Changes

That’s better, isn’t it? But I bet you’d still have a hard time actually cooking from this recipë. Where’s the list of ingredients? Where are the quantities and proportions? What about caloric contents? Cooking time and temperatures? How many people does it serve? We’ve got used to taking certain elements of a culinary recipë for granted, but it turns out that in the 17th century they just hadn’t been invented yet.

Another thing we take for granted is that it’s usually the same person who buys a cookbook, reads it and cooks from it. In the 17th century, though, it was quite normal for these three roles to be separated. The book would have been purchased by someone who could afford it, that is, a rich nobleman or a magnate (the Polish equivalent of an aristocrat). Or, rather, it would have been his wife, the lady of the house. She would have bought the book not for herself, however, but for the head chef (or “master cook”) she’d had employed. It was the head chef’s job to manage the entire kitchen staff, order the necessary ingredients from external suppliers and make decisions about what would be served on the lord’s table (having agreed the menu and the costs with the lady). So the recipës in the cookbook would have been read by the head chef – an experienced professional who didn’t need all the proportions, temperatures and cooking times, because he already kept this knowledge in his head. But here comes another twist: he would have read the recipës aloud – not to himself, but to the kitchen staff, who would carry the instructions out. We can tell this by the grammatical forms used in the book; it’s always the singular second-person imperative, indicating a direct order that you could issue to your subordinate, but never to a magnate or to his wife who actually owned the book. Czerniecki, for example, would have never addressed his own employer, Princess Helena Tekla Lubomirska, by the familiar ''“ty”'' (“thou”), but consistently called her “Your Princely Grace, my Most Charitable Lady and Benefactress”.