America - which by the way helped me in preparing my program here in Poland when I returned - there are a lot of programs. I don't have a sense that if someone comes on the scene who has a good program that I am going to lose my daily bread, and that I am brushed aside. I don't feel that at all.
Q: Do you feel needed in the Polish kitchen?
A: I don't have a sense of mission. That's why I did not become a politician, even though everything pushed me in that direction with an enormous force. I founded a student's society, I sat in prison. Having the kind of father I have, I could have entered politics with great ease. That's why I said that I don't have that sense of mission. If I do something in life I have to force myself to do it. It does not come out of my enthusiasm, rather I have to do it, so let's go. I don't have that need. Of course if I decide to do something I try to do my best, that's why there are funny things (that happen). For example, in my program I try to convince people to eat a lot of fish, then a Norwegian company calls me and asks me to promote Norwegian salmon and herring. They say they'll pay me for promoting their products and I say, 'Why do you want to do that and spend money when I am doing that already?' I like fish, I think it's good.
I think it would be good for all consumers if the prestige associated with being a chef rose in Poland. In America, the gentleman, the house chefs and restaurant owners I studied with, were very wealthy, very confident, really big shots. Here, cooks are still perceived as something a little worse - people who somehow failed in life. If the prestige of the profession is so low, it's difficult to say anything about good restaurants and good gastronomy. To that you have to add the problem of being held back for 50 years by real socialism where you couldn't even mention things like herbs or fresh vegetables, and even getting a piece of meat was a problem. Now Poles are making up for the loss of the meat, there is a psychological hunger for meat, because they used to have to conquer to get meat. Now people overeat meat, they eat for reserves. So a few things need to be done, and I do them. Some of them I do because they give me money and a way of supporting my family. It just turns out that I have a good time in this field, and I don't have to force myself to do it.
Q: I am under the impression that the Polish kitchen remains a woman's domain and that it is slow to change with sayings such as 'To the heart via the stomach'; 'A hungry pole is an angry Pole.' Are you a sign of changing times?
A: It turns out that when there are gatherings of kitchen chefs from restaurants (in Poland) there are mainly just men. Sometimes there is one or two women here or there. Just like around the world, even in America, at the Culinary Institute of America, where more women studied than at gatherings for cooks here in Poland. But there is that Polish stereotype: Woman to the kitchen and man to I don't know where - to battle with his sword, on a horse, or eventually to the hunt. But it's like with all stereotypes. Just like they say, women are worse cooks. Someone gives an order: 'Force the woman to cook something.' It has already been proven that slavery is one of the worst systems and if we are forced to do something, then we do it badly, without heart. If a man starts to cook, he has to break through the stereotype and has to enter the kitchen, he has to really like and want to do that. It is his decision, his conscious choice. That's why when a man goes into the kitchen it usually turns out well. When a woman becomes an alpinist or a pilot, usually, the ones who fought their way through, they are usually the best, that's the way life goes.
Q: Shopping is easier now, there is better selection, quality and more exotic international products on the market. How is this going to influence the development of the Polish palate and cuisine?
A: The very fact that a new product comes onto the market, a vacuum appears - a vacuum because people's interests are piqued because it's something new, you can impress your friends. Even just a couple of years ago everything was so gray and disgusting. Everything was so impoverished that it didn't entice people to think positively about going shopping, about eating, about products that something could be made from. When big stores opened up with interesting things, colorful vegetables, that reality was immediately reflected on the plate. The fact that fish is now available, there have immediately been letters: 'Maciek, do a program about what we need to do with these shrimp, because we look at these things and don't understand, we just don't know what to do with them.' Availability on the market creates demand. From that point of view, just as Poland has been able to catch up in such a short period of time, the same is happening in the culinary area. But that being said, what's happening is that McDonald's (type places) are opening up more than anything. But I think that just like chicken pox and other childhood illnesses, society has to go through those phases and we're going in the right direction.
Q: But isn't that a sign of the beginnings of a dining culture in Poland? Now eating is done at home with the whole family sitting around the table, and the restaurant culture is still missing.
A: Finances have a big role to play here. That is going to change as people become more affluent. What we see now in restaurants in Warsaw, the expensive ones, are usually representatives of large Western companies and they can allow for a lot of time spent in restaurants - the bill figures into their business costs. For the average Pole, a meal in a restaurant is a holiday or a big event, not something that happens every day. Now there is a series of restaurants that are being opened by well-known Polish actors called Prohibicja. They started with the assumption that they want to open a restaurant because they couldn't find a place where they could sit and spend time, not necessarily to eat dinner, but sit and be with friends. But because they are opening that restaurant and it is intended to be a national chain of restaurants, those types of places will slowly develop. Before people went to restaurants mainly to drink vodka. It's a different thing around the world, people go to a pub, or they go first to a restaurant, then go have drinks. Here, going to a restaurant meant ordering a half-liter, without any idea of what was going to happen next.
