A Royal Banquet in Cracow: Difference between revisions

[[File:Restauracja Wierzynek.jpg|thumb|upright|The sign at the entrance to the [http://wierzynek.pl/nasza-legenda/ Wierzynek restaurant] at Rynek Główny 16 (no. 16, Grand Square) in Cracow]]

Among many tourist attractions in my beautiful hometown of Cracow (or Kraków, if you will), the former seat of the kings of Poland, there are two venerable establishments which pride themselves on dating back to the reign of King Casimir the Great – specifically, to the year 1364. One of them is Poland’s oldest institution of higher learning, the one where Copernicus went to college. Indeed, King Casimir obtained papal consent to open a university in Cracow in 1364. But it took him three more years to actually open the Academy of Cracow, and three years after that King Casimir died and the Academy closed for business. It was only in 1400 that King Vladislaus Jagailo and Queen Hedwig founded a new university in Cracow, which is known to this day as Jagiellonian University (and not Casimirian University). ``Founded in 1364" turns out to be somewhat of a stretch.   

 

| Also on the square is the historic restaurant Wierzynek, the best place to enjoy courtly European service and traditional Polish specialties. Said to be one of the oldest operating restaurants in Europe, its history goes back to 1364, when innkeeper Mikolaj Wierzynek created a banquet served on gold and silver plates for the guests of King Casimir the Great, including Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. Wierzynek restaurant has hosted every visiting head of state ever since. Experience 500 years of history at the elegant café downstairs or the venerable upstairs salon, where seasonal game, mountains trout, and mushroom-sauced delights are served amid decorative reminders of the establishment's gloried past.

  | tytuł    = 1,000 Places to See Before You Die: A Traveler's Lifelist

As a child, I too was convinced that this restaurant – back then passing for the best in town, if not in all Poland (largely due to a lack of competition) – had been founded in 1364 by Mikołaj Wierzynek (pronounced: {{pron|mee|kaw|wye}} {{pron|vyeh|zhih|nek}}), who must have been, therefore, Poland’s first restaurateur. My first doubts appeared later, when I read that restaurants in general are a 19th-century invention and that medieval monarchs avoided dining in taverns or inns, unless they had absolutely no choice. And together with doubts came questions: What was this banquet in Cracow about? Who took part in it and why? What kind of food was served? Who was this Wierzynek and what role did he play in the banquet? And when was the restaurant bearing his name and located on Europe’s largest city square really opened?

== A Diplomatic Summit or a Family Reunion? ==

[[File:Drzewo EN.png|class=full-page|Casimir the Great's family relationship. In yellow: more or less likely participants of the Cracow Congress of 1364.]]

[[File:Kazimierz Wielki - kamienica hetmańska.jpg|thumb|upright|left|A supposed portrait of Casimir the Great (2nd half of the 14th century) on a bossed keystone at the  Hetman House (below one of the Wierzynek restaurant's dining rooms) in Cracow]]

The only historical source that mentions the banquet at Wierzynek’s are the ''Annals of the Glorious Kingdom of Poland'' by Jan Długosz, also known by his Latinized name, Joannes Longinus. According to his account, it all began when Charles of Luxembourg, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Bohemia (a kingdom roughly corresponding to the modern-day Czech Republic) was receiving envoys from Hungary and said something very offensive about King Louis of Hungary’s mom. It led, obviously, to a major diplomatic crisis. Louis, together with Duke Rudolph Habsburg of Austria (who also had his differences with the emperor and, incidentally, his father-in-law), was getting ready for war. This is when Pope Urban V decided it was enough that western Europe, recently ravaged by a pandemic of bubonic plague, was already being plunged into a bloody conflict (which would later come to be known as the Hundred Years’ War). Having rulers of the relatively stable and quickly developing central Europe at each other’s throats would be too much. Which is why he dispatched his nuncio, Peter of Volterra, to try and calm them down. The nuncio did a great job – he managed to prevent hostilities and to convince the wrangling monarchs to settle their argument through arbitration. It was agreed there would be two adjudicators: one was Duke Bolko the Small of Schweidnitz, the last sovereign ruler in Silesia and uncle of the emperor’s recently deceased third wife. The other was King Casimir of Poland, brother of the Hungarian queen mother whose honour had been besmirched.

