Anna Weker from Basel

It should come as no surprise that Polish text was incorporated so quickly into foreign books, given, firstly, the extraordinarily rapid spread of printing, and secondly, the emergence of literature written in the national language. In the Czech lands, publications in Czech began to appear much sooner than in Poland. Whilst, therefore, the first (surviving) Polish cookbook is only Stanisław Czerniecki’s *Compendium ferculorum*, and possibly the lost *Kuchmistrzostwo*, the Czech original of the latter work was written in the 16th century, and one might suspect that the manuscript sources from that country harbour even more treasures, including more than one recipe for ‘Štika po polsku’.

The earliest Czech recipes date back to 1535 and 1591. Shortly afterwards, in 1598, a German cookbook entitled ‘Ein Köstlich new Kochbuch’ by Anna Wecker featured another version of pike à la polonaise, titled ‘Ein Polnischen Hecht’. Less than 40 years later, a remarkably similar recipe, now labelled ‘a la polonaise’, appeared in France, and also – in 1686 – in Austria.

Pike ‘Polish style’, which took European tables by storm, is, in a sense, a prime example of Old Polish and Polish cuisine of that era as such. In keeping with the saying ‘peppery and saffron-coloured, my lady’, this is fish in a sauce that is at once sour, spicy, peppery and slightly sweet. This flavour, inspired by medieval contacts with the East, was, in a sense, the hallmark of Polish cuisine and also the reason why ‘Italian-style vegetables’ – introduced by Bona Sforza and her courtiers – appeared in Poland. It is worth noting here that Bona herself was not solely responsible for attempts to introduce, for example, artichokes or broccoli to the Polish table.

Before the queen’s arrival, numerous Italian courtiers were already living in Poland, tending vegetable gardens and, in a sense, exerting a culinary influence (albeit a minor one) on Polish dining tables. Pressure which dishes such as pike in a thick sauce – so heavily laced with spices that it essentially lost its original flavour – continued to resist.

Polish-style pike fascinated Europeans and featured in various cookery books partly because it was probably a characteristic fish (in the 16th century, Polish techniques for stocking rivers with fish and managing fish welfare were amongst the best in Europe) for these regions, as well as being, in a sense, ‘enhanced’ by intense, distinctly Polish flavours.

Recipes for pike à la polonaise from various cookbooks can be found at the end of this article; for now, however, it is worth taking a closer look at the dish itself. It is a fish that is cut into pieces, cooked in broth, and then part of it may be mashed with parsley and poured over with vinegar and wine to create a base for the flavour (sapor – a thick sauce). Finally, the last stage involves combining both portions of fish – the whole piece and the part used as the base for the sauce – in a single pot, and then seasoning it (to put it mildly) with a variety of spices. Recipes here list ‘all’ spices, or to be a little more specific: saffron, pepper, ginger, nutmeg, mace, lime and, possibly, raisins. As can be seen, the result is fish cooked in an exceptionally aromatic and rich sauce, in which the dominant flavours are precisely those typical of old Polish cuisine: spicy, peppery, sour, and slightly sweet – more or less in that order. If we look at the numerous recipes collected in S. Czerniecki’s book *Compendium ferculorum*, we can see that such combinations of spices are extremely popular in Old Polish cuisine. The ingredients usually include raisins, pepper, ginger, sometimes cloves, and, essential, ‘limunij’, as well as vinegar, wine and sugar or honey. It is, however, pike that has taken a truly royal place amongst the dishes that have, so to speak, been exported beyond the boundaries of Polish cuisine. It is worth noting, incidentally, that some recipes for pike mention that other fish, such as crucian carp or ‘white fish’, can also be prepared in this way. This means that it is not strictly and exclusively about pike, but simply about a certain, as we have mentioned, combination of flavours, ‘auf polnisch’, ‘à la polonaise’, ‘in the Polish style’. The highlight of such recipes is therefore the flavour composition of the rich sauce, rather than just this particular fish.

Let us therefore first look at the recipe that appeared in *Kuchmistrzostwo*, and which was discovered by specialist historians in a handwritten collection of recipes from 1757, compiled in Volhynia for Rozalia Pociejowa, née Zahorowska. This manuscript, published as part of the Polish series *Monumenta Poloniae Culinaria*, contains a complete copy of the 16th-century *Kuchmistrzostwo*. Below, therefore, is the recipe for ‘pike in root sauce, Polish style’:

‘Prepare an unsalted broth; scrape the pike clean, fillet it, and cut it into chunks. After rinsing it, place it in the broth so that it cooks thoroughly, then drain it, and place it in a bowl; take some onions, finely chop them and cook in a pot; when they have boiled, divide them into two. Then blend one half in a blender with parsley; when well blended, take some vinegar, wine or whatever you prefer, dissolve it in the saucepan, strain it through a cloth and pour it into the cauldron; place the pike in there and season it with all the spices except cloves; and if the sauce is too thick, add some raisins. You may prepare carp and other white fish in this manner, and place the other half of the fish on top.’

And next, according to the recipe found in Czerniecki’s work

‘Pike in its own yellow sauce’

“Take a pike, scale it, score it, parboil it, dice the parsley and cut it lengthways, then season with salt. And when you have boiled it, pour the stock in which it boiled into a saucepan, add the thickening, which you have dissolved in the flavour of the onion that was boiled. Add saffron, pepper, ginger, nutmeg and lemon. If you wish, simmer it further, and if more salt is needed, add some of the broth in which you boiled the fish. Boil all fish in this way, except for eel.”

Finally, here is a recipe also recalled by Professor Jarosław Dumanowski, taken from a handwritten cookbook dating from the 1680s:

“After gutting, scaling and chopping the pike into rings, salt it for an hour or two. Boil a handful of peas, a few onions and a few parsley roots, along with a few croutons of white bread; then strain all this through a sieve and beat in some eggs. Season it with wine, pepper, ginger, mace and saffron, then bring to the boil. Add sugar and butter, and, having rinsed the pike to remove the salt, cook it in this mixture.”

Paul Tremo, on the other hand, in the 18th century, instructs that pike should be prepared quite differently:

“Having gutted the pike thoroughly, leave it to rest in salt for an hour. Then remove it carefully, slice it into rounds, place it in a saucepan, sprinkle a handful of breadcrumbs and a knob of butter over it, pour in half a bottle of wine and a little less stock than wine, and bring it to the boil immediately. Add a little ground blossom or, if grated, some nutmeg, and season with pepper before serving. Add a lemon cut into slices, bring to the boil a few more times, and serve.”