4,991
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
}}</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 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 recipës they found in printed sources by hand. Sometimes they would even create entire manuscript cookbooks that were compilations of recipës taken from diverse sources, both printed and handwritten. It was one such manuscript, entitled ''Zbiór dla kuchmistrza, tak potraw jako ciast robienia''{{czyt|Zbiór dla kuchmistrza, tak potraw jako ciast robienia}} (''A Collection for the Master Chef, of Recipës for Dishes, as Well as for Cakes'') 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 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 that 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 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.
