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I took the recipës from ''Compendium Ferculorum'' (''A Collection of Dishes'') by Stanisław Czerniecki{{czyt|Stanisław Czerniecki}}, first published in 1682. I wrote then that it was the oldest cookbook ever printed in Polish. Well, that's no longer true. Polish and Ukrainian historians have recently confirmed that an even older Polish-language cookery book was published a century and a half before ''Compendium Ferculorum''. Not a single volume of that older book has survived to our times, but now we know for sure it was there. Some clues about its possible existence in the past had been know earlier, but as the surviving fragments could be suspected of being some 19th-century hoaxes, there was no certainty. Until now. So let's follow the fascinating history of this new oldest Polish printed cookbook and how it was rediscoveed. And then, let's pick and try out a recipe recipë from it – one for beginners, of course.

[[File:Kuchmistrzostwo - ocet.jpg|thumb|upright=.9|One of the surviving pages of ''Kuchmistrzostwo'' with various recipes recipës for vinegar, currently owned by the Warsaw Public Library (ID number: XVI.O.140)]]

In 1891, Zygmunt Wolski{{czyt|Zygmunt Wolski}} (1862–1931), an apprentice librarian at the Krasiński Library in Warsaw, visited Cezary Wilanowski's{{czyt|Cezary Wilanowski}} (1846–1893) second-hand bookshop, where he found a folder containing four loose sheets of paper that had been removed from an old book cover. The cover bore no title, but it did bear the year of publication: 1538. The four sheets which were reused to strengthen the cover came from three different printed books. Two of the sheets were covered with culinary recipes recipës -- all for different kinds of vinegar, as it happened. Wolski carefully examined the watermarks on the paper, the typeface and the language used in the recipesrecipës, and concluded that they must have been printed in the first half of the 16th century.<ref> {{Cyt

}}</ref> Wolski connected the dots and concluded that the two sheets with torn edges and printed with vinegar recipes recipës may have come from an otherwise lost coobook with such a previously unkown title.

}}</ref> This allowed Władysław Wisłocki{{czyt|Władysław Wisłocki}} (1841–1900), custodian of the Jagiellonian University Library, to compare the vinegar recipes recipës discovered by Wolski with recipes recipës found in the Czech book. And he realized that what Wolski found were indeed fragments of the oldest printed Polish cookbook, which happened to be a translation of the Czech ''Kuchařství''. And, according to Wisłocki, the title was rendered into Polish as ''Kucharstwo'', rather than ''Kuchmistrzostwo'' as Wolski had claimed.<ref>{{Cyt

All this is well and good, but what kind of discovery is it when all that we have from the oldest Polish cookbook are recipes recipës for vinegar? Yes, vinegar was formerly an extremely important preservative and a popular condiment, produced in may different ways, from wine or beer, and sometimes flavoured with various additives. You could, for example, make it like this:

[[File:Pieczeń wołowa po węgiersku.JPG|thumb|Another surviving sheet from ''Kuchmistrzostwo'', this one with recipes recipës for meat dishes, currently owned by the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow (ID number: Cim 0.913)]]For something more, one had to wait almost forty years, but I believe it was worth it. It was then that Kazimierz Piekarski{{czyt|Kazimierz Piekarski}} (1893–1944), head of the Old Prints Department at the Jagiellonian Library, discovered a badly damaged sheet of paper printed with more recipes recipës from ''Kuchmistrzostwo'' (or ''Kucharstwo'', if you wish). He removed the sheet, naturally, from the cover of a different tome, namely the 1549 edition of the Latin-language ''De Tuenda Valetudine Libri Sex'' (''Six Books on the Preservation of Health'') by the aforementioned Galen.

Piekarski examined the typefaces used both on the sheet he had found and on the pages with vinegar recipes recipës discovered by Wolski, and then compared them with the typefaces known to be used by different Cracow printers in the first half of the 16th century. And he came to the conclusion that the two fragments came from two different editions of the same cookbook. The sheet found at the Jagiellonian Library was printed with types used at Maciej Szarffenberg's print shop, while the two sheets discovered in Warsaw must have been printed with types employed by Hieronim Wietor{{czyt|Hieronim Wietor}} (ca. 1480–1547) – rather than by Florian Ungler as Wolski had assumed. But if a hundred unsold copies were found in Mrs. Unlger's inventory, then Ungler must have also printed his own edition of the same cookbook, although not a single copy of that edition has survived to our times.<ref>{{Cyt

But, perhaps more importantly, on this newly discovered sheet, we finally had recipes recipës not for vinegar, but for decent meat dishes. Even game meat, to boot! In the title of the first recipe recipë we can also see a small, but interesting modification made by the 16th-century Polish translator. The original Czech version speaks of "buffalo, bison or other uncommon game, not found in our lands", whereas the Polish translation has "buffalo, bison or other game, uncommon in ''Polish'' lands". On the one hand, I understand the translator's urge to localize the text a little, but on the other, it seems to me that he did it somewhat half-heartedly. It's true that, by the 16th century, bison had already been extinct in Bohemia, or what is now the Czech Republic, but it still roamed the vasts forests of Poland, so it wasn't that exotic to Polish cuisine.

