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}}</ref> I will write about the title of this book [[Epic Cooking: The Perfect Cook#“A Dear Souvenir of Righteous Customs”|in a different post]]. For now, it suffices to say that the poet never had the occasion to fulfill his dream of hosting a real-life Old Polish-Lithuanian feast and had to satisfy his culinary fantasies by conjuring up a perfect traditional banquet on the pages of ''Pan Tadeusz'' instead.
He placed his description of an old-fashioned "Polish dinner" in the books (chapters) XI and XII of the poem. In the earlier books, on the other hand, we can find depictions of the kind of meals the author could remember from his own youth in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (a constituent nation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which covered not only the territory of the modern-day Republic of Lithuania, but also the much larger Belarus). To him, this was just the ordinary, daily fare of the "land of [his] childhood". To us, though, it is what the cookery described in his treasured little book was to Mickiewicz – the forgotten world of Old Polish cuisine. And just like Mickiewicz would fantasize about recreating an Old Polish banquet, so would I like to share with you my own vision of a ''Pan Tadeusz''-style supper. Someone someday may actually try to prepare a meal based on the menu I propose here; but for now let's stick mostly to our imagination.
