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It's better than nothing, but still rather generic – bread, wine, fish, various kinds of meat – but no word of specific dishes or recipesrecipës. Which is not surprising after all; mind you, de Machaut wasn't personally present at the feast. Even if he'd based his poem on a first-hand account of the event – either from King Peter himself or from a member of his retinue – he must have guessed the culinary details himself. And he simply guessed what one just could have expected at a royal feast – that is, on the one hand, various meats aplenty, which is what inhabitants of northern Europe liked best, and, on the other hand, bread and wine, the attributes of Christianity and Mediterranean civilization. And of course fish, as any banquet longer than three days must have covered some lean days.

De Machaut wrote there was no point asking for further details of the feast, as grandeur of such scale couldn't be put into words anyway. Still, I'm going to try and imagine what kind of dishes may have been served on King Casimir's and his visitors' table. Unfortunately, no Polish recipes recipës from the Middle Ages have survived to our time, but we do have Czech recipesrecipës, which are worth looking at. Why? Because, firstly, the most important guest was Emperor Charles, ruler of the Czech-speaking Bohemia who resided at the Hradčany Castle in Prague, so it makes sense that some Czech recipes recipës could have been included in the menu to honour him. And, secondly, the Poles generally looked up to Czech civilization, which stood much higher than their own at the time.

}}</ref> What disgusted him so much in Bohemian cuisine were the ways of food preservation that were typical for the climes of all northern Europe, such as smoked meat, salted fish, brine-cured vegetables and beer-vinegar pickles. Unlike the Frenchman, the Poles had no qualms about imitating Bohemian foodways. The oldest-known Polish-language cookbook, ''Kuchmistrzostwo'' (''Cookery''), is in fact a translation of Pavel Severýn's ''Kuchařství'', published in Czech in 1535; sadly, only a few of the translated recipes recipës have survived, all of them for vinegar at that.<ref>{{Cyt

Let's a take a peek, then, into the oldest recipe recipë collection in the beautiful Czech language. It's ''Spis o&nbsp;krmiech kterak mají dělány býti'' (''How to Prepare Dishes''), known from a 15th-century manuscript, although some individual recipes recipës included in it may be much older. It turns out that, even back then, Bohemian-Polish culinary exchange wasn't entirely one-sided and that among about 160 recipes recipës we can find in the cookbook there are five which are described as ''po polsku'', or "in the Polish manner". One of them is for Polish-style mutton and the remaining four are variants of ''štika po polsku'', or pike in the Polish way. Pike was a highly prized fish in the Middle Ages, so on a lean day it wouldn't have been out of place on the royal table. And how better to receive a Bohemian king in Poland than by treating him to a Polish-style Bohemian dish? So let's see how it was made.

If anyone decides to give this recipe recipë a try, then please let me know whether it's any good. As for me, I wouldn't want to waste good fish. Because what was so Polish about this preparation? If you compare the recipes recipës described as "Polish style" with others in the same cookbook, you will notice that the difference was mostly in the method of thermal treatment. All of the supposedly Polish dishes were simply boiled, whereas in other recipes recipës boiling was at most only the first step, which could be followed by roasting, baking, frying, stuffing, covering in aspic, etc.<ref>{{Cyt

}}</ref> In the case of the Polish pike, all that remained to be done was the spicy onion coulis, or thick sauce.<ref>Magdalena Spychaj, ''op. cit.'', s. 600</ref> In other words, purportedly Polish recipes recipës were the most primitive and required little culinary expertise. Which doesn't mean that such a Polish-style pike could not be served at Wirsing's banquet after all. Maybe not as the ''pièce de résistance'' of Cracovian cooks, but perhaps for a change of pace in one of the courses. Today a single course consists of a single dish, sometimes accompanied by some sides, but a course in the medieval sense was an entire set of contrasting dishes all served at once.<ref>{{Cyt

}}</ref> As European gastronomy was modernizing and moving away from excessive use of exotic spices, this medieval recipe recipë remained a souvenir of the colourful times when boiled fish was being seasoned with wine, pepper, ginger, mace and saffron (but no cloves!), while a Cracovian merchant was hosting princes, kings and an emperor.