More than one cookery book from the 15th-18th centuries mentions, among other things, fish, or more specifically 'Polish-style' pike. The term appears in various culinary publications in Germany and the Czech Republic, and from the 17th century onwards in Austria and France. Such a rapid incorporation of the Polish recipe into foreign books should not come as a surprise, given firstly, the extremely rapid secularisation of printing, and secondly, the issue of writing in the national language. It was much faster to publish in Czech than in Poland. So, while the first (extant) Polish cookery book was only the "Compendium ferculorum" by Stanisław Czerniecki, and possibly the lost "Kuchmistrzostwo", the Czech original of the latter was written in the 16th century, and one can suspect that manuscript sources from that country hide even more treasures, among which would be many a recipe for "Štika po polsku".

The first Czech recipes date back to 1535 and 1591. Shortly afterwards, in 1598, the German cookbook Ein Köstlich new Kochbuch by Anna Wecker contains another version of pike in Polish, entitled Ein Polnischen Hecht. Less than 40 years later, an extremely similar recipe already labelled 'a la polonaise' appears in France and also - in 1686 - in Austria.

The Polish-style pike, which conquered European tables, is in a way an exemplification of Old Polish cuisine and the Polish cuisine of the time. According to the saying "peppery and saffron, my lady," it is fish in a sauce that is at once sour, spicy, peppery and sweet. Such a taste, inspired by medieval contacts with the East, was, in a way, a hallmark of Polish cuisine and also the reason why 'Italian food' imported by Bona Sforza and her courtiers appeared in Poland. It is worth mentioning here that it is not Bona herself who is responsible for the attempt to introduce, for example, artichokes or broccoli to the Polish table. For before the queen, Poland was already home to a number of Italian courtiers who cultivated vegetable gardens and, in a way, exerted culinary pressure (albeit little in reality) on Polish tables. Pressure that was still resisted by dishes such as pike in a heavy sauce and so saturated with spices that it basically lost its original flavour.

Pike in the Polish way fascinated Europeans and appeared in various cookery books also because it was probably a characteristic fish (in the 16th century Polish stocking and fish welfare management technologies were among the best in Europe) for the area, and somehow "turned up" by intense, purely Polish flavours.

Recipes from various books for Polish pike can be found at the end of this text, but now it is worth looking at the dish itself. It is a fish that is sliced, cooked in broth, and then some of it can be smashed with parsley and doused in vinegar and wine to make a base for the flavour (sapor - a heavy sauce). Finally, the final step is to put both portions of the fish - the whole one and the one that is the base for the sauce - in one pot, and then season it with (to put it mildly) numerous spices. Recipes specify 'all' spices here, or a little more specifically: saffron, pepper, ginger, nutmeg, mace, lime blossom and possibly sultanas. As you can see, the result is fish cooked in an extremely aromatic and heavy sauce, in which the leading flavours are just typical Old Polish: spicy, peppery, sour, sweet - more or less in that order. If we take a look at the numerous recipes collected in the book Compendium ferculorum by S. Czerniecki, we see that such spice combinations are extremely popular in Old Polish cuisine. What is usually needed are sultanas, pepper, ginger, sometimes cloves, necessarily "limunij", as well as vinegar, wine and sugar or honey. However, it is precisely pike that has taken a truly royal place among dishes that have, as it were, been exported beyond the borders of Polish cuisine. It is worth noting, by the way, that some recipes for pike mention that other fish, such as carp or "white fish", can also be prepared this way. This means that it is not really about pike specifically and exclusively, but simply a certain, as we mentioned, set of flavours, "auf polnisch", "a la polonaise", "po polsku". The clou of such recipes is therefore the flavour composition of the heavy sauce, and not just this particular fish.

Let us first take a look at a recipe that was present in the 'Cookery', found by specialist historians in a manuscript collection of recipes from 1757, written down in Volhynia for Rozalia Pociejowa, née Zahorowska. This manuscript, published as part of the Polish series 'Monumenta Poloniae Culinaria', contains an entire copy of the 16th-century 'Cookery'. Below, therefore, is a recipe for 'pike in the root in Polish':

"Set a broth that is not salty, and scrape and split the pork, and chop it into bits, then, having rinsed it, put it into this broth so that it boils well, then drain it, and put it into a bowl, and take onions, and brew them in a pot, having chopped them finely, and when they boil, divide them into two. Then drill one half of it in the watering-place with parsley, and when it is well drilled, take vinegar, wine, or whatever you like, and dissolve it in the watering-place, and strain it through a handkerchief, and put it into a pot, and put there the sorrel, and all the roots without the cloves, and if it is thick, add raisins. And this way you can also work carp and other white fish, and put the other half of the fish on top."

And then to the recipe found in Czerniecki

"A pike yellow in its yucha".

"Take the szczukka, glaze it, scratch it, stick it on, cut the parsley into cubes and lengthwise, pawn it with salt. And when you boil it, pour off the soup in the pot in which it boiled, pour in the gooseberry, which you dissolve with the same taste as the onion boiled in. Give saffron, pepper, ginger, knob, limes. Add salt if you like, and if you need to add salt, pour in the soup in which you boiled the fish. Cook all the fish in this way, except for the eel."

Finally, a recipe also recalled by Professor Jarosław Dumanowski, from a manuscript cookbook from the 1780s:

"Having glazed the pike, drawn and chopped into a bell, soak it in salt for an hour or two. Then rub a handful of peas, a few cilantro and a few parsley roots, as well as a few croutons of white bread and crack an egg through a sieve. Stir in wine, pepper, ginger, mace and saffron and bring to the boil. Add sugar and butter, and having rinsed the pike from the salt, brew it all in."

On the other hand, Paul Tremo in the 18th century tells us to prepare pike in a completely different way:

"Having dressed the pike well, you will leave it to lie in the salt for an hour. Then take it out, cut the bell and put it in a saucepan with a handful of breadcrumbs, a piece of butter, half a bottle of wine, a little less broth than wine, and bring it to the boil. You'll add a little crushed flower or, dabbed, nutmeg, and toast it before serving. Put a sliced lemon in a plate and boil it a few more times before serving."