She makes gefilte fish from her grandmother’s recipes, bakes her own matzah and feeds the citizens of Lublin and visitors to the Polish city with kreplach, chopped liver and delicious salt beef. But although the menu at her restaurant Mandragora is Jewish, chef-patron Izabela Kozlowska-Dechnik is not.
And yet it remains her mission to preserve the dishes of the Jews who once lived there.
Almost the entire Jewish population of Lublin, 95 miles southeast of Warsaw, was wiped out during the Shoah. Among the 40,000 Jews who were murdered were the two families who co-owned the 16th century building which now houses the restaurant.
Mandragora is full of Jewish flavour
This year Mandragora, which takes its name from the Bible’s Song of Songs, celebrating the mandrake as a symbol of love, fertility and happiness, will have been open for 20 years.
Kozlowska-Dechnik says she grew up eating Jewish food: “It was the cuisine I knew as a child, and the food of my city as well as of my friends of Jewish origin.”
She runs the restaurant with her husband Kamil, who also isn’t Jewish but who lived in Israel for 18 years.
“We get a lot of visitors from Israel, and it helps that Kamil speaks fluent Hebrew,” says the chef who, over the years, has supplemented the Ashkenazi dishes of her childhood with Sephardi and Middle Eastern favourites, including malabi.
Malabi is on the menu
“My grandfather managed a restaurant, my aunt ran a cafe where my grandmother worked in the kitchen and everyone on my mother’s side was a very good cook. So opening a restaurant was a dream for me
Mindful that the few Polish Jews who survived the war sometimes hid their ethnicity thereafter, she suspects she too may have some Jewish parentage. “I am Christian, but everyone laughs that I act like a real Jewish mother, that I have a big Yiddish heart.” If true, it might explain, why her grandma Zosia made “great gefilte fish” for the family, adding, “none of her daughters knew how to replicate the horseradish sauce she made to go with these soft, slightly sweet grey balls.”
She certainly regrets never having found out where her grandmother’s recipes came from. “I didn’t have time to talk to her about it, but I remember her singing Jewish songs, and before she died she told me there was a menorah in the house.” Her grandmother’s son, and Kozlowska-Dechnik’s uncle, always denied the family had Jewish roots, “but he taught me how to bake matzah.”
When she first went to Israel, Kozlowska-Dechnik says was overcome by a sense of belonging. “The moment I landed at Ben Gurion; I felt like I had flown home. Everything was so natural, yet amazing to me at the same time - my first Shabbat in Jaffa, new acquaintances, cooking in the home of a Holocaust survivor.”
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Some of the most popular dishes at Mandragora include chopped liver -- which she makes with walnuts as well as onions, although the latter is chopped more coarsely than is customary in the UK -- stuffed goose neck, and duck with tzimmes and pearl barley. “Most of the dishes are prepared to recipes that are more than 100 years old and are a kind of journey through the Jewish calendar.” Also on the menu is cholent for Shabbat, latkes at Chanukah and holishki – translating as little pigeons — a traditional stuffed cabbage that’s eaten around Sukkot time. On the drinks menu, there are Israeli wines and “Kosher Macher” beer, brewed especially for the restaurant,
Kozlowska-Dechnik also tries to keep Polish-Jewish cuisine alive for the next generation through annual Jewish cooking workshops for children which she runs with the Polish actor Etel Szyc, one of very few Jews born in Lublin after the war. And she’s also the director of the annual three-day Lubliner Festival, Lubliner being what the city’s Jews called themselves for centuries. For the rest of the year, locals and visitors to the city can celebrate things Jewish by eating Yiddish food at Mandragora.
More information about the 2024 Lubliner Festival, August 23-25 at lublinerfestival
