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Old Polish Cookery for Beginners

12 bytes added, 17:20, 7 January 2020
[[File:Nowy Wiśnicz z powietrza.jpg|thumb|left|The castle of Nowy Wiśnicz, which was once the family seat of the Princes Lubomirski; this is where Stanisław Czerniecki worked as a steward and chef, and where he wrote down his recipes in the first cookbook to be printed in Polish.]]
Another thing we take for granted is that it's usually the same person who buys a cookbook, reads it and cooks from it. In the 17th century, though, it was quite normal for these three roles to be separated. The book would have been purchased by someone who could afford it, that is, a rich nobleman or a magnate (the Polish equivalent of an aristocrat). Or, rather, it would have been his wife, the lady of the house. She would have bought the book not for herself, however, but for the head chef (or "master cook") she'd had employed. It was the head chef's job to manage the entire kitchen staff, order the necessary ingredients from external suppliers and make decisions about what would be served on the lord's table (having agreed the menu and the costs with the lady). So the recipes in the cookbook would have been read by the head chef – an experienced professional who didn't need all the proportions, temperatures and cooking times, because he already kept this knowledge in his head. But here comes another twist: he would have read the recipes aloud – not to himself, but to the kitchen staff, who would actually carry the instructions out. We can tell this by the grammatical forms used in the book; it's always the singular second-person imperative, indicating a direct order that you could issue to your subordinate, but never to a magnate's or to his wife (the owner of who actually owned the book). Czerniecki, for example, would have never addressed his own employer, Princess Helena Tekla Lubomirska, by the familiar "''ty''" ("thou"), but consistently called her "Your Princely Grace, my Most Charitable Lady and Benefactress".
Let's go back to the recipe. What do we have here? Stewed meat with sweet, sour and spicy seasoning; taste combinations that most Poles today would consider typical for Indian or Thai cuisines, but never for Old Polish cookery. And yet, this is exactly the kind of cooking that the Polish lords of yore would have priced the most and this is what we will find throughout Czerniecki's cookbook. So does it even make sense to recreate these old recipes, if the final effect may well turn out inedible to our modern palates?