Q: How much does the limited availability of exotic food here restrict you in your writing or in preparing your television program?
A: I have a fair number of years behind me, and I started cooking during real socialism. People in this part of Europe are masters at finding substitute products, at using different things. If a housewife in the West has written down that the dish requires black olives and there are not any black olives, she can't (make the dish). The average Polish housewife would die from laughter, because she had to make beef stroganoff without the beef. Things appeared like beef stroganoff made from parts of lungs or kidneys. These were things that contradicted the very idea: Beef without beef. A bad cook is someone who says: 'I don't have this ingredient so I can't make the dish.' If you are supposed to make a steak without a filet, that's a problem. But you can make a different dish of a similar nature with different ingredients. So I am not limited at all.
Q: Does Polish cuisine need a good advertising campaign outside of Poland?
A: Yes, it's really needed. Polish cuisine lost its five minutes in history because in the 16th and 17th centuries it was really valued in Europe. There is a French chefs' report from the 17th century that says Poles are the best in Europe at preparing fresh-water fish. Really, when you read old Polish cookbooks, you can see that there are so many fresh-water fish recipes. There were a lot of rivers, lakes, breeding ponds, that later disappeared. There is also wild game, mushrooms that are unique in aroma. When I made chlodnik for cooks in America, they really loved it and said they finally understood gazpacho. I think that if Adam Mickiewicz had not had been an aesthete, but rather loved Polish cuisine and organized a dinner from time to time for his friends, that cuisine would have become well known. The same goes with (Fryderyk) Chopin … they were both skinny guys who didn't have time to be bothered with the kitchen.
Q: Does your father like what you cook?
A: He likes it. I say that hamburgers, McDonald's and hotdogs are not culinary phenomenona, but rather products of civilization and a certain style of work, a fast pace of living. Unfortunately my father is also this type of phenomenon. I can never forgive the times when I made a delicious roast or something else for him, it was dinnertime and he was flying off somewhere and stuck it in a roll and gulped it down while walking across the courtyard. For sure he was good-cook material, but it got wasted.
Q: Why do you like cooking, is it that you like to eat?
A: The beginning is always the same, you have to like to eat. It's a question of being sensitive to senses: to taste. Without that there is no sense to start cooking. It's like a musician who doesn't like to listen to music. It just isn't possible. At the beginning is appetite and the knowledge that something tastes good, and smells good, and we want to try to make it ourselves. Most of all, you have to love people and have a warm attitude toward them. It is the desire to do something nice for someone else. It's a kind of present you give someone else and its very important. I can't imagine a good cook who is nervous, angry, who has a bad attitude. You have to be at peace, a nice guy without any special feeling of mission or aggression. And if you really like to eat and want to toil a bit, you have a chance to become a cook.
Q: Why did you decide to write cookbooks?
A: The work of a cook is rather fleeting. Sometimes you work a couple of days or many, many hours to create a meal, then a few people come over and after 15 minutes there is not a trace left. It's a little bit like the envy of an artist who creates his work, and after a few centuries, you can say something about that painter by looking at his work. That's why there is the need to extend the lives of certain recipes and concoctions, and that's where the idea for a book came from.
Q: How much time do you spend promoting your books?
A: The first book came out in May for the International Book Fair in Warsaw. We really hurried to publish it than, because events like these present good opportunities to introduce books. That was May, and since then I've finished the third book. (About) once a month in different parts of Poland I sign books. That's the best way of getting to the reader. If someone has a book with a dedication inside, they go and show their friends, neighbors and family. Then they want to get a book like that. That's how it looks.
Q: What's unique about promoting cookbooks, in comparison to other genres?
A: Literature is read by 10% of the population in Poland, while almost 100% of the population cooks. The husband buys for the wife, or the wife buys for the husband, someone for Grandma and we are all somehow mixed up in this method of cooking, I would say. Unfortunately that's not yet the case as far as reading literature is concerned. That's why it's a wider spectrum and promotions turn out better at events that are not book based. At the Dominican fair in Gdansk, in two hours 500 (cook) books went. The publishing house didn't bring more books because they never had nearly so many books go in such a short time.
Q: Is Poland following in the footsteps of places like the United States, where cookbooks are at the top of the best-seller lists?
