Compendium Ferculorum – an insight into the structure of the earliest Polish cooking instructions

Abstract

Despite the growing interest in traditional cuisine, to the present author’s knowledge no linguistic analysis of Polish culinary recipes has been conducted so far. Even though numerous studies of recipes written in other languages, such as English, have been published, the structure and typology of early Polish recipes have, as yet, been ignored. The aim of the present paper is to investigate the earliest known Polish collection Compendium Ferculorum, and collate these fi ndings with what is known about this text type from other languages. Such an analysis will show whether the earliest Polish instructions, which appeared relatively late, i.e. in the 17th century, follow the pattern which is typical of the period or rather that of an earlier stage in the evolution of the recipe, as was the case with the earliest American recipes (Dylewski 2016).