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This is where the Tribune got interrupted again and there would be no later occasion to pick up the thread. Now that our appetite for an interesting story has been whetted, the dish is being snatched away from our mouths! But don't despair, not all is lost; if something's missing in the canonical version, maybe we can find it in the deleted scenes? That's right! There's an original manuscript version of ''Pan Tadeusz'' with a passage that never made it into print. It says that the Tribune's cookbook originally belonged to a Greater Poland nobleman called Captain Poniński who used this book to give opulent feasts. Before he died, he had given it to his neighbour, Lord Skórzewski, who lived in the village of Kopaszewo. His widow, Lady Skórzewska, in turn, offered it to Bartek Dobrzyński, a Lithuanian who often travelled to Greater Poland in for business. But Dobrzyński was a poor nobleman with a modest kitchen and had no use of a cookbook meant for aristocratic courts, so the he gave it to the Tribune, for use in the benefit of Judge Soplica's household.<ref>{{Cyt

This Greater Poland connection isn't random. This is where Mickiewicz stayed for a few months in 1831, while an anti-Russian uprising was raging in the Russian partition of Poland. He wished to join the insurgency, but the border between Russian and Prussian partitions was guarded so well that the got stuck in Greater Poland, a region on the Prussian side. The uprising had been long quelled while when Mickiewicz was still visiting the noble manors of the Prussian partition, sightseeing, romancing and writing poetry. Many of the details of everyday life, allegedly typical for Lithuanian nobility, that you will find in ''Pan Tadeusz'' are actually the result of the observations the poet made in Greater Poland. And his precious cookbook – "a dear souvenit souvenir of righteous customs", as he wrote in the deleted passage – really did once belong to an Antoni Poniński, who gifted it to Ludwik Skórzewski and whose widow, Honorata Skórzewska, gave it as a present to… no, not to Bartek Dobrzyński, but to Mickiwicz himself, while he was a guest at Kopaszewo.<ref>{{Cyt

This was also where he heard the tales of a great banquet of 1812, which Józef Chłapowski, Captain of Kościan, gave in the neraby palace of Turew, to the soldiers of the 1st Light Cavalry Regiment of the Imperial Guard (an elite unit of Napoleon's army, made up exclusively of Polish noblemen), one of whom was his son, Dezydery Chłapowski, among them.<ref>A. Kuźmiński, ''op. cit.'', p. 126</ref> Mickiewicz would then poetically transfer this Greater Poland feast to Soplicowo, while also enhancing it with an Old Polish menu inspired by a cookery book he had kept as a souvenir of his stay in the region.