A: I think that there is a good chance for that to happen. At any moment we will approach 40,000 in print with 'Dishes from the Grill', and we are printing new books all the time. In this case, the book has been on the market for only a half a year. Because we are writing a series of books, the law of series is going to come into play. If someone buys 'Fish Dishes' or 'Soups' and they like them, they are going to want to buy earlier books to complete the series. It's not a situation that the book has its few months and disappears from the market. In this case, we hope that it's going to be a process that grows and there is a chance in this case to reach 100,000, which is a rare thing.
Q: Are your books tied to your television program?
A: For sure. Through a simple accident - on the one hand a father running for president and a son set on becoming a chef - this collision caused a situation where the interest of the media was really big. I was invited to a few television programs for the press. Someone was watching and noticed that I behaved well on television, I didn't get stressed out, I smiled and was relaxed. The fact that my name is Kuron and my father is Jacek Kuron, gave me a very good start. It goes without saying that the situation intensifies when television comes into play. TV is for sure a power, and gives a rare kind of popularity. We reach people all over Poland, even though my station, tvn, is not received all over Poland. But people get it, some from cable, others from satellite. I am recognized, I sign autographs. That's why the outlook is so good for the book. I am not so conceited to say that it is such a good book that people are throwing themselves at it.
Q: Who is your competition on TV or in the book market?
A: I would put it this way: For sure, I don't see a person on the market who is a direct competition for me. Watching culinary programs in America - which by the way helped me in preparing my program here in Poland when I returned - there are a lot of programs. I don't have a sense that if someone comes on the scene who has a good program that I am going to lose my daily bread, and that I am brushed aside. I don't feel that at all.
Q: Do you feel needed in the Polish kitchen?
A: I don't have a sense of mission. That's why I did not become a politician, even though everything pushed me in that direction with an enormous force. I founded a student's society, I sat in prison. Having the kind of father I have, I could have entered politics with great ease. That's why I said that I don't have that sense of mission. If I do something in life I have to force myself to do it. It does not come out of my enthusiasm, rather I have to do it, so let's go. I don't have that need. Of course if I decide to do something I try to do my best, that's why there are funny things (that happen). For example, in my program I try to convince people to eat a lot of fish, then a Norwegian company calls me and asks me to promote Norwegian salmon and herring. They say they'll pay me for promoting their products and I say, 'Why do you want to do that and spend money when I am doing that already?' I like fish, I think it's good.
I think it would be good for all consumers if the prestige associated with being a chef rose in Poland. In America, the gentleman, the house chefs and restaurant owners I studied with, were very wealthy, very confident, really big shots. Here, cooks are still perceived as something a little worse - people who somehow failed in life. If the prestige of the profession is so low, it's difficult to say anything about good restaurants and good gastronomy. To that you have to add the problem of being held back for 50 years by real socialism where you couldn't even mention things like herbs or fresh vegetables, and even getting a piece of meat was a problem. Now Poles are making up for the loss of the meat, there is a psychological hunger for meat, because they used to have to conquer to get meat. Now people overeat meat, they eat for reserves. So a few things need to be done, and I do them. Some of them I do because they give me money and a way of supporting my family. It just turns out that I have a good time in this field, and I don't have to force myself to do it.
Q: I am under the impression that the Polish kitchen remains a woman's domain and that it is slow to change with sayings such as 'To the heart via the stomach'; 'A hungry pole is an angry Pole.' Are you a sign of changing times?
A: It turns out that when there are gatherings of kitchen chefs from restaurants (in Poland) there are mainly just men. Sometimes there is one or two women here or there. Just like around the world, even in America, at the Culinary Institute of America, where more women studied than at gatherings for cooks here in Poland. But there is that Polish stereotype: Woman to the kitchen and man to I don't know where - to battle with his sword, on a horse, or eventually to the hunt. But it's like with all stereotypes. Just like they say, women are worse cooks. Someone gives an order: 'Force the woman to cook something.' It has already been proven that slavery is one of the worst systems and if we are forced to do something, then we do it badly, without heart. If a man starts to cook, he has to break through the stereotype and has to enter the kitchen, he has to really like and want to do that. It is his decision, his conscious choice. That's why when a man goes into the kitchen it usually turns out well. When a woman becomes an alpinist or a pilot, usually, the ones who fought their way through, they are usually the best, that's the way life goes.
Q: Shopping is easier now, there is better selection, quality and more exotic international products on the market. How is this going to influence the development of the Polish palate and cuisine?
