Anastazja Pustelnik

Sister Anastazja Pustelnik, born Krystyna Pustelnik, was a Polish religious sister of the Congregation of the Daughters of Divine Love and one of Poland's best known cookbook authors. She was born on 13 October 1950 in Dylągowa in the Subcarpathian region. Her father died when she was six months old. After her mother's death she began to cook for the household at seventeen, taking on a small family farm with her brother before seeking paid work abroad.

At about twenty she worked in a glassworks in Vsetín in then Czechoslovakia, making lamp shades and cathode glass on piece rates. A roommate's letters from a novice in Kraków introduced her to the Daughters of Divine Love. In 1973 she entered the congregation. She cooked first for children with disabilities in houses run by the sisters, then for the Jesuit writers' community in Kraków, where her Sunday cakes and everyday meals became a quiet legend among guests of Wydawnictwo WAM.

A notebook of recipes grown from that kitchen became her first book, 103 ciasta siostry Anastazji, published by WAM in November 2001 in a first print run of about two thousand copies. It sold out quickly and eventually exceeded four hundred thousand copies. Further titles followed: 173 specjały, salads and preserves volumes, and other collections of home cakes and traditional dishes. By the late mid 2010s Polish reports put total sales of her books above four million copies, many sold through ordinary post offices as well as bookshops. Foreign coverage sometimes called her a Polish Nigella Lawson; she preferred to say she liked cooking more than counting sales, and that prayer belonged in the kitchen as much as flour and eggs.

She retired in 2018 and lived at the sisters' house on Kraków's Wola Justowska, reading, walking the garden and praying for readers who still queued for signatures at book fairs. In 2019 she received the Feniks Specjalny award for her contribution to culinary education in Polish families. A biography by Sławomir Rusin, Siostra Anastazja: Życie pełne smaku, appeared from WAM the same year.

Sister Anastazja died on the morning of 4 October 2026 at the age of 76 after cancer. The Congregation of the Daughters of Divine Love announced that she had gone to the house of the Father. Polish Catholic and secular outlets remembered a nun whose simple recipes brought millions of households to the same table.