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Epic Cooking: The Last Old Polish Feast

No change in size, 21:12, 9 April 2023
Saffron ice cream by Bogdan Gałązka, Gothic Restaurant, Malbork.</poem>]]
After some time, this foam would trickle down from the bush, producing the illusion of thaw. Winter was gone, spring and summer were here. The foam would also uncover a dark forest made of fruit preserves, fields of buckwheat made from chocolate, apple and pear trees made from, I don't know, some apple-and-pear mousse? And saffron wheat fields, which I suppose doesn't mean naked saffron threads imitating ears of wheat, but rather some kind of paste dyed yellow with saffron. And if soon afterwards "the grain, painted gold, slowly melt[ed] while absorbing the warmth of the hall",<ref>A. Mickiewicz, ''op. cit.'', Book XII, verses 174–175</ref> then it surely must have been saffron ice cream. That would have been a truly Baroque twist: snow imitated by lukewarm cream "foam" followed by summer crops made from ice cream! Sadly, Czerniecki provides no ice cream recipë in his book. But I do know that you can get delicious saffron ice cream (with ground orchid tubers, which give it a peculiar fudgy texture) at Gothic Restaurant in the Malbork Castle.<ref>''Update:'' Sadly, the restuarant restaurant didn't survive the covid-19 pandemic and closed down in 2020.</ref> I'd say this treat alone would be a good enough reason to visit Malbork, even if the largest brick Gothic castle in the world wasn't in itself a worthy tourist destination.
At the end all that was left were cinnamon canes and laurel branches that were somehow covered in cumin seeds. I'm not sure whether these branches would have made a good snack. I'd rather imagine, in this role, some kind of cumin or caraway-flavoured bread sticks.