Old Polish Cookery for Beginners: Difference between revisions

Cooking according to centuries-old recipes can be a real challenge even for experienced chefs. There are, however, dishes so simple that even beginner cooks could hardly fail to get them right – whether hundreds of years ago or today (let alone today, I should say, with modern kitchen tools at our disposal). So here's a handful of easy recipes I've picked for culinary novices from the oldest printed Polish-language cookbook.

  }}</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  

  }} }}

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.  

Don't worry: among more than 300 recipes contained in ''Compendium ferculorum'' you can find a few dishes so simple that they haven't changed all that much troughout the ages and their recipes look surprisingly familiar, even if written in a rather old-fashioned style. These are mostly egg-based dishes, so they probably have been around about as long as people have been raising chickens. Let's start with the most trivial recipe, which is that for scrambled eggs:

Break the eggs, pour onto butter in a clay pot and, having fried them, serve in the pot; you may also chop up finely some young green onions or parsley.

Today we would rather use a teflon pan than a clay pot, but otherwise the recipe hasn't changed one bit. The dish is so pedestrian that it's weired the recipe has found its way into a cookbook written for master chefs working at magnate courts.  

If you deem the scrambled eggs to easyfor you and would like to try something a tad more challenging, then check out this recipe for thin pancakes, which are know in English as ''crêpes'':

Break eggs into milk and some flour, grease a clay pot or pan with butter, pour small amounts [of the mixture into the pot], fry into thin [pancakes] and serve doused with [melted] butter.

Break eggs into milk, and if you want, you can add some flour too, but it's better without the flour; add small raisins and cinnamon, pour onto hot butter in a clay pot, fry and flip, and once fried, dust with sugar and serve.  

There's a breakfast dish popular with Polish college students that is known under the fancy name, "''jajecznica na winie''", which literally means "scrambled eggs on wine". This is a joke name, of course; which college student would waste good wine (or even not so good wine) by adding it to scrambled eggs? The name actually comes from the expression "''co się nawinie''", meaning "whatever is at hand", which is exactly what ingredients are added to the dish (other than the mandatory eggs that is).

And yet, in Czerniecki's cookbook, we can find, beside the "simple scrambled eggs", a recipe for "''jajecznica z winem''", or "scrambled eggs with wine". This time, it's no joke; it's an egg dish made with actual wine. Here it goes:

I've decided to try out this recipe myself. I used three eggs, a teaspoon of sugar, a pinch each of salt and cinnamon or ⅓ glass of wine. Hungarian wine was the most popular with 17th-century Poles, so I chose a sweet Tokay for this dish.

I beat the eggs with the pinch of salt, then I added the sugar, cinnamon and wine, and pour the whole mixture onto a butter-greased pan. The original recipe doesn't call for rasins, but I figured they wouldn't make the dish any less authentic and added them as well.

The egg batter was quite fluffy at first, but then collapsed, which I believe was caused by the addition of wine, as it never happened to me before in regular omelettes. At least it was pretty easy to fold this omelette in half and even in quarter.  

I liked the distinctive winey aroma which lightly contrasted the sweetness of the sugar. And, what's also important, I was quite filled with this simple breakfast.