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Old 20th May 2008, 23:17
Zbyszek Zbyszek is offline
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A glimpse of the past

Hello Silkrem, your photo made me recall my distant past when, as a child, I used to spend my holidays in the village where my Dad was born. Salo (Sadlo or slonina in Polish) was a standard cover of the bread slice on the table of rye field cutters' families. The peasants sat tired at the table after a full day of hard manual work - men used scythes to clear the field while the women formed the sheafs of rye and I sometimes helped in sheaving them with special rye binders and it was all a very hard job; sickles were also in use from time to time for the smallest plots and in the case when the stalks were bent or broken after violent storms.
My uncle cut thick hunks of home-made bread baked on horse-radish leaves (oh, what an unforgettable taste it was!) and he did not spare salo on them.
As for lunch, they usually put a big bowl full of cooked potatoes with the 'skwarki' (cut and fried salo) in the middle of the table and we drank sour milk reaching for a potato from the common bowl from time to time.
A good cutter needed the whole day of a killing work to clear 2.5 acres of a rye field. The only drink they used in the field was water and black unsweeted "coffee" made of wheat.

Last edited by Zbyszek; 20th May 2008 at 23:33.
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