The List of Traditional Products is a national register kept by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. It includes foods and dishes with a documented history, and each entry has a name, a category and a voivodeship. For the Silesian Voivodeship it is a sizeable collection, from ciulim of Lelów to Racibórz beer. This text sets out what an entry means and what the list looks like, without describing every item separately.

What an entry on the list means

The rules for entry on the national list, quoted by the Polish Press Agency (PAP) from the office's materials, require that a product have "a method of production established over time, of at least 25 years", and that its quality or characteristics result from the use of traditional production methods. The application is submitted to the marshal of the given voivodeship, who is responsible for verifying it. The applicant must have a documented history and method of production of the product.

The register is kept in the ministry's Quality Systems and Programmes Department, and its legal basis is the Act of 9 March 2023 on the registration and protection of names of origin, geographical indications and traditional specialities guaranteed of agricultural products and foodstuffs, wines or spirit drinks, and on traditional products. According to the ministry's website, the register is kept in paper form and then published online. An entry is not a quality mark like the protected EU names. It means that the product has a documented tradition and has been noted in the register.

How many items the list has for Silesia

This number grows with each new entry, so any figure given is valid only for a specific day. In September 2017 the Marshal's Office of the Silesian Voivodeship published the guide "Śląskie od kuchni" (Silesian Cuisine), which describes 143 traditional products from our voivodeship. According to PAP, cited by the dzieje.pl portal, at the time the guide was published exactly 143 products from the Silesian Voivodeship were entered on the national list. The list may have grown since then, so the figure of 143 should be read as the situation in September 2017.

Categories and examples

The product cards assign entries to categories, and the guide "Śląskie od kuchni" arranges them in four parts, as PAP reports: dishes "from streams, mountains and lakes", "from fields, orchards and forests", "from the cottage and the familok" and "from the oven and the baking tin". Each part is a separate, smaller booklet, making it easier to use in the kitchen. A few examples show the range of the list.

According to PAP, the dishes in the guide also include roulades, noodle broth, that is broth with pasta, and Cieszyn-style tripe. The novelties of 2017 included compote and plum butter from the żniwka plum, Żywiec Land honeys and Racibórz beer.

Ciulim came first

The first product of the Silesian Voivodeship registered in 2006 was, according to PAP, ciulim of Lelów, a bake of grated potatoes. The card on the ministry's website gives the date of entry as 28 February 2006. Several dishes from the list have separate texts on the portal, and here it is enough to note that this is only the tip of the iceberg.

How to read the list

An entry concerns a specific product described in the card, not every dish with a similar name. The cards contain a description of appearance, taste and tradition, often with quotations from memoirs or regional literature. Read together, they show that the list includes both everyday and festive dishes, named after places such as Lelów, Bestwina or Racibórz, and after larger towns such as Cieszyn or Częstochowa. The list is also a pretext for an outing, because some of the products have a point on the map, for example Siewierz, where the Bishops' Castle stands. The Marshal of the Silesian Voivodeship described regional cuisine in 2017 as essentially a tourist product, because after sightseeing and trails people want to sit down and eat, and often ask about regional dishes.