Old Polish Cookery for Beginners: Difference between revisions

The book in question, first published in 1682, was written by Stanisław Czerniecki (pronounced ''stah-{{small|NEE}}-swahf churn-{{small|YET}}-skee''), a steward and chef at the court of the Princes Lubomirski. He gave it a bilingual (Latin-Polish) title, ''Compendium ferculorum, albo Zebranie potraw'' (''A Collection of Dishes''), but the contents were entirely in Polish (contrary to what Ms. Mary Ellen Snodgrass suggested in her ''Encyclopedia of Kitchen History'', where she described ''Compendium ferculorum'' as Poland's "Latin standard"<ref>{{Cyt  

  }}</ref>). Czerniecki was well aware that his was the first cookbook ever published in his native tongue. "As no one before me has yet wished to present to the world such useful knowledge in our Polish language," he wrote in his opening line, "I have dared, {{...}} despite my ineptitude, to offer my {{...}} collection of dishes to the Polish world."<ref>{{Cyt  

The recipes, though, are not easy to follow. First, they're in Polish, which may be an inconvenience, if you don't speak the language. But even you did, you'd still have to wade through 17th-century Polish spelling, interpunction and typeface. Let's take the example below. You could probably make out the name of the dish, printed in roman type, but what about the actual recipe, written in blackletter?

Take a hazel grouse or a partridge, small birds or pigeons, a capon or veal, or whatever [kind of meat] you want; soak in water, put in a pot, salt, bring to boil, debone, cover again with the stock, add parsley; and when boiling, add coulis [thick vegetable sauce], vinegar, sugar, saffron, pepper, cinnamon, both kinds of raisins, and limes; bring to boil and serve in a bowl.

That's better, isn't it? But I bet you'd still have a hard time actually cooking from this recipe. Where's the list of ingredients? Where are the quantities and proportions? What about caloric contents? Cooking time and temperatures? How many people does it serve? We've got used to taking certain elements of a cooking recipe for granted, but it turns out they just hadn't been invented yet in the 17th century.  

Another thing we take for granted is that it's usually the same person who buys a cookbook, reads it and cooks according to its recipes. In the 17th century, though, it was quite normal for these three roles to be separated. The book would have been purchased by someone who could afford it, that is, a rich nobleman or a magnate (the Polish equivalent of an aristocrat). Or, rather, it would have been his wife, the lady of the house. She wouldn't have bought the book for herself, however, but for the head chef (or "master cook") she'd had employed. It was the head chef's job to manage the entire kitchen staff, order the necessary ingredients from external suppliers and make decisions about what would be served on the lord's table (having agreed the menu and the costs with the lady). So the recipes in the cookbook would have been read by the head chef – an experienced professional who didn't need all the proportions, temperatures and cooking times, because he already kept this knowledge in his head. But here comes another twist: he would have read the recipes aloud – not to himself, but to the kitchen staff, who would actually carry the instructions out. We can tell this by the grammatical forms used in the book; it's always the singular second-person imperative, indicating a direct order that you could issue to your subordinate, but never to a magnate's wife (the owner of the book). Czerniecki, for example, would have never addressed his own employer, Princess Helena Tekla Lubomirska, by the familiar "''ty''" ("thou"), but consistently called her "Your Princely Grace, my Most Charitable Lady and Benefactress".

Let's go back to the recipe. What do we have here? Stewed meat with sweet, sour and spicy seasoning; taste combinations that most Poles today would consider typical for Indian or Thai cuisines, but never for Old Polish cookery. And yet, this is exactly the kind of cooking that the Polish lords of yore would have priced the most and this is what we will find throughout Czerniecki's cookbook. So does it even make sense to recreate these old recipes, if the final effect may well turn out inedible to our modern palates?