X. Toruń Orientation: The Gingerbread Museum

The first thing you need to know for this story to make sense is that I love ginger. I love anything and everything ginger. Ginger tea? I buy the boxes in bulk. Ginger cats? The cutest creatures on the planet. Ginger candies? My purse is like a ginger mass grave, empty wrappers unceremoniously piled at the bottom.* Ginger people? Look at my past relationships (that’s right, Nicholas John Humphrey II. You thought I liked you for your hipster rants about American Conservatism or your outrageously Anglican name? Think again.) Anyway, the point is I freaking love ginger. So imagine my ecstasy when I discovered Toruń is the capital of gingerbread. I had to run back to the hotel and cry softly into my pillow, truly overwhelmed with happiness. It was almost too much to bear.

Once I learned how to pronounce the word for gingerbread in Polish (pierniki) my language lessons were officially over. I bought bagfuls a day. Pierniki were the only things that kept me awake through morning lectures. The only things that kept me smiling through our ninth dinner of potatoes. The only things that kept me communicating with my peers (Peer: “Hey Elise! Can I try a bite of your pierniki?” Me: “Fuck off.”).  At night, when my daily pierniki bag was finally empty, I would dream about which kinds to buy next. The ones dipped in dark chocolate? Or maybe the traditional Catherine bread, named after some medieval girl the king proclaimed the official pierniki baker for the entire kingdom? I finally found where I belonged: Toruń. Everyday in Toruń was a pierniki day.

Then one day, the unimaginable happened. We were going to the International Pierniki Museum. An entire museum dedicated to gingerbread! I immediately wondered if I was qualified to apply as head curator. I began planning my permanent move to this parochial Polish town.

After Polish class (Po proszę pierniki. Wiele pierniki. Lubię pierniki?), the time had finally come. I ran downstairs and waited for the tour guide, my weight shifting constantly from foot to foot, desperate not to pee myself with anticipation. Yet as we walked up the stairs to the entrance, it became immediately evident that the “Pierniki Museum” was not a museum by any stretch of the imagination. The international Pierniki Museum was a single room with a man and woman dressed up in medieval peasant garb and an overpriced gift shop taking up half the space behind them. The other “museum-goers” constituted of a fourth-grade class trip. I knew it was a fourth grade class trip because half the girls wore leggings, and the other half jeans.  By fifth grade, sartorial self-autonomy breaks down and the dictatorship chooses either leggings or jeans as the official standard, contingent upon the decade. My decade was a hegemon of bell bottoms, but, according to my niece, the current ruling is “jeggings,” an intermediate of the legging-jean dichotomy. I also knew this was a fourth grade class because the girls lorded over the puny boys like geese in a pool of baby ducks. The rest of the audience comprised of Fulbright scholars: professors in their sixties and seventies, doctorate candidates and post-grads. Apparently, it was not obviously in which category I belonged…the fourth grade teacher actually started escorting me to their side of the room before realizing that, despite my stature, I was not wearing jeans, leggings or “jeggings.” I was not amused.

Jeans or leggings... Why did I sleep through that lecture on conceptual clustering?

Finally, it was time for us all to circle around and shut up. The woman (who introduced herself as the “gingerbread witch”) threatened that if we shared the secret to her perfect recipe, we would be burned alive. Except that she clearly could not give a shit. She said all her lines in perfect monotone while twisting her finger around the purple highlights in her hair (not a 13^thcentury fashion). And somehow, while within inches of sixty eager audience members, she managed to give the entire speech without acknowledging the presence of a single soul. This degree of apathy does not come naturally, and I'll admit I was impressed.

On the other hand, the “medieval peasant” presented his lines with the cheerful spunk of a cartoon elf. He gleefully welcomed each and every one of us, and spliced in jokes at every possible juncture. Between the depressed punk rocker and this sexually ambiguous elfin creature, I decided I didn’t want a career here after all.

And that became even more evident with the events that followed…

Courtesy of the Muzeum Piernika

 Now here’s where the story gets quite disturbing. It begins with the witch’s explanation of how to make the perfect pierniki. Get this: gingerbread does not entail any ginger. This has to be the biggest case of false advertising ever, perhaps only second to low calorie ice cream. Why would you call something “gingerbread” when it is neither ginger nor bread? I still love it and it’s still delicious, but, seriously, what the fuck? To make matters worse, the pierniki dough has to sit in a barrel for 12 weeks before it’s ready. That’s right, eighty-four disgusting days in a dank basement to gain its spicy flavor and brown bear hue. In fact, the fresh dough is a kind of a light biege. 

While these were not our medieval pierniki guides, it captures the general sentiment (courtesy of the

Żywe Muzeum Piernika)

However, none of this even mattered after what we learned next. After gingerbread bitch and the elf explained the secrets of the pierniki, we “made” our own. Squishing a handful of their pre-prepared dough into little brown turds, we rolled the turds in flour, flattened the turds with a rolling pin, and then picked out a mold to press onto them such that they would look less like turds. I chose a dancing bull in an ovoid frame. Then we transported our molded turds onto a giant baking pan to transform them into delicious pierniki. I have to admit, they still looked delicious even after finding out that they’d been sitting in a mildewed, possibly rat infested basement for 12 weeks before getting molded, and even after thinking of them as fecal matter. I counted the minutes until I could bite into my drunken bull, hot and soft and crispy all at once. This was probably the closest I’d been to desiring meat since vowing vegetarianism 14 years ago.

I couldn't find a picture of a bull, but it's the same general idea

After ten endless minutes, it was time to remove the pierniki from the oven and take them off the baking trays. Yet just as I lifted my moronic bull by its horns, the elf announced that these were not edible pierniki. No, rather these were the decorative kind. I clamped my mouth shut. The decorative kind?! Apparently, it’s a Polish tradition to make gingerbread that you don’t eat. This is incontestably the most upsetting nonsense in the history of Poland, which is saying a lot if you’ve read anything about Poland’s history. Seriously though, what kind of sadistic joke was this? Who the fuck makes gingerbread that you can’t eat? Apparently gay elfs and their emo sidekicks.

So that was our trip to the gingerbread museum in Toruń. It sucked.

 ----

(*Is it appropriate for me to type that in a blog about Poland? Probably not.)