The waiting game in Port Richmond

In the fallow stretch between the end of football season and the advent of Easter, a certain suspension of animation can be detected on the gray streets of Port Richmond, its Polish eateries and bakeshops, corner taprooms and smokehouses idling in the river-ward winter, getting by, waiting.

On a recent Saturday puffed potato pancakes and slick pierogis emerged from the kitchen at Syrenka, the steam-table place on Richmond Street. Across the street, families squeezed into booths at Krakus Market, facing aisles stocked with bottled pickles and marinated mushrooms, imported Polish flour, and ham roasted - to succulent, sweet tenderness - by a butcher in the back.

It wasn't quite 3 p.m., closing time, at Szypula's (est. 1922), the babka cake bakery a few blocks south. But the cases had already been emptied out, the day's ration of customers presumed to have come and gone.

Why not pace yourself? Things would be crazy soon enough. At Szypula's, in the week or two before Easter alone, sales of the yeasty-sweet babkas (cherry and cheese, and chef's-hat babkas made in coffee cans for the Ukrainian trade, and egg-shaped babkas) leap from a few dozen up into the thousands.

It is as if a genetic switch got flipped. Back come second- and third-generation Poles, some displaced more than 40 years ago when I-95 bulldozed 200 of Port Richmond's rowhouses; back come the sons and daughters of workers who once - until downsizing came - got a regular paycheck at Rohm & Haas, the chemical works nearby.

They'll load up on babka, yes, but on the hefty rings of rye bread, too, that will be blessed on Good Friday, and poppyseed and lekvar (prune paste) rolls, and, of course, the crispy ribbons of fried dough called chrusciki they sell at Szypula's, and at the Polish bakeries that dot Allegheny Avenue at the foot of St. Adalbert's Church, its spires rising like spikes in the Port Richmond sky.

They will make pilgrimages to Swiacki's on Salmon Street, and Czerw's, the estimable kielbasa smokehouse still tucked on alley-like Tilton Street, a Polish white eagle painted on its red brick facade, a tall tube of a smokestack anchored with guy-wires to the rooftop.

But in these weeks of waiting, life goes on. The pumpernickel gets sliced, and the sauerkraut-sausage stew called bigos gets scooped, the beer gets poured, and at Krakus Market's restaurant alcove (Staropolska, or Old Poland), there is the sustaining winter menu - as you'll find in old Poland itself - of chicken-potato pancakes, stuffed cannolis of cabbage, and homemade Polish soups, an astonishing rotating list of them, 15 kinds in all.

The old-country larder is workaday, heavy on cabbage and potato, carrot and mushroom. But the soups, made "by average Polish women," says manager Sylvia Gardyasz, can be surprisingly layered and vivid: There's bright, chunky cauliflower soup, redolent with dill, and chicken noodle with meatballs, and tomato soup and a hot cucumber soup, and potato soup, and a brothy mushroom soup. There is pea soup, vegetable soup, barley soup, bean soup, sorrel soup, shredded cabbage soup (more lemony than sweet), and, my favorite, a tangy goulash soup, warm with paprika, studded with beef, carrot, mushroom, and potato.

There are Krakus' handful of sour soups, as well, commonly known as borscht, from the Russian. They include the familiar standby made with red beets, and a Ukrainian style with sauerkraut, potato, and beans. And last week you could find a milky-colored Polish variant called "white borscht" as a daily special.

Its gentle acidity is from a fermented rye meal and vinegar, and it is laced with kielbasa and slippery wedges of hard-cooked egg.

In Poland, it is often reserved for Easter time. But in wintry Port Richmond, in a lull that sharpens the pangs of longing, sometimes a body can get tired of the waiting.