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[[File:Kuchmistrzostwo - ocet.jpg|thumb|upright=.9|One of the surviving pages of ''Kuchmistrzostwo'' with various recipës for vinegar, currently owned by the Warsaw Public Library (ID number: XVI.O.140)]]
The way historians often make their most interesting discoveries is by dismantling the covers of old books. This is because bookbinders in the past 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{{czyt|Zygmunt Wolski}} (1862–1931), an apprentice librarian at the Krasiński Library in Warsaw, visited Cezary Wilanowski’s{{czyt|Cezary Wilanowski}} (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 recipës – 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 recipës, and concluded that they must have been printed in the first half of the 16th century.<ref> {{Cyt