5,079
edits
Changes
That's better, isn't it? But I bet you'd still have a hard time actually cooking from this recipe. 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 recipe for granted, but it turns out that in the 17th century they just hadn't been invented yet.
[[File:Nowy Wiśnicz z powietrza.jpg|thumb|left|The castle of Nowy Wiśnicz, which was once the family seat of the Princes Lubomirski; this is where Stanisław Czerniecki worked as a steward and chef, and where he wrote down his recipes in the first cookbook to be printed in Polish.]]
Another thing we take for granted is that it's usually the same person who buys a cookbook, reads it and cooks according to its recipes. 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 wouldn't have bought the book 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 recipes 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 recipes aloud – not to himself, but to the kitchen staff, who would actually 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's wife (the owner of 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".