The nuncio also engaged in matchmaking and arranged the marriage of the freshly widowed emperor with Casimir’s granddaughter, Duchess Elizabeth of Stolp, Pomerania. The wedding was held in Cracow. According to Longinus, people invited by King Casimir included – apart from the young bride (and her family) and the not-so-young groom (and his family) – King Louis of Hungary, King Sigismund of Denmark, King Peter of Cyprus, Duke Bolko the Small of Schweidnitz, Duke Otto V of Bavaria, Duke Semovit of Masovia, Duke Vladislav II of Opole, etc. The wedding reception lasted twenty days, during which barrels of wine were put out in the streets for the common folk, while the royals and lords passed their time with tournaments, dances and banquets. The festivities were overseen – again, according to Longinus – by a&nbsp;certain Wierzynek, ``a councillor of Cracow, native of the Rhineland" and ``manager of the royal treasury". He held one of the banquets in his own home, where – in gratitude for ``unspeakable benevolence" – he seated King Casimir (and not the emperor!) in the place of honour and showered him with presents that were worth more than the new empress’s dowry.<ref name=Długosz>{{Cyt  

[[File:Busta Alzbeta Pomoranska.jpg|thumb|170px|Empress Elizabeth's bust in Saint Vitus' Cathedral in Prague (ca. 1380)]]

| Clear-headed historical criticism does not fully trust Longinus, who tends to combine distinct facts, seek relationships among them where there aren't any and embellish his account with more than just stylistic additions. No more did the beautiful story of a king's fight for his sister's honour and of his granddaughter's wedding survive the scalpel of critique. Doubts, minor at first, eventually dismantled almost entirely the structure which Longinus had skillfully pieced together.

As it happens, the great Cracovian chronicler, writing a&nbsp;century after the actual events, combined at least three separate meetings of central European monarchs which took place in Cracow in the years 1363–1364 into one big congress. First there was the imperial wedding of May 1363. Louis wasn’t there as he hadn’t yet reconciled with the emperor, nor had the kings of Denmark and Cyprus any reason to attend. The bride’s and the groom’s families were certainly there, so we can presume the presence of some people not mentioned in the sources, such as the emperor’s brother John Henry, Margrave of Moravia, or Casimir of Stolp, the bride’s brother and King Casimir’s favourite grandson.  

In December of the same year Bolko the Small arrived in Cracow, so that he and King Casimir could finally adjudicate on the dispute between Charles and Louis. It’s possible that King Valdemar IV of Denmark (not Sigismund, as Longinus writes) was in town at the same time on unrelated business.

It’s commonly accepted that Wirsing’s banquet took place during the third of the meetings mentioned above – the one of September 1364. This one took the top spot in the number-of-crowned-heads-in-one-place category, which surely stirred people’s imagination. But if sources confuse this summit with the imperial wedding of May 1363, then you can imagine just as well that Wirsing’s feast was part of the multi-day wedding festivities. Especially if you remember that Longinus compared the value of Wirsing’s gifts for Casimir to that of the bride’s dowry. Although, after all, if Wirsing had done such a&nbsp;good job as a&nbsp;wedding reception manager, than why couldn’t he repeat his own success during the political summit a&nbsp;year and a&nbsp;half later? Perhaps there was more than just one ``banquet at Wierzynek's"?

[[File:Jan Matejko - Uczta u&nbsp;Wierzynka 1877.jpg|thumb|upright|left|This is how Jan Matejko, in 1877, imagined guests arriving at the banquet at Wierzynek's – on the opposite side of the Grand Square to where the restaurant bearing his name is now located.]]

