The first thing you are likely seeing here is a recipe. I try to translate one recipe from a historical source every day, and here is where I post them. When I have time to experiment, I also post reports on actually trying out the dishes or short articles on other historical questions I find interesting. But mostly, it is recipes. I hope you enjoy them.
Just a short recipe from Philippine Welser’s collection today. It looks like an early form of puff pastry:
71 If you want to make Spanish pastries
Take good flour and prepare a dough with clear warm water. Salt it a little and work it well, that way it can be made to stand (last er sych auf setzenn). Prepare a sheet as long as your work surface (das bredt) is and quite thin. Roll it out with a rolling pin and spread that same sheet with melted bacon, but only half. Let the fat congeal and roll out the same sheet on top of itself again (read das selb blat yber ain ander for das selb baldt yber ain walger) and make another eight of these sheets, each over a rolling pin. And (make) as many pastry crusts (hefelin) as there are people at the table so that everyody has one. Fill them with what you have of gamebirds, chickens, or other chopped meats of veal or castrated ram. Bake them in the oven or the pan and serve them hot.
This is interesting, and I think it describes a kind of early pate feuilleté. Unfortunately, the key sentence that describes (I think) folding over the layers of dough over layers of fat depends on a reinterpretation. The wording as it stands makes no sense. Interestingly, there is a similar recipe in Marx Rumpolt’s New Kochbuch of 1581 that can help us interpret this one:
46. Prepare a dough with water so that you can roll it out well and thin. Grease it with melted fresh bacon and roll the dough up over itself. Make so much that all on top of each other it is as thick as an arm. And once it is thick (enough), cut it away in pieces, be they for small or large pastries. If you want to roll it out, moisten your hands with melted bacon that is not hot so the dough does not stick to the hands. Again work a pastry case of white dough and set the other one inside it that you have worked from bacon fat. For this dough holds up the Spanish one so it does not collapse. And you can fill them with chopped meat. Cut another piece of Spanish dough so you can make a top crust. Grease paper with olive oil, set the pastries on it, slide them into the voven and let them bake. See they do not burn; they burn easily because there is so much fatness in the dough. Open the lids and pour in good chicken broth so that the chopped meat does not become dry (herb), that way it turns out good and well-tasting. This is how you make small pastries. You can also use this kind of dough with fish. (clxxiv v)
This is still not entirely clear – and cleartly not exactly the same thing – but it is obviously a technique fore layering thin, unleavened dough with fat to achieve a tener, flaky crust. It is served in individual portions, likely because it would not hold up well as a large container. And most importantly, these Spanish pastries are defined not by what is inside them, but by what is around them. You can put in whatever meat you like, as long as it is encased in this kind of proto-puff pastry, it is a Spanish pastry. This looks like it could use some experimenting.
Philippine Welser (1527-1580), a member of the prominent and extremely wealthy Welser banking family of Augsburg, was a famous beauty of her day. Scandalously, she secretly married Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg in 1557 and followed him first to Bohemia, then to Tyrol. A number of manuscripts are associated with her, most famously a collection of medicinal recipes and one of mainly culinary ones. The recipe collection, addressed as her Kochbuch in German, was most likely produced around 1550 when she was a young woman in Augsburg. It may have been made at the request of her mother and was written by an experienced scribe. Some later additions, though, are in Philippine Welser’s own hand, suggesting she used it.
The manuscript is currently held in the library of Ambras Castle near Innsbruck as PA 1473 and was edited by Gerold Hayer as Das Kochbuch der Philippine Welser (Innsbruck 1983).
We had this meal on Easter Saturday, so it is about time I got around to posting it. Dishes mostly based on descriptions in de diaetis, the 11th-century Latin text from Salerno.
Our main dish was chicken slowly cooked with chickpeas and spinach, a loose interpretation of this:
…The first (e.g. capons, pigeons, partridges), if they are eaten cooked with vinegar and sugar, comfort the heat of the stomach. Thus says Rufus. If they are cooked with orache and chickpeas, and a little cinnamon, they loosen the belly.
I interpreted this conservatively, as a kind of stew cooked slowly, originally probably in some kind of thick-walled pot made of soapstone or pottery. We used an enamelled cast iron pot in which we started two soup chickens in chicken stock so as to ensure the meat retained flavour. If we had had dried chickpeas, we would also have added them at this point, but we were reduced to using pre-cooked ones due to the exigencies of holiday shopping in Germany. After long morning of simmering, I took out the chickens, stripped off the meat, returned it to the pot and added about 1.2 kg of fresh spinach. After the leaves had collapsed, I added the chickpeas and seasoned the mix with cinnamon and a light touch of pepper. That really was all it needed.
