Changes

But, perhaps more importantly, on this newly discovered sheet we can finally find recipës not for vinegar, but for decent meat dishes. Even game meat, to boot! In the title of the first 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 vast forests of Poland, so it wasn’t that exotic to Polish cuisine.

And then, there remains the question of how to date this oldest Polish cookbook. Its first edition couldn’t be published earlier than 1535, which was when ''Kuchařství'' came out in Prague. After all, the translation can’t be older that the original. The latest possible date, on the other hand, is 1547, wich which is when the cookbook was noted in Szarffenberg’s inventory. It was only in the 21st century that it was possible to significantly narrow this 12-year gap, thanks to a&nbsp;catalogue of the library which belonged to Austrian book collector Hieronymus Beck von Leopoldsdorf{{czyt|Hieronymus Beck von Leopoldsdorf}} (1525–1596). One of the items listed in his catalogue is “''Kuchmistrzstwo'' Prossowol 1536”. It’s unclear what “Prossowol” could mean; it may have refered referred to some printer who hailed from the village of Proszowice{{czyt|Proszowice}} near Cracow. In any case, if that printer had published an edition of ''Kuchmistrzostwo'' as early as 1536, then it would mean that the Polish translation came out only a&nbsp;year after the Czech original.<ref>{{Cyt