4,991
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
The manuscript contains a total of about a thousand recipës, as well as medical, veterinary and gardening tips – all written by the same hand. The sources these 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 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. 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 recipës from previous centuries? Did she wish to study culinary history? Or maybe these old 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 recipës which stand out from the rest as being written in a particularly archaic language come from. They are all old Polish translations of recipës from the Czech ''Kuchařství''. It’s clear from the style and the grammar of these recipës that they were all writtin written 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 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 the picture 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!
[[File:Kotła.JPG|thumb|left|upright|What does it say? Can you make out the letters? Hint: it means “of a cauldron” in Polish.]]
