A Royal Banquet in Cracow: Difference between revisions

{{data|29 March 2019}}

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. King Casimir obtained papal consent to open a university in Cracow in 1364 indeed. 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 Vladislav 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.   

Okay, but what does it have to do with culinary history? Nothing. That's why we're now going to focus on the other establishment, one which even has the year 1364 written into its logo. Here's what we can read about it in ''1,000 Places to See Before You Die'', a snobbish guidebook to the world's most overpriced hotels, restaurants and other tourist traps:

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 the lack of competition) -- had been founded in 1364 by Mikołaj Wierzynek (pronounced ''mee-{{small|KAW}}-wye vyeh-{{small|ZHIH}}-neck''), who must have been, therefore, Poland's first restaurateur. My first doubts appeared 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?

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 enjoyed tournaments, dances and banquets. The festivities were overseen -- again, according to Longinus -- by a 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  

As it happens, the great Cracovian chronicler, writing a 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 in 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 and 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.  

Finally, in September 1364, Emperor Charles and King Louis convened in Cracow to reconcile and swear friendship to each other, as mandated by Casimir and Bolko's arbitration. This was a purely political gathering, not a family event, so most likely without women. Other participants may have included dukes of Austria, as parties to the dispute, other aforementioned dukes and -- quite coincidentally -- King Peter of Cyprus.

[[File:Nuremberg chronicles - CRACOVIA.png|thumb|left|400px|A panorama (from the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle) of the Wawel castle, the city of Cracow and its suburbs, including the town of Kazimierz, founded and named after King Casimir the Great]]

Years later Guillaume de Machaut would sing of King Peter's peregrination, as well as the actual crusade against Egypt, in ''The Capture of Alexandria''. According to de Machaut's account, Charles and Peter leaved Prague on horseback, entering Silesia (a region between Bohemia and Poland) after three days, then passed a number of Silesian and Polish towns (some of which couldn't possibly be on their itinerary, so it looks like the poet just listed the place names he happened to know) and finally reaching Cracow, where they were greeted by other monarchs with much rejoicing. During the congress, the monarchs politely lent their ears to Peter's pleas and then supported his crusading efforts by letting him win the main prize in a tournament.

As for Wierzynek, Longinus gives us only his surname. A merchant family of this name, one of Cracow's most affluent and influential, used to live in the city for centuries. Its progenitor, Mikołaj Wierzynek, arrived in Cracow from the Rhineland, or what is now western Germany, at the beginning of the 14th century. And of course his name wasn't really Mikołaj Wierzynek, but Nikolaus Wirsing; it was only years later that his descendants Polonized the German surname to "Wierzynek". He served as a member of the city council of Cracow and later as a mayor of the nearby salt-mining town of Wieliczka. He was even named Pantler of Sandomierz, but it doesn't mean he was actually responsible for the royal pantry whenever the king was in that city; it had already become a purely titular office, but a prestigious one and reserved for the nobility. So how did a Rhenish merchant become a Polish nobleman? We don't know for sure, but there were basically three options to achieve this status: ennoblement, naturalization and imposture. Whichever it was, Wirsing was certainly a man of means who enjoyed a high level of the king's trust -- in other words, an ideal candidate for organizing a great banquet designed to wow the emperor and other monarchs, and to glorify Casimir the Great's kingdom, which was just making its debut as a serious player on the international stage.

There's only one but: Pantler Nikolaus Wirsing died in 1360, that is, 3--4 years before the banquet. So if it wasn't him who threw the most famous party of medieval Poland, then it must have been one of his family members. His family grew quickly after he had settled in Cracow, but, out of a number of Wirsings residing in Cracow in 1364, historians have been able to identify one particular Wirsing who could have been responsible for the banquet; it was the pantler's son, Nikolaus Wirsing Junior, who, like his father, served as a Cracow councillor and, unlike his father, isn't known to have accomplished much else. Hence the conclusion that Junior held the banquet, perhaps in his own house, but he did it in the name of the city, spending money from the city's budget.<ref>S. Kutrzeba, ''op. cit.''</ref>

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 place 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 did such a good job as a wedding reception manager, than why couldn't he repeat his own success during the political summit a year and a half later? Perhaps there was more than 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 restuarant "Pod Wierzynkiem" ("At Wierzynek's").<ref>{{Cyt  

</ref> Książek may have picked the Morsztyn House not for historical reasons, but because it had (supposedly) already housed a German-only restaurant during the Nazi German occupation.<ref>{{Cyt  

Unfortunately for Kazimierz Książek, the communist regime was already beginning to solidify its grip on Polish economy. Between 1948 and 1951 (different sources give different dates) the restaurant was nationalized and rechartered as the Wierzynek State Tourist-Gastronomic Establishment. You might think that an ennobled patrician wouldn't have been an ideologically appropriate namesake for a state-owned eatery in a people's republic. Yet, in this case (as in many others), nationalism had the upper hand over socialism. For the Nazi Germans, Nikolaus Wirsing was German enough to let them rename Senate Street (ulica Senacka) in Cracow's Old Town to Wirsing Street (Wirsingstraße).<ref>{{Cyt  

  | data    = 31 sierpnia 1941

</ref> And if Nazi occupiers had claimed this historical figure as their own, then it was time to reclaim him for the Polish culture as Mikołaj Wierzynek.

