The Amer­i­can-born, Berlin-based writer Lau­rel Kra­tochvi­la has craft­ed a visu­al feast of a sec­ond cook­book in Dobre Dobre, which fea­tures over 120 recipes for baked goods from Poland and beyond. The title trans­lates into ​“good good,” a sen­ti­ment that is usu­al­ly accom­pa­nied by the com­ment ​“not too sweet” — the ulti­mate endorse­ment for a dessert in Poland.

The cook­book is divid­ed into six sec­tions, from breads and cakes to meringues and top­pings, every­thing from the savory onion-filled bialys and pota­to-rye bread chleb prąd­nic­ki (some­times weigh­ing more than thir­ty pounds!) to the stand­out saf­fron and orange bundt fea­tured on the cov­er of the book. It comes as close as any one cook­book could to cat­a­logu­ing the entire­ty of Pol­ish bak­ing, while extend­ing its reach to fea­ture recipes from Pol­ish descen­dants and the dias­po­ra from Thai­land to the UK.

Many recipes will be famil­iar to Amer­i­can read­ers, such as New York bagels or pota­to knish, but there are also those that feel more unique­ly Pol­ish — less-sweet desserts, cer­tain­ly, as well as those that fea­ture rose petals, bil­ber­ries, and sour cher­ries. Dobre Dobre has accom­plished the feat of mak­ing the recipes look absolute­ly mouth­wa­ter­ing while still feel­ing approach­able for the aver­age home bak­er; a large part of that is like­ly attrib­ut­able to the gor­geous sun­lit pho­tog­ra­phy by Mał­gosia Minta, as well as the invit­ing page design — black, red and white, like some­thing from a Sovi­et movie poster. 

Kra­tochvi­la, who was a 2023 final­ist for the James Beard Award, owns the Fine Bagels bak­ery in Berlin, but her jour­ney to Europe was not a straight line. At twen­ty-three, she moved to Prague before lat­er train­ing in France, and has now lived in Cen­tral Europe for close to twen­ty years. Her mater­nal ances­tors were Jews from Pol­ish Rus­sia, and the book does not shy away from the com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship that Poland has had with its Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion. Today, there are few Jew­ish bak­ers in the coun­try, but Kra­tochvi­la notes that before World War II, up to half of the bak­eries in Poland had been Jew­ish-owned, despite the fact that the res­i­dents made up only about 10% of the over­all pop­u­la­tion — a result of the ​“ghet­toi­sa­tion of Jews into lim­it­ed professions.”

Today, Jew­ish baked goods in Poland can seem sad­ly divorced from their ori­gins, but at the same time, they are omnipresent, some­times just known by anoth­er name — dur­ing her first vis­it to Poland, Kra­tochvi­la describes see­ing gold­en loaves in a bak­ery and cry­ing out ​“chal­lah!”; the shop­keep­er cor­rects her that they are chał­ka, but the author bites into the bread and it is large­ly the same as the chal­lah she had eat­en at home in Boston. The con­nec­tion between Jew­ish and Pol­ish bak­ing can be felt through­out the coun­try, with the author not­ing, ​“rugelach, onion breads, apple cakes — every­one makes them, so what belongs to whom?”