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.
Today, my son and I visited his grandmother and she had bought Schoko-Quarkbrötchen (a nice, if slightly heavy kind of bun with chocolate flakes baked into it). My son, though, asked for a Franzbrötchen. This above all marks him out as a proper Hamburger, but it also gave me the opportunity to involve him in producing that sticky confection – or to try, given he defected from the kitchen to watch an Asterix movie with his grandma. He enthusiastically helped eat them, though.
The Franzbrötchen is a legendary piece of local lore, its history lost in the mists of deep time, but like many such patriotic fables, it turns out to be an invention of the nineteenth century. Today, it is ubiquitous. No bakery in Hamburg is without the sticky, squashed cinnamon roll either in the buttery original or the many varieties that have been multiplying lately. Depending on the season, I can now get Franzbrötchen with nuts, chocolate, marzipan, streusel, plums, strawberries, pumpkin, apple, or cherry compote on my way to work. My preference is still the basic version, though.
Legend has it that Franzbrötchen were created by Hamburg’s bakers when the occupying troops of Napoleonic Marshal Davout demanded croissants. This is implausible because a) though they look a little like failed croissants, the technique is not similar at all, b) Hamburg’s bakers were quite capable of producing a flaky butter dough and c) croissants are not that old. Rather, they seem to be associated with the Franz’sche (French) Bäckerei in neighbouring Altona and make their first appearance in the 1820s. While this business had been founded by French immigrants, it was then run by a German family. There is no reason to think they were inspired by croissants, Emperor Franz, or a Franciscan friar’s medieval charity. The nineteenth century saw a creative explosion in confectionery. The Franzbrötchen is, after all, quite similar to the Danish cinnamon roll which was also invented then (and Altona was a Danish city until 1864).
So, what is this thing the Hamburgers are so proud of? Basically, a Franzbrötchen is a piece of butter-laminated yeast dough rolled up with cinnamon and sugar. Unlike a Danish pastry, it is not turned on its side, but squashed down the middle to expose much of the filling during baking. This caramelises the sugar as it mixes with the melting butter, creating the sticky, brown layer covering a proper Franzbrötchen. It’s a great treat for a wet, drizzly, dreary day.
A professionally made Franzbrötchen depends on folding butter into its dough multiple times. Bakeries use machines to do this and produce many layers. If you are working at home, there is no need to. All you need is a yeast dough of flour, milk, eggs, and sugar that you roll out, spread with butter, fold over, and roll out again once or twice. Since you are working with yeast, you need to use room temperature butter rather than the iced blocks of classic pate feuilletée, but that actually makes it easier. After you have worked the butter layers in,m you rioll out the dough one last time, brush it with water (or melted butter, if you are looking for a very rich mix), cover it with sugar and cinnamon, and roll it up. You then cut the roll into pieces about four centimetres long and squash them dowen the centreline with the handle of a wooden spoon. That produces the characteristic shape of the Franzbrötchen.
If you make them at home, you are free to vary the spices – I like ginger and mace along with my cinnamon – and the richness, and produce small rolls rather than the large portions bakeries sell. I like to have them about 5-8 centimetres across, perfect for serving with tea. So far, all responses have been encouraging. Try it, and be sure to mention that the recipe was brought to the Hanseatic city of Hamburg by a baker sentenced for manslaughter to complete a pilgrimage to Rome, where he learned it from a Franciscan. It’s not true, but everybody likes to hear these kind of stories.
I suspect this recipe in Philippine Welser’s collection, unlike the previous one, is meant for dried plums:
47 If you want to make a plum (gwestenn) tart
Take plums and wash them cleanly in much water. Put them in a pot that is glazed on the inside and pour in good wine. Let them boil for a long time so the stones are removed easily. Then take them out and remove the stones. Prepare a tart base (bedalin) with sugar and cinnamon, and then put the plums on it one next to the other until it is full. Then sprinkle it well with sugar, cinnamon, and a little ginger and make a cut top crust. Let it bake, and when it is half baked, pour in one or two spoonfuls of this broth (the cooking liquid?) and brush it with an egg, then let it bake fully.