Our second main dish, and the vegetarian option, was based on a short passage in the chapter on eggs:
The diversity of eggs according to their preparation is multiple. There are those which are roasted, be it in the ashes or in the coals. And some are boiled in water. Others are fried in the pan in oil or in other fat. And some are cooked in water and oil with various condiments such as onion, pepper, cumin and similar. Others are cooked with meat and herbs in sauces. (…)
But those that re cooked in water and oil and condiments are most easily digested, aid coitus and multiply sperm, especially if they are cooked with roasted meat and with hot and aromatic condiments such as pepper, cinnamon, sugar, and similar.
Together with one on aubergines:
(…) but they are of less harm if they are tempered and split and filled with salt and then much later thrown into hot water and afterwards placed in different water and washed two or three times. After then are washed in water, they will lack all their blackness and they are then boiled and, the water having been discarded, are cooked again with fat meat of cattle or sheep or pork or similar. Those who wish to eat them without meat cook them with vinegar, oil of unripe olives, obsomagarum and similar things.
So, we know that eggs are cooked with meat in sauces which presumably means broken into the pot and cooked whole, not stirred in or boiled in the shell. I decided to apply this (speculative, but plausible) technique to a vegetarian preparation of eggplant and onions. This still requires an interpretation of what obsomagarum is. I believe it is a fermented sauce, possibly actually garum, but cautiously decided to go with soy sauce in this instance. The result was absolutely excellent, in my opinion the best dish in the spread. The onions were finely diced, the eggplant coarsely, and the whole cooked in a pan with the eggs broken into shallow depressions in the top towards the end. It was excellent with bread.
Third, and this is based on a number of church donation documents rather than a recipe, I cooked broad beans together with millet to produce a thick porridge. This was served to the poor as a charitable donation, enriched with either olive oil or lard, and would have made a meal in itself. Here, as a side, I held back on the oil. It also worked very well.
Finally, we had leavened light wheat bread and unleavened barley bread. Both were good, but the wheat bread (using modern cultured yeast) was more pleasant to eat. Two sauces – green herb sauce and honey mustard – were added because they were left over from the fish feast. They matched well, and both basic combinations are plausible; There is a green sauce in the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum and honey mustard in Palladius.
For dessert, we made apples baked in a crust again. This is a favourite:
(…) And thus it is good to eat the juice that is pressed from apples and the flesh discarded, or to find another way in which their hardness and sharpness is relieved. It is relieved in three ways, that is, by boiling in water because that way they acquire softness and humidity, or by suspending them above the steam of hot water, because that causes moistening and ripening, or by cutting them apart in the middle, removing the hard seeds inside them and in their place inserting sugar or honey, (…) and they must afterwards be wrapped in some kind of dough and then placed in the ashes or coals until the dough outside is cooked. Through this art, their softness and tastiness predominates, they are quickly digested, and the harm they do to the nerves is relieved. (…)
In honour of the holiday, we further wanted some kind of Easter-themed addition and settled on bunnies. The excuse was furnished by the instruction to combine almonds and honey:
(…) The oil that is extracted from them is better if their kernels are hard. But if they are first blanched (excorticentur), they should be given to eat as more digestible, more so if they are taken with honey or sugar. (…)
Obviously this in no way implies a paste. It could just be blanched almonds dipped in honey, or coated in it in a hot pan, or immersed in it to be taken out, or perhaps cooked into almond brittle. All of these are plausible. But I guess so is mashing them in a mortar, and this way we got bunnies.
After a long trip, I am back and finally have time to post again. Thank you for your patience. Today it’s another piece of the König vom Odenwald, in praise of the goose:
III In Praise of the Goose
This is the tale of the goose, It is not empty talk.