In Cold-War-era Poland, the Wierzynek restaurant was synonymous with Old Polish grandeur. This was where the few hard-currency tourists were directed to when they asked for the best restaurant in town and where international delegations were invited to sample what fine dining meant this side of the Iron Curtain. As Edward Szot, the restaurant's long-time manager, reminisced, the Kennedys came here to enjoy beef escalopes, George H.W. Bush polished off a haunch of venison and a pork-loin roulade, and Fidel Castro was regaled with export-grade chocolate. One of the most troublesome patrons of this establishment, known for its selection of game and other meats, was Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru -- a vegetarian!<ref>{{Cyt  

In the 1980s, Wierzynek declined from communist Poland's shop window to communist Poland in a nutshell; beyond a decrepit façade, the restaurant was busier cooking books than food, with the management habitually turning a blind eye to widespread theft and graft. In the following decade, Poland was no longer communist, but little changed at Wierzynek, which continued to be state-owned. Employees sold their own unrecorded merchandise, managers destroyed financial documentation and prosecutors failed to investigate it all properly. In the end, in 2002, only the restaurant's director, officially identified as Stanisław K., was sentenced to two years of probation for mismanagement.<ref>{{Cyt  

  | data    = 24 listopada 2002

Right next door she also opened an Italian restaurant, a sushi joint, a steakhouse and a chocolate shop -- just anything to keep abreast of Cracow's rapidly expanding gastronomic offer. As for Wierzynek itself, it remains one of the city's many decent eateries (although not among the [https://guide.michelin.com/pl/krakow/restaurants?max=30&sort=relevance&order=desc 25 places in Cracow that have made it into the Michelin Guide]) and certainly one of the most expensive.

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 with a 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 the emperor 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 plate 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, "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 towel from a hotel room and the hotel manager decides to make you a 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  

It's better than nothing, but still rather generic -- bread, wine, fish, various kinds of meath -- but no word of specific dishes or recipes. Which is not surprising after all; mind you, de Machaut wasn't personally present at the feast. Even if he based his poem on a first-hand account of the event -- either from King Peter himself or from a member of his retinue -- he must have guessed the culinary details himself. And he simply guessed what one just could have expected at a royal feast -- that is, on the one hand, various meats aplenty, which is what inhabitants of Northern Europe liked best, and, on the other hand, bread and wine, the attributes of Christianity and Mediterranean civilization. And of course fish, as any banquet longer than three days must have covered some lean days.

De Machaut wrote there's no point asking for further details of the feast, as grandeur of such scale can't be put into words anyway. Still, I'm going to try and imagine what kind of dishes may have been served on King Casimir and his visitors' table. Unfortunately, no Polish recipes from the Middle Ages have survided to our time, but we do have Czech recipes, which are worth looking at. Why? Because, firstly, the most important guest was Charles, a king of the Czech-speaking Bohemia who had been elected emperor, who resided at the Hradčany Castle in Prague, so it makes sense that some Czech recipes could have been included in the menu to honour him. And, secondly, the Poles generally looked up to Czech civilization, which stood much higher than their own at the time.  

  }}, 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 speech of great beauty and elegance by 16th-century Poles.  

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

Let's a take a peek, then, into the oldest recipe collection in the beautiful Czech language. It's ''Spis o&nbsp;krmiech kterak mají dělány býti'' (''Of Dishes to be Made''), known from a 15th-century manuscript, although some individual recipes 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 recipes we can find in the cookbook there are five which are described as ''po polsku'', or "in the Polish manner". One of them is Polish-style mutton and the remaining four are variants of ''štika po polsku'', or pike in the Polish way. Pike was a highly prized fish in the Middle Ages, so on a lean day it wouldn't have been out of place on the royal table. And how better to receive a Bohemian king in Poland than by treating him to a 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. Mix the other part of onion with saffron. And when you lay the pike in a bowl, put this onion on top.

| źródło      = ''Spis o&nbsp;krmiech kterak mají dèlány byti'' (rękopis z&nbsp;XV–XVI&nbsp;w.), quoted in: {{Cyt  

If someone wants to give this recipe a try, then please let me know if it's any good. As for me, I wouldn't want to waste good fish. Because what was so Polish about this dish? If you compare the recipes described as "Polish style" with others in the same cookbook, you will notice that the difference was in the method of thermal treatment. All of the supposedly Polish dishes were simply boiled, whereas in other recipes boiling was at best only the first step, which could be followed by roasting, baking, frying, stuffing, covering in aspic, etc.<ref>{{Cyt  

Pike in the Polish style would later make a career throughout Europe. It was copied from Czech cookbooks into German, Austrian, French, Russian and even Polish ones.<ref>{{Cyt  

  }}</ref> As European gastronomy was evolving and moving away from excess of exotic spices, this medieval recipe remained a souvenir of the colourful times when boiled fish was being seasoned with wine, pepper, ginger, mace and saffron (but no cloves!), while a Cracovian merchant was hosting princes, kings and an emperor.