If this is made with dried plums, it may come out not too dissimilar to the date tart in recipe #42:
42 If you want to make a date tart
Take the dates and remove the kernels, and boil therm in good wine. When they are boiled well, place them on the tart base. Put on cinnamon, sugar, and ginger and let it bake nicely.
I wonder how well they would have held together as they were boiled, but it seems they were expected to stay discrete even after quite some softening. That suggests a rather tough, leathery consistency. Beyond that, I am sure the result was attractive. A similar combination of spices using mashed fruit is one of my favourites.
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).
A bit after the first recipe for sour cherry tart, Philippine Welser’s recipe collection gives two more:
36 If you want to make a sour cherry tart
Prepare a bottom as for other tarts. When it is finished, take a semel loaf, grate it small, and fry it in fat. Then spread it on the bottom and spread it out evenly. Break off the sour cherries (off the stalk) and lay them on this close together. Take out the pits (beforehand), that way it cooks better. Sprinkle them with sugar and cinnamon and make a fine thin cover on top. Cut this as you like and brush it with egg, and let it bake until it is enough.
(…)
53 If you want to make a sour cherry tart from juice
Take sour cherries and put them into wine. Let them boil. The wine must be sweet. When you boil it, put in a semel loaf and sugar. Then pass the cherries through and put them into a pan, let them boil and let them cool again. Then take sugar and cinnamon and put it into the above, put it on a tart base, and let it bake for a quarter hour. When you take it out, take melted butter and put it on the tart, and add sugar and cinnamon, that must always go on at the end.
54 To make a different sour cherry tart
Take sour cherries and remove the kernels. Lay them on a (dough) sheet one next to the other and put sugar, butter, raisins and spices on them. Put a thin crust (bedalin) on top and let it bake carefully.
Sour cherries were very popular in German cooking. We find them used in sauces and confections, so putting them in a tart should not be surprising. Aside from the consistency – achieved by thickening the liquid puree with fine wheat bread boiled in it and passed through a sieve – the three recipes are very similar and again attest to a the unadventurous nature of this recipe collection; sugar, cinnamon, butter. This is good, but it must have got old quickly.
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 had the time to try out something I came across a while ago. A half sentence in the Marvel of Milan, a praise poem by Bonvesin de la Riva on the extensive virtues of the city, describes an interesting use for walnuts:
Also almonds, may I say a little about this, wild hazelnuts, walnuts in incredible quantity, which are enjoyed all through the year and all citizens delight in them after any meal/dish (post omnia ferculla).They are also added, ground up, to cheese and eggs and pepper with which meat is filled in wintertime. There is also oil (made) of them which flows richly for us.
This mixture intrigued me, and I got myself some walnut meats and Rouladen beef for rolling up to try a few versions in manageable portion sizes. My first question was what to do about the eggs. Since there are recipes including boiled egg in stuffings for roasts from later years, I opted for hard-boiled egg processed with the nuts and cheese rather than raw to bind the mixture. The next variable to address was the choice of cheese, and I decided to make two stuffings with grated Padano cheese and one with mozzarella to see how they would perform. I do not think either is a very plausible candidate historically, but similarly fresh or aged cheeses would have been available. Processed into a paste with plenty of pepper, they produced a credible filling.
I do not have evidence for this, but for sheer curiosity I wanted to see how this filling would work with green herbs. This turned out to be completely superfluous because the flavour of the cheese and nuts overpowered them almost completely. Something stronger, though, perhaps green garlic, would certainly harmonise well. Given the hostility of the upper classes to anything that made your breath smell, though, I do not think this is likely. The rich, smooth consistency I got very likely was what the recipe aims for.
