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It's by dismantling the covers of old books that historians often make their most interesting discoveries. This is because bookbinders frequently strengthened the covers by gluing together pages torn from even older tomes. Luckily for us, the very first cookbook printed in Polish was among the many books to have fallen victim to this kind of recycling.
In 1891, Zygmunt Wolski (1862–1931), an apprentice librarian at the Krasiński Library in Warsaw, visited Cezary Wilanowski's (1846–1893) second-hand bookshop, where he found a folder containing four loose sheets of paper that had been removed from an old book cover. The cover bore no title, but it did bear the year of publication: 1538. The four sheets which were reused to strengthen the cover came from three different printed books. Two of the sheets were covered with culinary recipes -- all for different kinds of vinegar, as it happened. Wolski carefully examined the watermarks on the paper, the typeface and the language used in the recipes, and concluded that they must have been printed in the first half of the 16th century.<ref> {{Cyt
| nazwisko = Wolski
| imię = Zygmunt
}}</ref>
Wolski found the sheets only a year after Artur Benis (1865–1932), a historian at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow who was busy researching the history of book printing in Poland, had published his work on inventories of Cracow's mid-16th-century print shops. Such inventories were typically made for the purposes of inheritance proceedings and contained lists of books which a print shop owner had printed, but died before he could sell them. And so, in an inventory made in 1555, after the death of Helena Unglerowa, widow of Florian Ungler (d.&nbsp;1536), who had been the first person to print book books entirely in Polish, there was a mention of 100 unbound copies of a book whose Polish-language title was ''Kuchmistrzostwo'' (''Cooking MasterMastery'').<ref>{{Cyt
| nazwisko = Benis
| imię = Artur
}}</ref> Wolski connected the dots and concluded that the two sheets with torn edges and printed with vinegar recipes may have come from an otherwise lost coobook with such a previously unkown title.
Ale na tym nie koniec, gdyż w&nbsp;tym samym But that's no all. In the same year 1891 roku pojawiły się dwie nowe publikacje, które rzuciły więcej światła na owe dwie karteczkisaw the publication of two further works which shed more light on these two sheets. Po pierwszeFirstly, Benis wydał drugi tom swoich published the second volume of his ''InwentarzyInventories'', w&nbsp;którym pojawiła się wzmianka o&nbsp;jednym egzemplarzu książki kucharskiej będącym w&nbsp;posiadaniu zmarłej wwhich contained a mention of a single copy of a cookbook owned by Helena Gałczyna (d.&nbsp;1549&nbsp;r. Heleny Gałczyny), wdowy po innym krakowskim drukarzuwidow of another Cracow printer, Macieju Szarffenbergu Maciej Szarffenberg (zmd. &nbsp;1547). Cztery egzemplarze tego samego dzieła odnotowano też w&nbsp;księgozbiorze pozostawionym przez zmarłego w&nbsp;tymże roku niejakiego Szymona TyrlikowskiegoAdditionally, four copies of the same book were listed in the inventory of the a Szymon Tyrlikowski's book collection. Tylko że tytuł owej książki w&nbsp;obu inwentarzach zanotowano w&nbsp;formie: The title indicated in both inventories, however, was written as ''Kucharstvo'' bądź or ''Kucharsthvo''.<ref>{{Cyt
| nazwisko = Benis
| imię = Artur