Some say of game That it is plentiful. Some speak of birdsong, I will bring you something better! Nightingales, thrushes and siskins: I will praise something better! Calandra larks, larks and blackbirds: There is no meat on them. Peacocks, chickens and ducks: That is nonsense. I will tell you quickly How useful a bird the goose is! Be it dark or light (meat), It produces fine morsels. Skin and thighs I will not run away from And the priest’s cuts (i.e. the breast) I will gladly sit down to. Wings and neck skin Are best roasted Neck, feet and innards Are not bad when boiled. That drips into the (roasting) pan As I can tell you! Let that not dismay you It will make a fine sauce. And that (the goose) lays large eggs From which you raise young geese Needs to be said here. If twenty men came to a house Where a goose lay by the fire The smell coming from it Would attract them strongly: All would think, there will also be enough for me. O mind who increases my art: The usefulness only just begins here As I will describe to you. People write with the feather quill And use it as a needlecase: You fletch bolts and also arrows With which a man defends the home In which he raises his children. I also speak of this: You use the bones to catch Quail which people eat. But even those who forgo these Will still have use of it: Tailors, too, must have them As I will tell you; They sew across a feather quill. Some are pleased to use A feather quill in their crossbow So the nut does not come loose. Those are still not all its uses: The feather quill is so fine That mercury is carried in it. Further, it is the custom to use geese To catch wolves with them By tying them to a hurdle That is a more promising manner Than using pigeons. You use the feather quill on a cap (zuor huben) And a slappe (flap or decorative dagging)hangs from it Which the young squire wears. It is also useful to the fisherman He uses the quill for fishing So that it holds up the line. But the best is yet to come, It is no lie that the quill is used in a stone crossbow (steinbogen) To keep the strings apart One should be equipped accordingly. Weavers spool thread over the quill To make clothes And make their living from them. To play the bagpipes (blaterspiel) Someone blows through a quill When piping to a dance And people take each other’s hands. A bent leg feather Is used to make bait for falconry You cannot do without it. The goose is also a good guard animal. A feather duster Is used on tables and benches And to fan the embers. Those who need it call for it And bind it to the helm Beneath it, the dust rises (from the field). If someone does not believe me: I call the family of Neuenstein to witness Who defended their honour under it On behalf of beloved, pure ladies And those of Veinau Who are looked at with high honour They carry head and neck (in their armory) It has long been allowed them. Now begins the principal use: You whistle on the bones To raise people’s spirits. And hear what people do on the beds In which the feathers are contained: You make children on them A man with his wife Their pure, tender bodies Make gentlemen and princes Who shall strive for honour Priests, knights, and sergeants, I believe I speak the truth, Burghers and peasants. This poem became me ill When I made it known It is called the praise of the goose And it was created boldly By the kuenig vom Otenwalde Here ends the poem of the goose Let nobody make claims on me (i.e. punish me) about it.
I admit I really like goose, but I’m nowhere near that effusive. At any rate, it is fascinating to see there is a canonical style of cooking a goose – the main body roasted with the drippings used to make sauce, cut-off pieces and innards roasted or boiled, and apparently the meat being served in slices and quite smnall portions (I would not try to serve a single goose to twenty, no matter how substantial the bird). That the breast is known as priests’ slices (pfaffensnitze) tells us both that priests were seen as gluttons and that goose meat was served sliced up, in small pieces.
The rest of the poem is no less interesting and reminds us that animal products sourced from the domestic environment of most people had immediate uses in a wide variety of applications.There really was no great degree of separation between the production going on all around them and the things they used every day. Nobody needed reminding why people were doing the jobs they were doing.
The actual examples chosen are an odd assortment, but they make sense in the context of someone familiar with the life of the lesser nobility and senior secular clergy, people equally at home with bookkeeping and the hunt. The ‘stone crossbow’ is a weapon designed to hunt birds which lauinches small sonten wedged into a pouch on a double bowstring. I am not sure whether this is a particularly early description, but it is an interesting one. Clearly the author expects this to be a familiar item. The ‘feather duster’ is most likely an entire wing, probably dried or smoked, that could be used to fan fires, bust surfactes, and mounted on a helmet with more dignity than the poofy feather-covered stick we associate with the word today. Finally, a fisherman using a quill “so that it holds up the line” suggests something a lot like modern angling with a fishing pose. That likely was more recreational than professional.
Der König vom Odenwald is an otherwise unknown poet whose work is tentatively dated to the 1340s. His title may refer to a senior rank among musicians or entertainers, a Spielmannskönig, but that is speculative. Many of his poems are humorous and deal with aspects of everyday life which makes them quite interesting to us today. The evident relish with which he describes food and the fact his work is first recorded in a manuscript owned by the de Leone family led scholars to consider him the author of the Buoch von Guoter Spise, but that is unlikely.
I have not abandoned my blog, but today is the first day I have some time by myself (the geandmother is on site and has decided the kid needs some proper spoiling) and the laptop up. I have also found some fascinating stuff for when I am back at my desk, but for now it’s just this recipe from Philippine Welser’s collection:
67 If you want to make a goose pastry
Clean the goose completely and scald it well in water. Then take it out and press it down in the middle so it flattens and widens (jn der mit wol yn die breyde). Then take the spice that is described for capon pastry and sprinkle it very well, and then salt it very well. The take lemons, apples, pears, bacon, and caraway and stir it well together. It must be chopped a little, not too much, just the pears and the bacon. Fill the goose with that and arrange around it what is left of the filling. Lard the goose well and lay broad slices of bacon under the feet and the wings. Make a dough as though for venison pastries and wrap the goose in it (so that it is) shaped like a goose. Put it into the tart pan and let it bake.
