Poppy Seed Noodles (Rezance s Makom)
Ingredients: noodles (fettuccine width), ground poppy seeds, sugar, butter
Prep Time: 30 minutes
I grew up eating poppy seed noodles (rezance s makom). These are quite similar to šúlance s makom (poppy seed dough rolls, from šúlať, to roll). Those are frequently eaten on Christmas. See, in Slovak heritage, poppies are a sign of wealth. It’s customary to wish someone to have peňazí ako maku, money like poppies. This is why we eat so many dishes topped with poppy seeds.
Start by cooking noodles (rezance). Home-made noodles work the best, but if you don’t feel like all the trouble, just grab some wide, fettuccine-like pasta. Bring slightly salted water to boil. Cook until done. Noodles (just like any pasta) will float to the top when cooked. But of course, you can just taste one or two. Strain them and rinse off with cold water.
Place noodles in a pot in which you melted some butter (maslo). Stir in a mixture of ground poppy seeds (mak) and sugar (cukor). That’s it. Very easy and very tasty. Enjoy!
I grew up with this too! Just found an obscure but beautiful poppy seed grinder (Beacon) and just made this tonight! My kids love it! I named my daughter after her Great Grandmother Bozenka…yay! Wish my parents taught us Slovak…cheers, and love the site! Lorr
I wish my parents taught me English 🙂
I am going to make this poppy seed noodles. Have had it in my mind for ages. Can’t wait when ready.
good luck
It’s a Christmas dish in some families in Poland:) They would usually ad raisins and nuts and honey instead of sugar. We make poppy seed cake or poppy seed doughnuts instead.
Ohhhh… rezance s makom, or makove halusky – it just makes me drool again… mak is addictive 😉
My grandmother made these except she made homemade thick egg noodles, so it wasn’t a thick covering…just nice bites of the poppy seed. Delicious!
mnam! My host family made this last year, and we sprinkled powdered sugar on top.
I’m enjoying this blog– the recipes, Slovak lessons, everything! Dakujem!
My husband uses oil instead of butter but you can’t tell the diff. I am trying to learn to cook like his mama and him do but it is not easy. Thank you for having things like this for me to research with.
Mom from Bratislava was visiting me here in California, and brought two bags of grounded poppy seeds… yeaay. I am going to make rezance s makom tomorrow. Can’t wait. First I wanted to bake “makovnik”, but it takes too much. Nudle s makem budou rychle a skvele. Dekuji za recept!
we sometimes have pasta with toasted breadcrumbs melted with butter and sugar to make sweet breadcrumbs. also we use this breadcrumb mixture on dumplings made from potatoe and filled with jam.
Hi Tricia, thank you for all your comments!
I was a exchange student in slovakia in the mid 90’s. I the first time I had this in school I fell in love with it. I crave for some good slovak food and this site will help alot more on what things are that I can’t remeber what they are called.
I do love it I do make it .I live in UK but my father was from Slovakia I do it with walnut &Cottage Cheese
My mother used to make the SULANCE. There is hardly a substitute for that – as the contrast between the potato dough, thick and substantial, and the sweet, buttery taste of the ground poppy seed, is incomparable… When my mother died, I took few things back from Slovakia (process, after 6 years STILL NOT FINISHED!), but one of them was a poppy seed mill…
My son (who was born in California) – his first 2 languages I taught him was Slovak and German (for his father). It took him 2 weeks to learn English @ 2.5 y. of age – in front of Sesame Street while I translated all 3 languages. Don’t EVER let anybody tell you that it can’t be done! Slovak was voted the MOST DIFFICULT LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD by independent linguists in Paris – so, to go from there – just a little effort from your side. And dishes like Makove Sulance are a wonderful persuasive tool!
Thank you so much for this simple recipe which brought back fond memories of family gatherings during my childhood. With one set of grandparents from the Trnava area and the other from the Roznava area, we were pretty much exposed to most of the wonderful Slovak foods, customs, and the language, which, after they emigrated to Canada, we rebelled against. How I regret that now! Of my two other sisters, I am the only one who can communicate minimally (one grandmother NEVER did learn to speak English even though she moved to Canada in 1949!) I love you for setting up this website and am trying to compile a set of recipes that both grandmothers used for my own children. Believe it or not, my Baba from Trnava was a caterer for Slovak, Ukrainian, and other Eastern European Weddings and events and when she passed away, she left me her cookbooks. The only problems I have are translating them, and cutting the amounts down from recipes for 500….LOL…I loved her so much!
Djakujeme pekne Lubos! I’ll be making this tonight!
Annie, that’s great having Baba’s recipee book with 500 recipes in it.
Why don’t you post some of them in Slovak language, I m sure that some of us will be able to translate it into English. Anyway, contact lubos about it, I’ll be willing to help in translating recipes, and send it back to you without posting it (so you can decide what you will do with it) or I can post a translation.
I think you may have there a gold mine of old country cooking.
Cheer
As I sit here laughing, I realize that you misunderstood part of my message! I don’t have 500 recipes…Baba was a caterer for Slovak, Polish and many other Eastern European weddings and parties. she rarely cooked for one of these events that had LESS than 500 hundred people at them, including my own wedding in 1977. We had 525 guests at our reception. My poor husband had the guest list of 25, the other 500 were the Slovak contingency from our side of the family. I had nine bridesmaids and two flower girls, and he complained that he didn’t have 9 friends to act as ushers! So I lent him some of my Slovak relatives…LOL…
What I meant was that all of her recipes are FOR 500. I have to calculate them down to serve fewer than 500 as far as the ingredient amounts go.
When I have a chance, I will get out her treasured recipe books and hope that I can decipher what she wrote. Her books are worth a blog of their own, simply because she is the grandmother who, after 40 years in Canada, spoke half English and half Slovak, and that was also the way she wrote, so going through her cookbooks has provided hours of entertainment for us as she used both languages, and her English was always completely phonetic. (I once had to convince her that we couldn’t purchace train tickets to Piestany by asking for “tickets na train” said with a Slovak accent. I finally succeeded by requesting “listky na vlak”. Once she realized what she had said, she fell over laughing. And I was only 16, and knew very little of the language.
And of course, like all Slovak Baba’s, she assumed the ingredient amounts were common knowledge and the temperatures were known to everyone, so there was no need to write them down. When I asked her for more details on amounts, oven temperatures and how long to cook things, she always looked at me like I had two heads. Bless her heart, she took me to Slovakia in 1972, and I went again in 2009 with my husband and my Dad so that he could see Roznava, where he grew up. Sad to say, it was it last trip there since he emigrated in 1949 – he passed away last September, but the joy in his eyes was something I will never forget. I never learned to make his favorite dessert – kremes, but I was the haluski queen to him, even though I am technically second generation.
That trip, in itself, is an entirely different story.
I’ll get those books out and would love to have you help me translate, and I guarantee you a good laugh along the way.
Annie 🙂
I love it! I always eat it at xmas time
WoW! Just found this blog looking for exactly this recipe. We came to UK in ’58. Mum used to make this but neither Mum or Dad now with us, so I missed it like crazy. Cant wait to give it a go!
Hello,nice share.
Hello,nice share.