Czerniecki's cooking style, as is evident in his book, was typical for the luxuriant Polish Baroque cuisine, which still had a largely medieval outlook, but was gradually succumbing to novel culinary ideas coming from France.

In this new wave of French gastronomy, exotic spices were largely replaced with domestic herbs with the aim of highlighting the natural flavours of foods.

Compendium ferculorum, written in Polish and promoting traditional domestic cuisine, which maintained a largely medieval outlook, may be seen as Czerniecki's response to the onslaught of culinary cosmopolitanism.

The work opens with Czerniecki's dedication to his "most charitable lady and benefactress",[a] Princess Helena Tekla Lubomirska née Ossolińska,[8] recalling a famed banquet given to Pope Urban VIII by her father, Prince Jerzy Ossoliński, during his diplomatic mission to Rome in 1633.

[9] Ossoliński's legation was famous for its ostentatious sumptuousness designed to show off the grandeur and prosperity of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, even to the point of deliberately fitting his mount with loose golden horseshoes, only to lose them while ceremoniously entering the Eternal City.

The list of vegetables includes, now largely forgotten, cardoon, Jerusalem artichoke and turnip-rooted chervil, or popie jajka (literally, "priest's balls"), as Czerniecki calls it.

[18]Czerniecki concludes these introductory remarks with an admonition against sprinkling food with bread crumbs and by avowing to focus on "Old Polish dishes"[d] to let the reader experience domestic cuisine before moving on to foreign specialties.

[21] The instructions in Compendium ferculorum are succinct and often vague, lacking such elements of modern culinary recipes as lists of ingredients used, measurements or proportions, and cooking times.

[22] Take a hazel grouse or a partridge, small birds or pigeons, a capon or veal, or whatever [kind of meat] you want, soak in water, put in a pot, salt, bring to boil, debone, cover again with the stock, add parsley.

[25] Czerniecki's cooking style, as presented in his book, is characterized by aristocratic lavishness, Baroque pageantry and fiery combinations of contrasting flavours.

Such fusion of excessively piquant, sweet and sour tastes, which modern Poles would likely find inedible, was typical of Old Polish cuisine, described by Czerniecki as "saffrony and peppery".

Its first edition was little more than an abridged translation of La cuisinière bourgeoise (The Urban [female] Cook) by Menon, a popular French cookbook, first published in 1746.

In his account of the fictional banquet in Book 12, the poet included the names of several dishes found in the oldest Polish cookbook, such as "royal borscht", as well as two of the master chef's secrets: the broth with pearls and a coin, and the three-way fish.

Who now comprehends all these, to our times quite strange, These huge platters of kontuz, of arkas, blancmange, And then cod with its odorous and rich stuffing comes, With musk, caramel, civet, pine nuts, damson plums; And those fish!

Last, a master-chef's tour de force comes into view: A fish uncut, with head fried, its middle baked through, At its tail end and swimming in sauce, a ragout.

To underscore that the feast represents an exotic bygone world of pre-partition Poland, Mickiewicz added to this a list of random dishes, ingredients and additives, whose names he found in Compendium ferculorum and which had already been forgotten in his own time: kontuza (soup of boiled and sieved meat), arkas (sweet milk-based jelly), blemas (blancmange), pomuchla (Atlantic cod), figatele (meatballs), cybeta (civet), piżmo (musk), dragant (tragacanth), pinele (pine nuts) and brunele (prunes).

What is intriguing about this literary link between the oldest Polish cookbook and the national epic is that Mickiewicz apparently confused the title of Czerniecki's work with that of Wielądko's Kucharz doskonały, both in the poem itself and in the poet's explanatory notes.

[49] According to the poet's friend, Antoni Edward Odyniec, Mickiewicz never parted with an "old and torn book"[k] entitled Doskonały kucharz, which he carried in his personal traveling library.

This addition, copied from Compendium medicum, a popular 18th-century Polish medical reference book,[52] differed in both writing and cooking style from Czerniecki's original work, and did not reappear in subsequent editions.

[50] Editions from the first quarter of the 19th century, published in Warsaw and Berdyczów (now Berdychiv, Ukraine) use yet another title, Kucharka miejska i wiejska (The Urban and Rural [female] Cook).

These changes in title indicate that the cooking style promoted by the Lubomirskis' head chef, originally associated with fine dining at a magnate court, eventually became part of the culinary repertoire of housewives in towns and countryside throughout Poland.

[20] Renewed popular interest in Old Polish cuisine has resulted in reprints being made since the turn of the 21st century,[14] including a limited bibliophile edition of 500 numbered leather-bound volumes published in 2002 in Jędrzejów.

[53] In 2009, the Wilanów Palace Museum in Warsaw published a critical edition with a broad introduction by food historian Jarosław Dumanowski presenting Czerniecki's life and work.