This is interesting and represents as much of a technical challenge as an interpretatory one. The “spice that is described for capon pastry” is probably this:
…Then lay it into a bowl or platter and take the mixed spices as is described after this: 8 lot of ginger, 4 lott of pepper, 4 lot of nutmeg, 4 lott of cloves, 3 lot of cinnamon, pound all of that together and add a third part (dryttel) of salt, that makes eight and a half lott, this is proper with all pastries that are served hot. …
I am not sure how well this will work with goose, but it is certainly assertive. And that is just the beginning. Lemons (I assume not many, given their cost), apples, pears, bacon and caraway are added as a filling and arranged around the bird. The combination of apples or pears and bacon was not unknown as a goose filling earlier, incidentally. It is documented in other recipes. Combining it with lemons and such a strong spice mixture, though, seems excessive. In addition, we find bacon added. the last thing a modern goose needs to cook is more fat, but it seems that geese in the sixteenth century had leaner legs. we may be talking about a wild bird, but I doubt it.
The whole thing, wrapped up in pastry dough and baked, should be “shaped like a goose”, presumably a roast one. Also, since it is to be cooked in a tart pan, this implies either a smaller goose than is customary today (the more likely supposition) or a much larger tart pan than I have seen described elsewhere.
I may not try this simply because the failure potential is out of proportion to the cost, but it intrigues me.
Philippine Welser (1527-1580), a member of the prominent and extremely wealthy Welser banking family of Augsburg, was a famous beauty of her day. Scandalously, she secretly married Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg in 1557 and followed him first to Bohemia, then to Tyrol. A number of manuscripts are associated with her, most famously a collection of medicinal recipes and one of mainly culinary ones. The recipe collection, addressed as her Kochbuch in German, was most likely produced around 1550 when she was a young woman in Augsburg. It may have been made at the request of her mother and was written by an experienced scribe. Some later additions, though, are in Philippine Welser’s own hand, suggesting she used it.
The manuscript is currently held in the library of Ambras Castle near Innsbruck as PA 1473 and was edited by Gerold Hayer as Das Kochbuch der Philippine Welser (Innsbruck 1983).
I will be travelling with my son and there will probably not be time for many extensive posts in the coming week or so, so here is what Philippine Welser’s recipe collection says on venison pastries:
64 Further, how to make a venison pastry
Take the venison and parboil it in half vinegar and half wine. Then take pepper and salt and coat (lit. roll) long slices in it. Lard the venison so it is well larded. Then take pepper and salt and sprinkle it well everywhere. Then make a dough of second quality flour and take two eggs and a little melted fat and warm water. Make an elastic dough from that and roll it out in one large sheet or two, depending on how much venison there is. Fold one over the other when the venison is in it and make a wreath around it or otherwise close it neatly, as women know how to save (wyes fraw retten kan). Brush it with egg all over and put it into the tart pan and bake it slowly for three hours. Make a hole at the top and pour in half vinegar and half wine and pepper, and let bake for another hour.
65 To make a venison pastry
Take the venison and let it boil well in wine and vinegar so it is half boiled. Then take it out, lard it well, spice it well, and lay much bacon at the bottom. Let it bake for two hours.
66 Further to make a venison pastry; I think this is better than the above
Take the venison and boil it in water for an hour. Then let it cool. Cut long (strips of) bacon and take spices like pepper, ginger, and a little cloves , and salt; use much pepper, stir it all together, and coat (lit. roll) the bacon in it. Lard the venison well with this, and what bacon you have left over, lay (in the pastry crust) with the venison. Take the leftover spices and sprinkle it all over the venison. Make a kneaded (uber schlagenn) dough for it with only flour of second quality. Poke 5 holes in the top and let it bake for 4 hours.
With just pepper and salt, larding, and wine and vinegar as a cooking liquid, these recipes have a very contemporary feel. The instructions in recipe #64 to enclose the meat between two sheets of dough and then place it in a tart pan suggests the pastries were not very large. This would simply not be feasible with anything much bigger that a standard pie. The flavours work well together, but it is all rather unadventurous, even with the ginger and cloves added in #66.
Philippine Welser (1527-1580), a member of the prominent and extremely wealthy Welser banking family of Augsburg, was a famous beauty of her day. Scandalously, she secretly married Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg in 1557 and followed him first to Bohemia, then to Tyrol. A number of manuscripts are associated with her, most famously a collection of medicinal recipes and one of mainly culinary ones. The recipe collection, addressed as her Kochbuch in German, was most likely produced around 1550 when she was a young woman in Augsburg. It may have been made at the request of her mother and was written by an experienced scribe. Some later additions, though, are in Philippine Welser’s own hand, suggesting she used it.
The manuscript is currently held in the library of Ambras Castle near Innsbruck as PA 1473 and was edited by Gerold Hayer as Das Kochbuch der Philippine Welser (Innsbruck 1983).