What about Wierzynek? Well, the history of this establishment dates back all the way to… 1947. This is when Kazimierz Książek opened the restaurant in the Morsztyn House at no. 16, Grand Square (Rynek Główny 16). It’s said that it was from Dr. Jerzy Dobrzycki, head of the Cracow History Museum, that he got the idea to name the restaurant ``Pod Wierzynkiem" (``At Wierzynek's").<ref>{{Cyt  

| In the Wierzynek menu, as on medieval tables, reigns the golden roast duck, quail eggs, barrel-cured herrings and steaming-hot sour ryemeal soup with rabbit stock, served alongside smoked ribs. There is juniper-scented wild-boar ham, Mikołaj Wierzynek plum brandy and Casimir the Great vodka. This is how I imagine the menu composed by the Cracow councillor's chefs and this is what I serve.

| It was him [Wierzynek, a councillor of Cracow] who, on King Casimir of Poland's orders, demonstrated during these days such magnificence, opulence and liberality while hosting all the kings, princes, lords and any guests and strangers who had arrived by invitation or out of their own desire, that not only was food offered in generous amounts, but anything anyone asked for out of need or habit was provided to him in abundance.

This must be one of the earliest descriptions of what is now considered an important part of traditional Polish hospitality, that is, forcing more food and drink down one’s guests’ throats than they are able to ingest. I can almost hear Wirsing and King Casimir urge their commensals with ``You should try this one too! Just a little piece. But you must! Aren't you gonna drink with me?"

Later descriptions of the banquet often stress the lavishness of golden and silver tableware, which is probably how some historians have interpreted the mentions of expensive gifts that were presented to the visiting monarchs. This may have been influenced by analogy to a&nbsp;chronicler’s account of another famous banquet from Poland’s medieval history – the one in Gniezno, AD 1000, where Duke Boleslav the Brave entertained Emperor Otto III and impressed him so much that Otto made Boleslav Poland’s first king.

| So Bolesław was thus gloriously raised to kingship by the emperor, and he gave an example of the liberality innate in him when for three days following his coronation he celebrated a feast in style fit for a king or emperor. Every day the plates and the tableware were new, and many different ones were given out, ever richer again. For at the end of the feast he ordered the waiters and the cupbearers to gather the gold and silver vessels – for there was nothing made of wood there – from all three days' courses, that is, the cups and goblets, the bowls and plates and the drinking horns, and he presented them to the emperor as a token of honor {{...}}

It’s possible that these gifts were not so much handed to the guests as allowed to be taken. During the congress of Cracow, these may have been parts of the interior design of royal sleeping chambers at the Wawel Castle, ``sumptuously decorated with purple and scarlet, gold, pearls and jewels",<ref name=Długosz/> as well as precious-metal plates, which the visitors simply helped themselves to after the party. It’s like you steal a&nbsp;towel from a&nbsp;hotel room and the hotel manager decides to make you a&nbsp;present of it; this just seems to have been the norm in the Middle Ages. It’s little surprise, then, that both the guests and the chroniclers paid much more attention to the tableware than to the food and drink that was served on it. Especially that, outside of special occasions, even at royal tables people normally ate from trenchers cut out of stale loaves of rye bread, which – soaked with rich, spicy sauces – were later consumed by the servants.<ref>{{Cyt  

[[File:Józef Simmler Uczta u&nbsp;Wierzynka.jpg|thumb|''Wierzynek's Banquet'' by Józef Simmler (1862)]]

| <poem>And what a welcome did they get!

