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If you have seen the wonderfully beautiful and appetizing film ''The Taste of Things'', you may remember this fragment of dialogue between the gourmets visiting the main character, Dodin Bouffant:

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| <poem>“We owe Antonin Carême the vol-au-vent. They say he invented it by snatching a botched puff pastry from the oven.”

These words perfectly illustrate the traditional approach to culinary history. The study of how people prepared and consumed meals has only quite recently become an area of interest for professional historians. In France, this began roughly in the 1980s; in Poland, in earnest, only in the current century. Before that, anyone writing about old Polish cuisine for a broader audience was typically a non-specialist whose publications didn’t amount to systematic scholarly research. Instead, such authors eagerly – and usually uncritically – repeated and embellished various anecdotes and curiosities, which had greater or lesser grounding in historical sources. Over time, these stories seeped into all sorts of compendia and encyclopedias – printed and online, Polish and foreign – with little factual verification. After all, it’s not a very serious topic, so why even bother? And besides, why ruin a good, appetizing story with fact-checking?

What I propose here is a slightly different approach: I would like to do within the realm of culinary history what MythBusters did in the field of physics – that is, track down oft‑repeated tidbits related to the  history of Polish (and not only Polish) cuisine and verify – as best I can – whether there is a grain of truth to them. My goal is to make it both interesting and informative – even if inexpert, because, just as the MythBusters are not physicists by training, I’m neither a professional historian nor a food specialist. I hope, though, that historians and food experts, too, will find it interesting or even inspiring.