Kolekcja: Poland

Polish food travels better than most, because so much of the good stuff was built to keep: cured sausage, tinned meat, and fruit put up in jars at the end of summer.

Sokołów kabanos are the thing to try first — long, thin, hard-smoked pork sticks, dried until they snap rather than bend. They keep in a bag in the car, on a desk, in a rucksack, which is exactly why every Polish household has some. Lowell covers the tinned side properly: gołąbki, the cabbage rolls stuffed with rice and meat that take a whole afternoon to make from scratch, and mielonka, the pork luncheon meat that belongs on rye with mustard and a pickled cucumber.

For the sweet shelf, Lowell rhubarb and strawberry jam, apricot and elderberry, and a multifruit marmalade in a jar big enough to mean it. Milka bars sit here too, in plain milk and the oversized Mmmax.

European Food Store has imported Polish groceries to Santa Rosa since 2011. The tinned and cured goods ship anywhere in the United States; chocolate travels only to California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada and Arizona, because it does not survive a hot truck.