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Ale noc nad tem tym całą przemyśla troskliwy,

So what was it about Czerniecki? Well, he was indeed an experience chef, responsible to organizing for setting up aristocratic banquets for thousands of guests and also the author of the first cookbook printed in the Polish language. Only that this book – or, rather, a booklet, as it was small enough to fit into a pocket on one's chest, which was where the Tribune held it – had the bilingual, Latin-Polish title: ''''Compendium Ferculorum albo Zebranie potraw'' (both parts meaning ''A Collection of Dishes''). And this was – as we shall see tomorrow – precisely from this book that the Tribune got the recipes for all the dishes he would serve at the great banquet in Book XII.

Besides, it wasn't only the recipes that Mickiewicz took from the ''Compendium''. The of the dinner given by the "Count of Tęczyn" to Pope Urban VIII in Rome was also inspired by the same cookbook, and specifically, from the dedication its author adressed addressed to his employer, Princess Helena Tekla Lubomirska. Princess Lubomirska, the wife of Prince Aleksander Michał Lubomirski, took active part in Polish political wife; she was also a great partoness patroness of arts. Wacław Potocki and Jan Andrzej Morsztyn, whom I have quoted in some of my previous posts, dedicated their poems to her, while Czerniecki did the same with his cookbook. In the dedication, he recalled the time when, in 1633, her father, Prince Jerzy Ossoliński, Grand Chancellor of the Crown (rougly roughly equivalent to a prime minister), was sent by the king of Poland as an envoy to the Holy See. At the time, the Polish Commonwealth was at the peak of its power and glory, a fact Ossoliński was not going to let anyone fail to notice. His retinue included the famed winged hussars, crimson-and-gold-upholstered carriages, ten camels carrying opulent presents for the pope, while the prince's mount was dressed in diamonds, pearls and rubies, and deliberately shod with loose golden horseshoes – so that the horse could lose them along the way for everyone to see. The banquet which Ossoliński gave to the pope was without a doubt no less osstentatious. This is how Czerniecki described it:

|"''This Roman legation was described and depicted multiple times.''"<ref>A. Mickiewicz, ''op. cit.'', Poet's explanatory notes, own translation</ref><br>Ethcing Etching by Stefano della Bella (1633).]]

Of course, Mickiewicz reversed the sequence of events in his poem; if Czerniecki descrbied described the Roman banquet as historical fact in his cookbook, then couldn't have been prepared according to the instructions from the same cookbook.

Anyway, it looks like the poet confused two different cookey cookery books (which were, as it happens, the only two Polish language cookbooks printed before the end of the 18th century) – ''Compendium Ferculorum'' by Czerniecki, published in 1628, and ''The Perfect Cook'' by Wielądko, published a hundred years later. How come? Was it a mistake or poetic license? Maybe ''The Pefrect Perfect Cook'' just had a better ring in the poet's ear than the bland ''A Collection of Dishes'', so Mickiewicz switched the titles on purpose? But if so, then he could have a least explained this manipulation in a footnote. If he hadn't, then perhaps it was because he was genuinely in error himself. This conjecture is confirmed by a letter written by Edward Odyniec, who travelled together with Adam Mickiewicz in Italy, where he mentions a worn copy of a piece of culinary literature that the poet always would carry in his luggage.

| Adam wanted to give a purely Polish-Lithuanian feast, according the the ancient recipes from "The Perfect Cook", that is, a tattered old book which he carries around like a treasure in his traveling travelling library and often reads it with great pleasure. Obviously, this idea fell through {{...}}

Distinguished Mickiewiczologist, Prof. Stanisław Pigoń, has suggested a quite convincing solution of this puzzle; it was ''Compendium ferculorum'' that Mickiewicz loved to read when pining for Polish cuisine and dreaming of having an actual Old Polish banquet in real life, but it was old and tattered, and missing its title page. So Mickiewicz knew very well the contents of the work and the dedication, as well as the author's name, but he was ignorant of its title. On the other hand, he probably naver never read ''The Perfect Cook'', but he might have heard about it; the title could have stuck in his head and he may have later associated it with the mysterious treasure-trove of Old Polish recipes that had somehow found its way into his hands.

And how did it find its way into his hands? Well, it seems that Mickiewicz intended to tall us that through the Tribune's mouth. The Tribune thought his cookbook so precious that he considered it a worthy gift for Gen. Dąbrowski. While presenting the book to the general, he was also going to recount the itinerary the book had traveled travelled until it wondered into Soplicowo.

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 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 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 Mickiewicz 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 nearby 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), 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.

The Tribune had precious little time to prepare the feast. The army arrived in Soplicowo in the evening and the ceremonial dinner was to take place in the afternoon of the next day. Such a feat would have been impossible in real life, but in the poem it's barely an inconvenience. Anyway, the kitchen was bustling with work all night and all day. How was this work organizedorganised?

Again, the white apron didn't just spring out of the poet's imagination, for Master Chef Hrechecha is taken straigth straight out of the "Instruction for the Master Chef" contained in ''Compendium Ferculorum''. It reads as follows:

We can also see the issue of ever-drunk kitchen staff in ''Pan Tadeusz'' and specifically – at the artistocratic aristocratic court of Lord Pantler Horeszko:

But in the ideally idyllic Soplicowo this would have been unthinkable. Here everything worked like a charm. If a "perfect cook" ever existed, then it must have been none other than Tribune Hreczecha. The effect? A perfect Old Polish-Lithuanian banquet, just as Mickiewicz dreamed it, but realized realised only on the pages of ''Pan Tadeusz''.

| It it the master chef's duty {{...}} not to overspend, altough although a certain degree of overspening overspending is needed, as it highlights the hosts' generosity. According to an old proverb, it's better to incur a thaler's worth of loss than half a penny's worth of embarrassment. A skilled chef should remember this, not to disgrace his lord with foolish parsimony.