I was writing about the capon pastry in Philippine Welser’s recipe collection we tried a few weeks ago, but the book actually contains several versions of capon or chicken pastries:
59 To make a capon pastry
Prepare the pastry crust (denn hafenn lit. the pot) as you know and clean the capon as you know, chop off its head, neck, and feet and carve it as though it was served at the table, but not all through, only loosened. Then lay it into a bowl or platter and take the mixed spices as is described after this: 8 lot of ginger, 4 lott of pepper, 4 lot of nutmeg, 4 lott of cloves, 3 lot of cinnamon, pound all of that together and add a third part (dryttel) of salt, that makes eight and a half lott, this is proper with all pastries that are served hot. Now put as much of that spice on the capon as it requires and sprinkle it well with this spice between the wings and elsewhere, wherever it needs it. Then put it into the pot and lay in 4 long slices of fresh bacon and another 4 slices lay on it (on the bottom and top?). If you have no bacon, use fat. Then put a top crust on it and put it into an oven or tart pan and stay with it until it rises (auff gatt). When it has risen, poke a hole in it or the heat will break it open. Then let it bake for another 2 hours, and when you want to put in liquid, take one egg and some verjuice, beat it well together, and pour it in at the small hole before it is fully baked. Then put it back into the oven and leave it in another good hour, that is proper. Brush the pastry with egg before you bake it.
60 If you want to make a capon pastry
Make the pastry crust as you know and take the capon and clean it well. Parboil it a little, but not long. Then take it and chop off its neck and its feet. If you want, carve it up, but not all the way through, and season it well with pepper, ginger, not much mace, and a little cloves and cinnamon. Put it into the pastry crust together with the neck and the feet, and add the yolks of hard-boiled eggs and raisins. Take capon fat or marrow and also put it in, and put the leftover spices on top. Add sugar, and do not forget the salt. Close it and let it bake slowly, and brush it well with egg all around.
61 If you want to make a capon or chicken pastry with herbs
Take the capons or chickens, chop up their wings, put them in water and let them boil up. Chop up the fat of ox kidneys or their marrow and chop all kinds of good herbs with that. Spice it well with pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and raisins and sugar. Take the capons or chickens, put them into the pastry crust, place the abovementioned on top and the sides until it is full (?bys hin nein kunptt). Close it with a top crust and put it into the tart pan. When it is half baked, add verjuice to broth suitable for soup (suben brye) or use wine, make a hole in the lid, and pour in the broth. Brush it well with egg and let it bake fully.
62 To make pigeon or chicken pastry
You shall not carve them up (?erlegen) like the capons, but crush their backs, wings, and feet. Otherwise, you treat them as described above with regard to spices and larding (steck), but without the bacon if you wish, as is also described of those pastries. These pastries must not bake too long, only about three and a half hours. You can also add liquid with an egg and verjuice. Let it boil well in there. If you have no verjuice, use wine that is sour.
These recipes follow directly after the instruction for making pastry crust, so the remark “as you know” is less despair-inducing than it usually is. Beyond that, they are also quite interesting in culinary terms. The proportions of spices and salt given in #59 even suggest a kind of standard meat pastry spice mix as well as telling us this recipe is meant to be served hot. Not all meat pastries were, and some were meant specifically to preserve meat and/or make it portable.
The idea of pre-carving the bird in recipe #59 also shows a sense of practicality, making it possible for diners to take ready portions out of a pastry without needing to saw at the bird in its inconvenient dough shell. The flavour is probably undistinguished, a lot of spices with a touch of sourness, but certainly not unpleasant. Recipe #60 adds sugar, egg yolks, and raisins for a fashionably sweet note, but we found it adapted well to our palates. I am curious to play with #61 with its undefined herbs and unspecified amount of sugar. It could be meant as a slightly sweetened, strongly aromatic chicken pie or something more reminiscent of cough drops, as this source often combines herbs with sugar.
The shift from capon to capon or chicken to chicken or pigeon from recipes #59 to 62 is interesting, but not surprising. It locates the recipes in the domestic sphere – chickens and pigeons were kept by many wealthy householders – and suggests that capons were more luxurious, which they were. For any serious reconstruction it is safe to assume that capons would have matched modern broiling chickens in terms of fat and tenderness while chicken was more like soup birds.
Finally, it should be said that the cooking times given are very unlikely to be anywhere near accurate. I suspect they are estimates since even at a lower temperature than modern ovens usually have, they seem quite excessive. I will give it a try at some point. Four to five hours at a modest 150°C seem unlikely to improve a single chicken, but I have been surprised before.
