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).
The present paper deals with a late medieval culinary collection, Liber Cure Cocorum. The collection differs from the other known culinary manuscripts of the time due to its being written in verse. Altogether the poem consists of 137 recipes and four other fragments which introduce four sections of the collection: pottages, sauces, roast foods and ‘small cookery’. Most of the instructions included in Liber Cure Cocorum are known from other medieval collections, written in prose (cf. Hieatt 2006). In the article the collection will be analysed from two perspectives. First, the struc-ture of culinary poems will be discussed in order to examine the degree of their compliance with the traditional model of the medieval recipe. Next, although the authorship of the collection is anonymous, we will try to reveal who its author was and whom he meant as the target audience. For this purpose, we will pay attention to fragments in which the author directly refers to himself and/or to the potential reader. Additionally, any details included in the particular recipe components which might expose the potential poet and/or the audience will be discussed. By looking closely at the structure of the recipes and the intended audience, we will try to an-swer the question why it was written in verse rather than in prose.