I once wrote here about [[Old Polish Cookery for Beginners|old Polish recipës]] that were both extremely easy to cook and surprisingly familiar to our own times, which made them perfect for people who were only starting to try their hand at historical culinary reënactment. We could see how a recipë’s simplicity could also mean its durability; scrambled eggs, for example, are still prepared in much the same way as they were two hundred, four hundred or one thousand years ago.
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 that it did exist. 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 rediscoveedrediscovered. And then, let’s pick a recipë out of it to try out – one for beginners, of course.
== Cookery Bookery ==