Philippine Welser (1527-1580), a member of the prominent and extremely wealthy Welser banking family of Augsburg, was a famous beauty of her day. Scandalously, she secretly married Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg in 1557 and followed him first to Bohemia, then to Tyrol. A number of manuscripts are associated with her, most famously a collection of medicinal recipes and one of mainly culinary ones. The recipe collection, addressed as her Kochbuch in German, was most likely produced around 1550 when she was a young woman in Augsburg. It may have been made at the request of her mother and was written by an experienced scribe. Some later additions, though, are in Philippine Welser’s own hand, suggesting she used it.
The manuscript is currently held in the library of Ambras Castle near Innsbruck as PA 1473 and was edited by Gerold Hayer as Das Kochbuch der Philippine Welser (Innsbruck 1983).
There is only time for a quick recipe today, so I will pick up a loose end from the crafting meeting: The green tart from the recipe collection of Philippine Welser.
Our full spread: apple tart, grape tart, beef pastry, chicken pastry, raisin marzipan and green sage tart (foreground)
52 If you want to make a tart of greens (krautt dortten)
Take young chard (piesen) and all kinds of fragrant herbs, wash them, press them out well, and fry them in fat. Then put them into a bowl and grate good cheese into it as well as a wheaten bread. Put this in with the herbs and stir it together. Take eggs and a little cream, colour it yellow and season it with good spice powder. Stir it together well and make a base, put it into the tart pan and pour the filling on it. Cover it with another (dough) sheet and close it with a wreath (braided edge). Let it bake, but grease the pan with fat beforehand, then it will not burn. If you want it sweet, add sugar. When it has baked for a while, but a hole in the top and put in some sweet butter and put it in (repetition?). You can also bake this in an oven.
This was an improvised addition to the menu on realising we had a vegetarian in attendance. I abstracted some of the tart crust dough for it and raided my friend’s gharden and fridge for green herbs. There was no chard to be had, but plenty of sage, some parsley, rosemary, and odds and ends. I chopped all of it, added some firm, mild cheese, eggs, cream, and butter, and processed it all into a coarse mix. The seasoning I opted for was assertively savoury, with pepper, ginger, nutmeg and mace. That is probably not true to the original intent – Philippine Welser’s recipe book tends to serve herb tarts sweet. We did it to make it clearly a main course dish for those who did not eat meat. It turned out good – all ‘green tart’ recipes I have tried so far did – and I may try it or one of its companion recipes in the envisioned sweet version some day.
Philippine Welser (1527-1580), a member of the prominent and extremely wealthy Welser banking family of Augsburg, was a famous beauty of her day. Scandalously, she secretly married Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg in 1557 and followed him first to Bohemia, then to Tyrol. A number of manuscripts are associated with her, most famously a collection of medicinal recipes and one of mainly culinary ones. The recipe collection, addressed as her Kochbuch in German, was most likely produced around 1550 when she was a young woman in Augsburg. It may have been made at the request of her mother and was written by an experienced scribe. Some later additions, though, are in Philippine Welser’s own hand, suggesting she used it.
The manuscript is currently held in the library of Ambras Castle near Innsbruck as PA 1473 and was edited by Gerold Hayer as Das Kochbuch der Philippine Welser (Innsbruck 1983).
The pastries are easiest: You simply fill them with something other than meat. Options are nearly endless, and ours was apples and raisins, from the Mondseer Kochbuch:
55 Fritters (Krapfen) with Italian raisins (wehlischen weinpern)
Take Italian raisins and take as many apples with them and pound them small. Add spices and fill it into the fritters and let them fry, and do not oversalt them.
These are very good and I already tried them in February. The main reason I included them here was to have something for anyone who didn’t feel like eating the illusion food. I need not have worried.
The main dessert was a pot of hot porridge topped with fried lardons and fried sausages on the side. That would actually have made a perfectly normal meal outside of Lent, which makes the illusion so effective. The sausages are from the Königsberg MS:
[[22]] Wilthu Prottwirst inn der Fastenn machenn:
If you want to make bratwurst sausages during LentTake good figs and blanch them, and grind them up, and you shall chop them beforehand. Place them on a board, add grated gingerbread (Leckogen) and roll it out as long as a bratwurst is. Make a thick strawben (a kind of fritter) batter with wine, dip the sausages in it and fry them. Serve them with sugar.
I had tried these several times before, but this time the batter was thin enough to make a halfway convincing bratwurst optically. Of course, it is actually a sweet, rich fritter, so heavy that I made the individual sausages the size of Nürnberger.
Along with them, there was porridge. In this case, it was rice – round grain, the kind most familiar to medieval German cooks – boiled to a mush in almond milk with a small amount of sugar. We have similar recipes in many sources.
