About this blog

Hello and welcome to Forking Around with History – a blog about food and drink, as well as language, literature and history.

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:

“We owe Antonin Carême the vol-au-vent. They say he invented it by snatching a botched puff pastry from the oven.”
“Do you believe that story?”
“We’re not historians. But we like a good story, even if untrue.”

— Trần Anh Hùng: La Passion de Dodin Bouffant, 2023 (film)

Original text:

– Antonin Carême aurait inventé le vol-au-vent en rattrapant une pâte feuilleté qui aurait gonflé au four.
– Vous y croyez à cette histoire ?
– Nous ne somme pas historiens. Mais nous aimons les bonnes histoires. Même inventées.

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.

So let me invite you to fork around with history together with me, to recreate the origins and evolution of some of those legends and myths, and to debunk a few misconceptions about the history of Polish cuisine. And from time to time we may even cook something tasty.

Karol Palion

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