Changes

You don’t know any of these specialities? Don’t worry, Mickiewicz was actually assuming that the readers in his own time wouldn’t know them either; heck, he doesn’t seem to have known their exact meanings himself. The excerpt above is just a jumble of random words that don’t really add up to any meaningful menu. We’re going to decipher them in a moment, but first let’s see where the poet took them from.

These three “secrets” were recipës that required the highest level of culinary expertise, attainable only by the most skilled of chefs. Czerniecki divulges them as a&nbsp;sort of present for his readers. The first of these secrets is a&nbsp;recipë for a&nbsp;capon in a&nbsp;bottle. The trick was to carefully skin the capon (a&nbsp;well-fattened castrated rooster), put the skin inside a&nbsp;bottle, fill it with a&nbsp;mixture of milk and eggs, and sew it up, then plug the bottle and plunge into boiling water. As the mixture expanded in heat, it made the skin swell and stiffen, producing an illusion of a&nbsp;whole capon fit inside a&nbsp;bottle. The bird’s flesh could have been cooked and served separately, but it wasn’t about the meat. It was all about the deception, the surprise and making sure that the guests would “not be without great astonishment”.<ref>S. Czerniecki, ''op. cit.'', s.&nbsp;44</ref> Mickiewicz made no use of this particular idea in his poem, but we will come back to the two other secrets later on.