Some historians had their doubts, though. If the cookbook was so popular that it had three or even four editions within fifteen years, then how come not a single more or less complete copy has survived to our times? Why is it that the only proofs for the book's existence in the past are just three frayed sheets and a few mentions in inventories, which don't even agree about its title? Even worse, the two sheets with vinegar recipes recipës got somehow misplaced, so for a time, all historians had at their disposal was a facsimilë which Wolski had made and whose authenticity could be questioned.

[[File:O zwierzynie.jpg|thumb|A folio of the manuscript ''Zbiór dla kuchmistrza'' (''A Collection for the Master Chef''). The heading ''O zwierzynie'' (''Of Game Dishes'') opens the block of recipes recipës copied from ''Kuchmistrzostwo''.]]

}}</ref> But hold on, you may say, why the Manuscript Institute? We're talking about a printed book, aren't we? Well, yes, but keep in mind what we said about culinary recipes recipës being constantly copied and rewritten. Back when nobody kept a smartphone equipped with a camera and an OCR function in the pocket -- back when even photocopiers didn't exist -- people commonly copied recipes recipës they found in printed sources by hand. Sometimes they would even create entire manuscript cookbooks that were compilations of recipes recipës taken from diverse sources, both printed and handwritten. It was one such manuscript, entitles ''Zbiór dla kuchmistrza, tak potraw jako ciast robienia''{{czyt|Zbiór dla kuchmistrza, tak potraw jako ciast robienia}} (''A Collection for the Master Chef, of Recipes Recipës for Dishes, as Well as Cakes'') cookbook that caught Dr. Bulatova's attention and led her to get in touch with the foremost specialist on the history of Polish cuisine, Prof. Jarosław Dumanowski{{czyt|Jarosław Dumanowski}} at Copernicus University in Toruń.

The manuscript contains a total of about a thousand recipesrecipës, as well as medical, veterinary and gardening tips -- all written by the same hand. The sources these recipes recipës and tips were gleaned from are not always indicated in the text, but you can see from the different styles and grammars that they must have originated in various historical periods -- mostly within the 16th and 17th centuries. And yet, the copyist who made the manuscript clearly indicated on the title page that he finished his work on 25 July 1757 (such dating is further borne out by water marks found on the paper). Which means by the time the manuscript was created, the recipes recipës which were copied into had already been quite old. The copyist himself didn't sign his work, but the book's first owner left her signatures on three different pages. It was Rozalia Pociejowa ''née'' Zahorowska{{czyt|Rozalia Pociejowa Zahorowska}} (ca.&nbsp;1690–1762), a prominent noblewoman from the region of Volynia in what is now western Ukraine. What led her to commission such a compilation of recipes recipës from previous centuries? Did she wish to study culinary history? Or maybe these old recipes recipës still seemed relevant to her own times and she saw the collection in purely practical terms? We don't really know.

What we do know is where a bloc of 224 recipes recipës which stand out from the rest as being written in a particularly archaic language come from. They are all old Polish translations of recipes recipës from the Czech ''Kuchařství''. It's clear from the style and the grammar of these recipes recipës that they were all writtin in early-16th-century Polish, which means that the translation couldn't have been made at the same time as the manuscript was written. The copyist must have used an existing 200-year-old translation, which was either still preserved in its printed form at the time or had already been copied by hand from a printed book before.

There are other clues, too, which confirm that the author of the manuscript had access to the same printed cookbook of which only the three sheets survive today. One is that the manuscript contains the modified title of one of the recipes recipës that we already saw on the sheet found at the Jagiellonian Library: "buffalo, bison or other game which is uncommon in Polish lands, but only in foreign countries". Another is a word incorrectly written the letter "t" where one would expect the letter "k". It looks like the 18th-century copyist had trouble reading the 16th-century typeface, in which the k's and the t's do indeed look quite similar. See for yourselves: can your make out the word written in pricture below?<ref>The correct answer is: ''"kotła"''{{czyt|kotła}}.</ref> So if the copyist misspelled a word because he misread a printed letter, then he must have been copying a printed text -- and this means the printed text must have existed in the first place!

