Siemieniotka

Siemieniotka, also called konopiotka or siemieniatka, is a traditional hemp-seed soup from Silesia, Poland, served at the Christmas Eve supper, Wigilia. It carries on the centuries-old culinary use of hemp as food rather than as an intoxicant, from a time when hemp was an ordinary crop.

Śląskie Smaki, the region’s culinary tourism project, records descriptions of the soup in Silesian accounts from 1887 and 1888. The dish is still served at Christmas Eve suppers, with recipes passed from one generation to the next.

Sula Benet’s 1975 survey adds a different kind of evidence. She records hemp-seed Christmas Eve soup, spelling it semieniatka, in Poland and Lithuania and formerly Russia, and interprets the meal in relation to beliefs about deceased relatives visiting their families. This is her comparative folklore account, rather than proof that every contemporary Silesian household gives the soup the same meaning.

The dish

The name comes from siemię, seed. The seeds are boiled, rubbed free of their shells, and ground to a paste. The paste is thinned with milk and sweetened with honey.

Hemp seed is a food in its own right. Hulled, it is about half fat and a third protein, and it can be eaten raw, ground into meal or pressed for oil.

The occasion

Wigilia is the Polish Christmas Eve supper. It excludes meat, and by custom it has twelve dishes, for the twelve Apostles. It opens with a soup, which in most of Poland is beetroot borscht or a clear mushroom broth. In Silesia the soup may be siemieniotka.

Element of Wigilia	What it is
The soup	Borscht with small dumplings, mushroom broth, or in Silesia siemieniotka
Fish	Herring, and carp in several forms: the main dish everywhere
Sides	Cabbage, sauerkraut
Twelve dishes	One for each Apostle

A crop that stopped being ordinary

Hemp was for centuries a common field crop across Europe, grown for rope, cloth, oil and seed. The first drug laws did not touch it. Poland’s Act of 1923 named hashish beside opium, morphine and cocaine, and did not mention the plant.

That changed by stages.

Year	Polish law
1923	Hashish is controlled; the plant is not named
1951	Cannabis herb is listed as a narcotic
1985	A drug act that does not punish possession
1997, 2000	Possession becomes a crime
2022	State research institutes may grow cannabis for medicine

These laws were written about the herb and the resin. The soup is made from the seed.

Relatives

Dishes of the same family exist elsewhere on the old hemp-growing map of Europe and Asia.

Dish	Where	What it is
Siemieniotka	Silesia, Poland	Hemp-seed soup with milk and honey
Bhang ko achar	Nepal	A pickle of ground hemp seed with potato
Bhang chutney	Kumaon, India	Seeds ground with mint, tomato and spices
Shichimi	Japan	A seven-spice mixture that includes hemp seed

They have in common that they use the seed, and that they belong to regions where hemp was a household crop.

Latvian hemp-seed butter offers another Baltic food tradition in which cannabis seeds are prepared for nourishment.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]}