Porridges of many kinds – the word Mus described this class of dishes – as well as soups were often served with a topping of fried onions or bacon pieces. This gives an otherwise often rather dull dish a twin flavour boost of fat and umami. No doubt there were also rules about how to share these, probably similar to the recorded ones for spices and confits at richer tables. Early modern folk tales sometimes reference conflict over fat on porridge, no doubt a feature of life in poverty.
In this case, though, our lardons were actually thin strips of apple fried in oil, from the Munich collection Cgm 384 II.
59 Crackling (gruiben) in Lent
Cut white bread into cubes like bacon and fry that in fat or in oil until it is brown, and strew that onto the spoon dishes (mueser) like cracklings, that is courtly. Also cut apples thus and also fry them in fat and also serve them on spoon dishes (mueßern) in Lent.
They were probably too sweet – modern dessert apples contain much more sugar than historical varieties – but they looked very convincingly like fried onions. More so than the fat bacon they were meant to mimic.
Altogether, it was a lovely dessert, and close in enough in appearance to get some surprised looks. Lent seems to have encouraged the creativity of medieval German cooks.
A friend was able to source fresh trout for our gathering at the easter weekend, so I could finally try out some of my fish recipes on my unsuspecting fellow medievalists. The result was a Lenten spread that was both adventurous and luxurious. Altogether, we had trout filled, baked in pastry, grilled with herb filling, and marine trout cooked “two ways”, all served with sauce, rice, and a salad. But the meal began with a soup, as the 1490 Kuchenmaistrey instructs us:
1.xxviii Item reinuisch (lit. Rhine fish) and bolcken (Ehlert reads this as dried fish)boiled in water together with greens (kraut dar bey) or with sauces, that is good. The same fish and all smoked or dried fish may be served in a pepper sauce or with soup and greens on all fast days.
This was simple to do: A basic vegetable broth – storebought because I only got there Friday mid-morning due to train delays – with young spinach for the kraut. That term can mean any kind of leafy greens, so we went with something classy rather than the more common cabbage. The soup was served out with a piece of smoked trout and a small breadroll. Opening a meal with soup is a modern convention, of course, but we are fairly modern in this regard.
There followed several fish dishes as the main course, first a plain grilled trout. I filled it with a paste of herbs and nuts, a recipe that isn’t really based on any specific source but that I use to have something that is certain to work and appeals to the less adventurous. There is a reference to filling fish with sage in Anna Wecker, though:
For bream, trout, roach, perch, eel, nase, and the like, take mace and cloves. Also put sage behind their ears (gills) (and) into their bellies. Prepare it well with the spices beforehand and salt the innards inside the cuts well. If they have none, place them on a griddle and dry (roast) them gently. The vinegar makes them nicely firm.
The trout were very fresh and flavourful and the herb paste sharp, so this was a success.
Then, there was trout cooked in a pastry. This was based on a recipe in Anna Wecker’s Köstlich New Kochbuch of 1598, a spice mix to rub the fish with and bake them:
Cut them, then let them lie in vinegar overnight or from the early morning until the evening. Then prepare put them in the pastry case with pepper, ginger, mace, cloves and cut sage like you know (to do) with salmon. That is a hearty fish for pastries for those who know how to cook it right. You may add lemons, but they add nothing to it except ostentation (herrligkeit) because they dry out and stick to the top crust. You eat trout in place of salmon. Bake it for an hour and a half. Adorn and shape (the pastries) according to whether they are large or small. I will not take too much time here, (do) as was said before with pike, carp and (other fish) that are good for roasting.
Again, this is straightforward and uncomplicated: Let the fish lie in vinegar, then rub it with spices, wrap it in pastry dough and bake it. The pastry dough we used was a plain egg-enriched hot water paste shaped by my far more artistic kitchen companion. The result was delicious, though it was slightly challenging to get the bones out.
The next dish was slightly more of a technical challenge. I tried a proof-of-concept for fish cooked three ways. This conceit shows up numerous times in the sources and seems to be a perennially popular dish going back straight to Abbasid Baghdad. Meister Hans has one description of it:
Recipe # 257 von ainem visch gepraten, gesotn und gepachen dem thue also
Of a fish that is roasted, boiled and fried; do (to) it thus
Item if you wish to make three kinds of dish out of one fish that nonetheless stays whole: Take it and lay it on a griddle, and sprinkle the head part with flour and drizzle it with hot fat until it appears to you to have had enough of this and it turns brown.
Around the middle part, wrap a nice white cloth, around and around, and pour hot wine and water mixed over it, and salt the wine and water. Sprinkle the middle part with that a little and steam (seud – more usually means seethe or boil) it nicely until it is enough. And add a little blood to the wine.
Salt the tail part nicely and stick it with a knife and place embers under it, and roast it at a low temperature on the griddle.
