Changes

}}</ref> And even these were most likely copied from even older tablets, now lost to time. Because the thing with recipës is that they're much more likely to be copied than written from scratch. You can even see it in the Polish word for "``recipë", ''"``przepis"''{{czyt|przepis}}, which literally means "``something that is rewritten". Oftentimes, the copyist would add something to the recipë, or perhaps makes some abridgements, redactions or modifications – thus allowing the recipë to evolve. In pre-Internet times, culinary recipës were probably some of the best examples of memes, or units of cultural evolution.<ref>Many people think of memes as nothing but silly pictures shared on the Internet, but they are, in fact, as old as human culture itself. The Internet is only a new medium for memes to spread in, faster than ever before. The notion of memes, as cultural equivalents of genes, was coined by the famous biologist Prof. Richard Dawkins in 1976 (when the Interent was still in its infancy), who wanted to show that you can also study evolution outside of biology ({{Cyt

For this reason, when it comes to old cookbooks, it's difficult to even speak of authorship in any meaningful way. Even if you can see somebody's name on the title page, you can't be really sure whether it's the name of the original author or perhaps of a translator, editor, copyist or publisher. Or maybe of someone who was a little bit of all the above. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to such a person as "``the author", but keep in mind the they need not necessarily be the actual content creator as understood by modern copyright laws. Besides, even the idea of copyright didn't exist before the 19th century. Before that, people would just go and rewrite or reprint books (culinary or any other) without asking anyone for permission. They would sometimes indicate the original author's name in the copy, but sometimes not. The very idea of authenticity didn't exist either, so a copy wasn't seen as something inferior, but rather as a new, maybe even better version of the original thing. According to Galen of Pergamon (of whom [[Good Humour, Good Health#Whose Idea Is It?|I wrote before]]), the famous Library of Alexandria was so big thanks to a policy of sending royal customs officers to each ship which called at the local port, in order to gather any scroll of papyrus or parchment they could find and take it for scribes to make copies of. Then, they would give the shining new copies to the ship's captain, while the library would contend itself with the timeworn originals.<ref>{{Cyt

But, perhaps more importantly, on this newly discovered sheet, we finally had recipës not for vinegar, but for decent meat dishes. Even game meat, to boot! In the title of the first recipë we can also see a small, but interesting modification made by the 16th-century Polish translator. The original Czech version speaks of "``buffalo, bison or other uncommon game, not found in our lands", whereas the Polish translation has "``buffalo, bison or other game, uncommon in ''Polish'' lands". On the one hand, I understand the translator's urge to localize the text a little, but on the other, it seems to me that he did it somewhat half-heartedly. It's true that, by the 16th century, bison had already been extinct in Bohemia, or what is now the Czech Republic, but it still roamed the vasts forests of Poland, so it wasn't that exotic to Polish cuisine.

And then, there remains the question of how to date this oldest Polish cookbook. Its first edition couldn't be published earlier than 1535, which was when ''Kuchařství'' came out in Prague. After all, the translation can't be older that the original. The latest possible date, on the other hand, is 1547, wich is when the cookbook was noted in Szarffenberg's inventory. It was only in the 21st century that it was possible to significantly narrow this 12-year gap, thanks to a catalogue of the library which belonged to Austrian book collector Hieronymus Beck von Leopoldsdorf{{czyt|Hieronymus Beck von Leopoldsdorf}} (1525–1596). One of the items listed in his catalogue is "„``''Kuchmistrzstwo'' [sic] Prossowol 1536”. It's unclear what "``Prossowol" could mean; it may have refered to some printer who hailed from the village of Proszowice{{czyt|Proszowice}} near Cracow. In any case, if that printer published an edition of ''Kuchmistrzostwo'' as early 1536, then it would mean that the Polish translation came out only a year after the Czech original.<ref>{{Cyt

There are other clues, too, which confirm that the author of the manuscript had access to the same printed cookbook of which only the three sheets survive today. One is that the manuscript contains the modified title of one of the recipës that we already saw on the sheet found at the Jagiellonian Library: "``buffalo, bison or other game which is uncommon in Polish lands, but only in foreign countries". Another is a word incorrectly written the letter "``t" where one would expect the letter "``k". It looks like the 18th-century copyist had trouble reading the 16th-century typeface, in which the k's and the t's do indeed look quite similar. See for yourselves: can your make out the word written in pricture below?<ref>The correct answer is: ''"``kotła"''{{czyt|kotła}}.</ref> So if the copyist misspelled a word because he misread a printed letter, then he must have been copying a printed text -- and this means the printed text must have existed in the first place!

[[File:Kotła.JPG|thumb|left|upright|What does it say? Can you make out the letters? Hint: it means "``of a cauldron" in Polish.]]

The first chapter contains recipës for meat dishes. Many of these are for chicken and other birds (e.g., "``birds seasoned with onions and encased in dough"), but there are also several recipës for beef ("``roast beef in the Hungarian style"), pork, hare ("``hare with or without onions"), as well as various kinds of game, including: partridges, roe deer and red deer venison, wild boar, "``buffalo or bison", and even... squirrels. This is how you can cook the latter:

The third chapter has recipës for "``Saturday food", which means food allowed by the Catholic Church on the milder fasting days, such as Saturday. The milder version of fasting still excluded the meat of land-dwelling animals, but allowed the consumption of dairy and eggs. This chapter abounds in recipës for various kinds of dumplings, porridges and yolk-thickened soups. At the very end, in an implicit fourth chapter, we can find the vinegar recipës, some of which we already know. But let's stick to the porridges. The Polish word for "``porridge", ''"``kasza"''{{czyt|kasza}}, had a boader meaning in the past than it has today and referred not only to boiled cereal grains, but to any kind of food with porridge-like consistency. For example, you could cut some apples into chunks, fry them up and then pass through a sieve to obtain "``apple porridge".

One recipë that caught my attention is for "``rice porridge", which is rice cooked in cream and served sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon.