Alchemical diary

At the end of the 17th century, the cook of the Bishop of Shumlyansky, Zenon Brovar, created his masterpiece, a dish of perfect taste, and wrote it down in a recipe book. This “most perfect taste” was eventually lost along with the manuscript, having survived numerous editors, illustrators, and censors who aspired to immortality, leaving their voices on these pages. The autobiography, the recipe book, and theological treatise merge into a single palimpsest — one of the brightest examples of the Baroque search for truth through the play of symbols. Ostap Ukrainets’s efforts have collected and arranged these notes, and now, for the first time in over three hundred years, they are ready to be presented to the eye of a discerning reader.

Only do not neglect your attentiveness in diligently and attentively reading this book for the benefit of your soul. — Meletii Smotrytsky

If you read this book and sermons, you will find in them sufficient material from which you can compose sermons for the praise of God, for the refutation of heretics, for the edification of the faithful, and for the salvation of your soul. — Joanikii Galyatovsky

Why is reading stories very useful for every person? Because if they were not described and presented to the world, everything would go down to the ground together with the body without a trace, and people, as if in darkness, would not know what happened in past centuries. — Anonymous

This book is like a walk for the brain, during which dogs do not attack you. — Kateryna Dudka, wife of Kateryna Dudka's husband

A lot of Ukrainian literature is about kitchen matters. We love to cook, treat, and eat; we are used to expressing love through food. Baroque, inclined to seek deep connections between the smallest things, allows us to see the highest Truth and the Lord's Love even in a piece of bread and butter. Philosophy and theology, physics and ethics are present in every dish as fully as in the macrocosm, the whole wide world. It is about the infinitely great and holy things hidden in the infinitely small and mundane quests of cooking that Zenon Brovar and his numerous editors tell us.

Written and arranged by Ostap Ukrainets
The title and some marginalia were transcribed by Viktoria Lopukhina
The lettering was set by Viktor Kharyk
The cabbage cherubs were depicted for the binding by Yulia Dolynska
The garden images were created by Iryna Stabrovska
The heraldry was invented by Kateryna Omelyanenko
Edited by Olga Petrenko-Tseunova
The layout was arranged by Olga Zhirnova
The layout was set by Bohdan Mokriev
The integrity of the book was provided by Ilya Strongovsky
The book was blessed with her patronage by Lilia Omelyanenko