Okay, so what interesting recipes recipës can you find in that oldest Polish cookbook? The recipes recipës are divided into three chapters, or actually even four, except that the fourth chapter isn't visibly separated from the third.

The first chapter contains recipes recipës for meat dishes. Many of these are for chicken and other birds (e.g., "birds seasoned with onions and encased in dough"), but there are also several recipes recipës for beef ("roast beef in the Hungarian style"), pork, hare ("hare with or without onions"), as well as various kinds of game, including: partridges, roe deer and red deer venison, wild boar, "buffalo or bison", and even... squirrels. This is how you can cook the latter:

Both recipes recipës for squirrels -- in their Czech-language version -- were tried out by a group of Czechs: food writer Roman Vaněk{{czyt|Roman Vaněk}} and chef Pavel Mencl{{czyt|Pavel Mencl}}, with the help of historian Martin Franc{{czyt|Martin Franc}}, in an episode of the Czech-language TV show ''Zmlsané dějiny''{{czyt|Zmlsané dějiny}} (''Hungry for History''). Obtaining the principal raw material proved to be difficult as red squirrels, which are native to Europe, are protected by law. They ended up importing some grey squirrels from Britain, where they are trapped and killed as an invasive species. The culinary reënactors were quite satisfied with the end result, except that the colours weren't as bright as they had expected: rather than yellow and black, the sauces came out in different shades of brown. But this only shows that colours were perceived differently by people back when no aritificial food colouring was available.

Oh, but we wanted a recipe recipë for beginners, so let's keep on looking.

The next chapter is devoted to fish dishes, that is, something to eat during Catholic fasting days, such as Fridays. Here you will find many recipes recipës for carp, pike, stockfish (dried cod), as well as salmon, eel, weatherfish, lampreys and crayfish. A large portion of the chapter covers various kinds of aspic dishes. One particualry elaborate recipe recipë is for carp in ''kisielica''{{czyt|kisielica}}, or a kind of jelly made from fermented rye flour and divided into four parts, each in a different colour: black (with blod), brown (with cinnamon), green (with parsley) or white (with cream). But this is one is definitely for more advanced cooks, too.

The recipes recipës for buffalo of bison (with beef substituted for the game), as well as various kinds of ''kisielica'', were tried out by Maciej Nowicki, chef at the Wilanów Royal Palace in Warsaw, aided by Prof. Dumanowski, in the [https://vod.tvp.pl/programy,88/historia-kuchni-polskiej-odcinki,1235711/odcinek-4,S01E04,1273194 fourth episode] of the Polish-language TV show ''Historia kuchni polskiej''{{czyt|Historia kuchni polskiej}} (''History of Polish Cuisine''), which was all about the oldest Polish cookbook.

The third chapter has recipes recipës for "Saturday food", which means food allowed by the Catholic Church on the milder fasting days, such as Saturday. The milder version of fasting still excluded the meat of land-dwelling animals, but allowed the consumption of dairy and eggs. This chapter abounds in recipes recipës for various kinds of dumplings, porridges and yolk-thickened soups. At the very end, in an implicit fourth chapter, we can find the vinegar recipesrecipës, some of which we already know. But let's stick to the porridges. The Polish word for "porridge", ''"kasza"''{{czyt|kasza}}, had a boader meaning in the past than it has today and referred not only to boiled cereal grains, but to any kind of food with porridge-like consistency. For example, you could cut some apples into chunks, fry them up and then pass through a sieve to obtain "apple porridge".

One recipe recipë that caught my attention is for "rice porridge", which is rice cooked in cream and served sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon.

If you can read Polish and would like to try out some other recipes recipës form the oldest cookbook in that language, then I've got some good news: the entire manuscript, edited by Bulatova and Dumanowski, was [https://sklep.wilanow-palac.pl/zbior-dla-kuchmistrza-tak-potraw-jako-ciast-robienia-wypisany-roku-1757-dnia-24-lipca-p-641.html published in 2011 by Wilanów Palace Museum in Warsaw.] This way, almost half a millenium after the first publication of ''Kuchmistrzostwo'', its recipes recipës were published in print once again.

| tytuł = surviving fragment (recipes recipës for vinegar)

| tytuł = surviving fragment (recipes recipës for meat dishes)

[[Category:RecipesRecipës]]