Today the Poles are most keen to ape the Americans; earlier, ``what a Frenchman dreamed up, a Pole soon adopted"<ref>{{Cyt  

  | tytuł    = Pan Tadeusz, or The Last Foray in Lithuania: A Tale of the Gentry during 1811–1812

  }}, Book I, verse 484</ref>; and even before that, Italy was the point of cultural reference. But few people in Poland remember that in the late Middle Ages and at the turn of the Renaissance everything Czech was ''en vogue'' in Poland. Under Casimir the Great, the Polish Kingdom was growing strong, and forgotten were the times when Poland was ruled by King Wenceslaus II of Bohemia (Charles’s grandfather), while Vladislav the Ell (Casimir’s father), leader of the anti-Bohemian opposition, had to hide in forests and caves; but Casimir still looked from Cracow to Prague – by then, the ''de facto'' capital of the Roman Empire – as the West, in both geographic and cultural terms, and eagerly copied Bohemia’s legal, administrative and monetary solutions. Even the Czech language, which rings childish and funny to Polish ears today, was regarded as a&nbsp;tongue of great beauty and elegance by 16th-century Poles.  

Black pepper, leeks, a rotten cabbage roll,

Bad beds, and dark, straw, filth, a hole,

  }}</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&nbsp;translation of Pavel Severýn’s ''Kuchařství'', published in Czech in 1535; sadly, only a&nbsp;few of the translated recipës have survived, all of them for vinegar at that.<ref>{{Cyt  

  }}</ref>

Let’s a&nbsp;take a&nbsp;peek, then, into the oldest recipë collection in the beautiful Czech language. It’s ''Spis o&nbsp;krmiech kterak mají dělány býti'' (''How to Prepare Dishes''), known from a&nbsp;15th-century manuscript, although some individual 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 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&nbsp;highly prized fish in the Middle Ages, so on a&nbsp;lean day it wouldn’t have been out of place on the royal table. And how better to receive a&nbsp;Bohemian king in Poland than by treating him to a&nbsp;Polish-style Bohemian dish? So let’s see how it was made.

| Cook some stock that is not too salty. Scale the pike, cut into pieces, wash in clean water, and when the stock comes to boil, put the pike inside and cook well. Then strain it and put into a bowl. Chop up some onion very finely, cook it in boiling water, and when it's done, divide the onion into two parts. Grind one part with parsley in a crock, and once it is well ground, pour wine or vinegar into the crock, mix well and force through a sieve. Pour this sauce into a kettle or a pot, put the pike inside and season with all spices except cloves. You can prepare carp and other kinds of fish in the same way. Lace the other part of onion with saffron. And when you arrange the pike in the bowl, put this onion on top.

| oryg        = Zastav rosol nevelmi slaný, ostruž štiku a&nbsp;roztrhni ji na kusy, vymyj ji čistú vodú a&nbsp;když rosol zevře, daj ji do nĕho a&nbsp;obvař dobře. Potom ji oced' a&nbsp;naklad' na misu. Usekajž cibuli velmi drobnĕ, vař ji v&nbsp;vodĕ, at' prudce vře, a&nbsp;když uvře rozdĕl sobĕ tu cibuli na dvé, jednu polovici tři v&nbsp;pánvi s&nbsp;petruželi; když ji dobře utřeš, vezmi vína, anebo octa, rozpust' to v&nbsp;pánvi a&nbsp;potáhni skrze hartoch dajž tu jichu do kotlika nebo do hrnce, vklad' tam štiku, zakořeň všemi kořeními kromĕ hřebičkuo. Muožeš tiem zpuosobem kapry i&nbsp;jiné ryby dĕlati. Druhú pak polovici cibuli ošarfaň. A&nbsp;když štiku na misu daš, daj to cibuli svrchu.

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Abramowicz Uczta u&nbsp;Wierzynka 1876.jpg}}|thumb|upright=1.2|left|''Wierzynek's Banquet'' by Bronisław Abramowicz (1876)]]

If anyone decides to give this recipë a&nbsp;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 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 recipës boiling was at most only the first step, which could be followed by roasting, baking, frying, stuffing, covering in aspic, etc.<ref>{{Cyt  

  | tytuł    = L'ordre des mets

  | wydawca  = Muzeum Pałacu Króla Jana III w&nbsp;Wilanowie