I have never been more grateful for a sat nav than I was driving into Kashubia last summer, though I will admit it tried to murder me twice. The first time was a charming detour down what I can only describe as a tractor path masquerading as a road, and the second was when it announced we had arrived at our Suleczyno cottage while we were clearly staring at a cow. The cow looked as surprised as we were. After ten minutes of reversing and some creative pointing from a man carrying a bucket, we found the actual property tucked behind a stand of birch trees, and I immediately forgave everything because the kitchen windows looked out over a lake that was doing that glittering thing you normally only see on postcards.

The cottage itself had one of those solid wooden kitchens that makes you want to cook something complicated immediately, which was fortunate because I had packed approximately six kilograms of Polish sausage in a cool bag and was running out of ice. My partner had insisted we stop at a roadside stall somewhere near Kartuzy, where an elderly woman sold us kielbasa that she claimed her husband smoked himself. I have no reason to doubt her, and every reason to believe her, because that sausage tasted like it had been perfected over forty years of quiet marital competition.

We unpacked with the frantic energy of people who had been living on motorway sandwiches for eight hours. The cottage had a proper stove, not one of those holiday home hotplates that takes twenty minutes to warm a pan, and I found myself standing in front of it like a contestant on one of those cooking shows, suddenly aware I had no actual plan. The sausage, obviously. Some eggs from a carton I had spotted in a village shop whose doorbell was a cowbell. There was a loaf of chleb still warm from somewhere, wrapped in paper that was now slightly greasy from my overenthusiastic handling.

I made the mistake of attempting placki ziemniaczane on our second morning, having watched my grandmother make them decades ago and apparently retained none of the technique. What emerged from the pan was less potato pancake and more potato sacrifice, a burnt offering to the gods of patience. My partner ate two out of solidarity and then quietly made toast. I am not a proud man, but I am a stubborn one, so I tried again the next day with more onion and less confidence, and they were almost passable. The local shopkeeper, when I confessed this to her in broken Polish supplemented by enthusiastic hand gestures, laughed so hard she had to lean on her cheese counter. She sold me a jar of smalec and told me, I think, that even her dog had standards.

The Tuesday market in Suleczyno itself became our weekly pilgrimage. I use the word market loosely; it was three stalls, a van selling honey, and a man with a bucket of carp that he would gut while you waited if you were feeling decisive. We rarely were. Instead we bought ogorki kiszone from a woman who made them in her basement, and mushrooms that I suspect were foraged rather than farmed, though nobody asked and nobody told. There was a bakery van that arrived at half past eight and sold out by nine, producing loaves with crusts so dark and chewy they practically demanded butter and resistance training.

By our second week I had settled into a rhythm of sorts. Mornings began with that bakery bread, still warm if I timed it right, spread with the smalec I had finally learned to appreciate properly. Lunches were whatever we had assembled from the market: cheese, tomatoes that actually tasted of something, more of that endless sausage sliced thick and eaten with mustard sharp enough to clear your sinuses. I attempted bigos on a rainy Thursday, using a recipe I found written on a piece of paper in the cottage drawer, apparently left by a previous guest whose handwriting suggested either great passion or mild intoxication. It simmered for four hours and filled the house with a smell so aggressively comforting that my partner declared it the best thing I had ever cooked, which I choose to take as a compliment rather than a commentary on everything that came before.

The kitchen at that cottage taught me something I had not expected, which is that cooking in an unfamiliar place strips away all your shortcuts and crutches. I did not have my usual knives or my reliable pans or my emergency jar of whatever spice I always reach for. I had what was there, what I could find, what locals pointed me toward with varying degrees of patience. The result was food that was simpler than what I make at home, and somehow better for it. I stopped trying to impress myself and started trying not to waste good ingredients, which turns out to be a completely different and more honest way of cooking.

On our final evening we grilled the last of the sausage over a fire pit behind the cottage, watching the lake go silver and then grey and then black. I had attempted a final batch of placki as a sort of closing ceremony, and they were, finally, actually decent. My partner said so without any visible hesitation, which I counted as genuine progress. We ate with our fingers because we had run out of clean forks and neither of us could be bothered to wash up, and it was absolutely perfect in a way that no restaurant meal could have matched.

I still think about that kitchen sometimes, about the morning light coming through those birch trees and the smell of bread and the particular rhythm of cooking somewhere that is not home but becomes it temporarily. The sat nav never did work properly on the way out either, but by then I did not mind getting lost.