Cookbook Watch

California is scarcely aware of Polish food. If it weren’t for the venerable Warszawa Restaurant in Santa Monica, you’d be lucky to find anybody around here who could name a single Polish dish except for stuffed cabbage. But Warszawa has shown that Poland has a rich and sophisticated food heritage.

And just about the only place to read about it is in Robert and Maria Strybel’s huge, ambitious book “Polish Heritage Cookery” (Hippocrene Books, $39.95). If Poland ceased to exist, you could probably re-create its entire cuisine from this book, because it has recipes for everything. There are 30 pages of sausage recipes, 25 pages on making cheeses and other dairy products and 23 pages of recipes for game, including moose, bison and wild boar.

The careful, concise recipes are a pleasure to read. And boy, are they interesting. Meatballs with a liver filling, meant to be served in soup. Cucumbers stuffed with chicken salad. Mushroom pancakes topped with sour cream. Apples pickled a la sauerkraut, which are then used in salads or with roast pork (the Strybels also give a quick recipe “if you failed to put up a supply of sour-cured apples last autumn”). And lots and lots of sweets and pastries, such as apple slices baked in a cheese dough.

This book is one of the more impressive published by Hippocrene Books, which specializes in lesser-known cuisines. Its line includes books on Austrian, Welsh, South African, Finnish, Czech, Romanian, Ukrainian and even Maltese cookery.