This way, you have three dishes of one fish, that is one fried, the second boiled, and the third roasted.
I used a marine trout, frozen, to have a fish that was large enough to try out at least two of the three methods, but I would love to do this on an actual fire and weith a fish large enough to actually accommodate all three methods. Here, I wrapped the from part in a clean cloth soaked in wine which the tail section was drizzled with oil and dusted with flour. Cooked in the oven, it turned out quite good. The flesh was notably different, bith the wine-poached section moister, the flour-dusted end firmer and flakier. Both were good, if unremarkable, but this is definitely something to develop. Serving a whole fish cooked this way along with a battery of sauces as other recipes envision would make a lovely centre dish for a feast.
Finally, I wanted to see how hard it was to produce a filled fish, a recipe that occurs in several sources in a wide variety of versions. This is the one from the mid-15th century Innsbruck MS:
50 If you would make a filled fish (gefulten visch), detach the skin starting from the tail and take out the flesh, and boil it with spices (read gewurtzen for gelburtzen) and raisins. Place that back into the skin and close it with skewers (zwecken), and then roast it or serve it in a ziseindel sauce and do not oversalt it etc.
Getting between the skin and the flesh proved difficult and required much fine work with a small knife, but once I had managed to produce an opening, it was possible to loosen the insides with a blunt, flat butter knife and even the fingers quite effectively. It is still a hassle, but definitely not as hard as I had feared. Removing the flesh required cutting the backbone with shears, but getting it off the bones was ahgain easier than I thought. I added extra fish – frozen fillets – to bulk it out, seasoned it with ginger, pepper, cinnamon and cloves, added raisins, processed it (in lieu of a mortar) and returned it to the skin. For the first trial run, I opted to poach rather than roast it for fear of having it fall apart, but it proved quite durable. Closing it up again – we used thread rather than wooden skewers – was not easy, but the problem proved getting through the belly skin at all rather than tearing or damaging it.
The cooked fish was cut into slices to serve it, which proved difficult, and turned out tasty, though by common consent not as tasty as the grilled fish. I will have to try roasting it the next time.
Along with the fish, we had a raisin-honey sauce, a rice porridge, and a green salad, all suitable for Lent. The whole thing was excellent, and I feel a lot more confident addressing fish now.
I am still not finished writing up the fish feast we had on Good Friday, but here is a small thing I tried out on Saturday with our Sicilian Norman supper. It is based on a passage in Isaac Iudaeus de diaetis in the translation of Constantinus Africanus:
(…) Some cook them (beans) in water, and some roast them by the fire. Those (beans) that are cooked in water are more laudable because the water takes much windiness and grossness away from them, especially if the first water is thrown away and other water substituted. And two ways also apply here: either they are cooked with their shells or without them. Those that are cooked in water with their shell are hard to digest and windy (…) Those cooked without their shells are less windy and faster to digest. And if a sauce is made for them with some heating ingredients (such as long pepper, ginger, and almond oil) it is the perfect medicine for the act of coition. They are sometimes also eaten with mint, oregano, cumin and similar ingredients which diminish their windiness and inflation even more. Those that are roasted by the fire have less windiness, and they are very hard to digest except is they are soaked in water after roasting and eaten with cumin, mint and oregano. …
Boiling beans is nothing new, obviously, but roasting them by the fire intrigued me. It sounded a lot like the crunchy toasted chickpeas so popular today. I decided to give this a try and provide some snack food to the weavers and seamstresses upstairs.
Of course this is not the season for fresh beans, so I had to take recourse to dried ones. Even so, fava beans – the only kind available in Europe in the 11th century – are not easy to find here. A Turkish grocer eventually provided a bag. I steeped them in warm water overnight, shelled them, and laid the kernels out on a baking sheet to roast. I also added some chickpeas to gauge the process and have something that would be palatable even if it failed.
Though the idea would have been interesting, I decided against the sauce of ginger, long pepper, and almond oil. Instead, I liberally sprinkled the beans with cumin, oregano, mint, and salt and drizzled them with olive oil before putting them, in a convection oven at 200°C. The result was quite excellent, though some were very hard. I am fairly sure they would still have been good soaked in water, but eaten crisp and warm, they were too tasty to try that.
Isaac Iudaeus de diaetis universalibus et particularibus, originally written in Arabic in the late ninth or early tenth century, was translated and adapted by Constantinus Africanus in the late 11th century and circulated widely in Italy and beyond soon afterwards. While the original applies to a different context, it is still reasonable to use it as a guide to the advice that Siculo-Normans would have found useful. It is an open question how much the original was altered in translation – I cannot say since I read no Arabic. However, the extensive reference to eating pork suggests that some alterations took place.
