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So what was it about Czerniecki? Well, he was indeed an experienced chef, responsible for setting up aristocratic banquets for thousands of guests and also the author of the first cookbook printed in the Polish language. Only that this book – or, rather, a booklet, as it was small enough to fit into a pocket on one's chest, which was where the Tribune held it – had the bilingual, Latin-Polish title: ''Compendium Ferculorum albo Zebranie potraw'' (both parts meaning ''A Collection of Dishes''). And it was – as we shall see in the next post – precisely from this book that the Tribune got the recipes for all the dishes he would serve at the great banquet in Book XII.
Besides, it wasn't only the recipes that Mickiewicz took from the ''Compendium''. The mention of the dinner given by the "Count of Tęczyn" to Pope Urban VIII in Rome was also inspired by the same cookbook, and specifically, by the dedication its author addressed to his employer, Princess Helena Tekla Lubomirska. Princess Lubomirska, the wife of Prince Aleksander Michał Lubomirski, took active part in Polish political wifelife; she was also a great patroness of arts. Wacław Potocki and Jan Andrzej Morsztyn, whom I have quoted in some of my previous posts, dedicated their poems to her, while Czerniecki did the same with his cookbook. In the dedication, he recalled the time when, in 1633, her father, Prince Jerzy Ossoliński, Grand Chancellor of the Crown (roughly equivalent to a prime minister), was sent by the king of Poland as an envoy to the Holy See. At the time, the Polish Commonwealth was at the peak of its might and glory, a fact Ossoliński was not going to let anyone fail to notice. His retinue included the famed winged hussars, crimson-and-gold-upholstered carriages, ten camels carrying opulent presents for the pope, while the prince's mount was dressed in diamonds, pearls and rubies, and deliberately shod with loose golden horseshoes – so that the horse could lose them along the way for everyone to see. The banquet which Ossoliński gave to the pope was without a doubt no less osstentatious. This is how Czerniecki described it:
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