Hríbová Polievka

The story

Slovak families who keep to the older, simpler tradition of the Christmas Eve menu often choose hríbová polievka, mushroom soup, for their meatless Christmas Eve dinner. It shares its basic logic with the neighboring Czech houbová polévka and the Polish zupa grzybowa — all three rely on dried forest mushrooms that are gathered in the fall and kept for the fasting days of winter. The soup is cooked slowly, often with a little sour cream added toward the end for a creamier texture, and the smell of dried porcini or chanterelles spreading through the kitchen as they soak is, for many Slovaks, one of the most recognizable scents of the approaching Christmas. Some families also add small homemade noodles or dumplings to make the soup more filling. The choice of mushrooms varies by region, depending on what is available in the mountain or lowland parts of the country. For Slovak families in the diaspora, where true forest mushrooms are harder to find, this soup often travels in bags of dried mushrooms sent by relatives, because the flavor of a wild mushroom is hard to replace with the cultivated kind.