A: The very fact that a new product comes onto the market, a vacuum appears - a vacuum because people's interests are piqued because it's something new, you can impress your friends. Even just a couple of years ago everything was so gray and disgusting. Everything was so impoverished that it didn't entice people to think positively about going shopping, about eating, about products that something could be made from. When big stores opened up with interesting things, colorful vegetables, that reality was immediately reflected on the plate. The fact that fish is now available, there have immediately been letters: 'Maciek, do a program about what we need to do with these shrimp, because we look at these things and don't understand, we just don't know what to do with them.' Availability on the market creates demand. From that point of view, just as Poland has been able to catch up in such a short period of time, the same is happening in the culinary area. But that being said, what's happening is that McDonald's (type places) are opening up more than anything. But I think that just like chicken pox and other childhood illnesses, society has to go through those phases and we're going in the right direction.
Q: But isn't that a sign of the beginnings of a dining culture in Poland? Now eating is done at home with the whole family sitting around the table, and the restaurant culture is still missing.
A: Finances have a big role to play here. That is going to change as people become more affluent. What we see now in restaurants in Warsaw, the expensive ones, are usually representatives of large Western companies and they can allow for a lot of time spent in restaurants - the bill figures into their business costs. For the average Pole, a meal in a restaurant is a holiday or a big event, not something that happens every day. Now there is a series of restaurants that are being opened by well-known Polish actors called Prohibicja. They started with the assumption that they want to open a restaurant because they couldn't find a place where they could sit and spend time, not necessarily to eat dinner, but sit and be with friends. But because they are opening that restaurant and it is intended to be a national chain of restaurants, those types of places will slowly develop. Before people went to restaurants mainly to drink vodka. It's a different thing around the world, people go to a pub, or they go first to a restaurant, then go have drinks. Here, going to a restaurant meant ordering a half-liter, without any idea of what was going to happen next.
Q: How much does the limited availability of exotic food here restrict you in your writing or in preparing your television program?
A: I have a fair number of years behind me, and I started cooking during real socialism. People in this part of Europe are masters at finding substitute products, at using different things. If a housewife in the West has written down that the dish requires black olives and there are not any black olives, she can't (make the dish). The average Polish housewife would die from laughter, because she had to make beef stroganoff without the beef. Things appeared like beef stroganoff made from parts of lungs or kidneys. These were things that contradicted the very idea: Beef without beef. A bad cook is someone who says: 'I don't have this ingredient so I can't make the dish.' If you are supposed to make a steak without a filet, that's a problem. But you can make a different dish of a similar nature with different ingredients. So I am not limited at all.
Q: Does Polish cuisine need a good advertising campaign outside of Poland?
A: Yes, it's really needed. Polish cuisine lost its five minutes in history because in the 16th and 17th centuries it was really valued in Europe. There is a French chefs' report from the 17th century that says Poles are the best in Europe at preparing fresh-water fish. Really, when you read old Polish cookbooks, you can see that there are so many fresh-water fish recipes. There were a lot of rivers, lakes, breeding ponds, that later disappeared. There is also wild game, mushrooms that are unique in aroma. When I made chlodnik for cooks in America, they really loved it and said they finally understood gazpacho. I think that if Adam Mickiewicz had not had been an aesthete, but rather loved Polish cuisine and organized a dinner from time to time for his friends, that cuisine would have become well known. The same goes with (Fryderyk) Chopin … they were both skinny guys who didn't have time to be bothered with the kitchen.
Q: Does your father like what you cook?
A: He likes it. I say that hamburgers, McDonald's and hotdogs are not culinary phenomenona, but rather products of civilization and a certain style of work, a fast pace of living. Unfortunately my father is also this type of phenomenon. I can never forgive the times when I made a delicious roast or something else for him, it was dinnertime and he was flying off somewhere and stuck it in a roll and gulped it down while walking across the courtyard. For sure he was good-cook material, but it got wasted.
Q: Why do you like cooking, is it that you like to eat?
A: The beginning is always the same, you have to like to eat. It's a question of being sensitive to senses: to taste. Without that there is no sense to start cooking. It's like a musician who doesn't like to listen to music. It just isn't possible. At the beginning is appetite and the knowledge that something tastes good, and smells good, and we want to try to make it ourselves. Most of all, you have to love people and have a warm attitude toward them. It is the desire to do something nice for someone else. It's a kind of present you give someone else and its very important. I can't imagine a good cook who is nervous, angry, who has a bad attitude. You have to be at peace, a nice guy without any special feeling of mission or aggression. And if you really like to eat and want to toil a bit, you have a chance to become a cook.