I spread the stuffing on the Rouladen beef and rolled it up, then cooked them at a low temperature to soften them. The meat turned out pleasantly tender, most likely because of the oil and fat from the cheese and nuts preventing it from drying out. Today, we tend to use bacon for this. It was also pleasantly tast, rich and unctuous. I had added some chestnuts to the mix because Bonvesin de la Riva also mentions them:
Green (fresh), they are cooked in the fire and are eaten after other foods in place of dates, and in my estimation they give a better flavour than dates. They are often boiled and thus softened (? sive lessa) and eaten with spoons by many, thus cooked.
When the water has been discarded after cooking, they are often eaten without bread, or rather in place of bread.
I suspect that when such a roast was prepared on a spit, adding chestnuts to the dripping pan would produce something very similar to what I got. We know this was done with other vegetables by medieval cooks. It is how traditional Yorkshire pudding is still made in a pan under the roast, and medieval Islamic cuisine had an entire class of dishes made this way called judhab. I cannot be sure this is what people did, but it is plausible enough to use until I come across that elusive recipebook from the age.
I love green tart, and these two recipes from the collection of Philippine Welser are interesting:
51 If you want to make a tart of greens (krautt dortten)
Take on your table sage leaves, eight marjoram sprigs, a handful of parsley, 5 leaves of lemon balm (melisen, Melissa officinalis), 12 leaves of bugloss, a little chervil (?), 10 endive leaves, 10 borage leaves, a little chervil (?), and about four times as much chard (mangelt) as there is of the other herbs. If they are clean, do not wash them and chop them small. Then put them into hot fat and fry (reschs) them in it. Then put them in a bowl and grate cheese of the best kind into it, a little ginger, pepper, sugar, and 10 eggs or more, until it is quite thin. Mix it well together and pour it out on a base that is very thin, and let it bake. When it is almost baked, put a little butter on it and sprinkle it with sugar. This is for two tarts, take half as much to make one and let it bake fully.
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.
While this is not quite exactly the identical recipe, the two are so close to each other that they are functionally the same thing. Recipe #51 gives an unusually detailed list of the herbs and spices required while #52 remains unspecific. Recipe #52 calls for cream, which #51 omits, and specifies the addition of a top crust which is not mentioned in #51. Altogether, though, this is the same filling of chard, herbs, cheese, eggs, and spices we know in various iterations from several other recipes. I am quite fond of it, though I haven’t tried this sopecific mix yet.
One interesting feature is that the two recipes use a different name for chard. Recipe #51 calls it mangelt, a cognate of the modern Mangold, while #52 has piesen, a word that today only survives in dialects. This suggests that the two recipes originate from different sources and were copied faithfully into one collection at one point without standardising the vocabulary. This flexible recombination of recipes and whole sections seems to be a feature of many German recipe collections.
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).
It is called a “tart” in Philippine Welser’s recipe collection, but really it isn’t. I need to try this.
50 If you want to make a sage tart
Take 2 bunches of sage and two bunches of parsley greens and pound them together in a mortar. Press the juice out thoroughly. Then take a pound of sugar, well pounded, and put it into a bowl. Take ginger to the value of one kraytzer and pepper to the same value, and a little salt, all pounded small. Further take eight eggs and a quarter (qwerttlich) milk, or a little more. Then take the above juice, mix it all together, coat the pan with butter and make the base as thin as possible. Have a care with the embers, you must often lift the lid and make sure that it doesn’t burn. It takes much effort. It is written that you should not use any base, but only flour strewn over the butter.
This is a fascinating recipe that doesn’t really need much in the way of guesswork. The “quarter” of milk probably refers to a quarter of a Maß, somewhere in the reqion of a cup. The spice measure is less certain, given how much prices could fluictuate, but it illustrates neatly that at this point, spices were still a luxury item. The Kreuzer referenced here was a silver alloy coin valued at 1/60 of a Gulden and represented somewhere around 10-20% of a day’s wage for a labourer. Spending that amount was not bank-breaking, but it is still the rough equivalent of putting 30-40 Euros worth of one ingredient into one dish. It is not a trivial expense unless you are someone like the Welser family.
I expect the consistency that is aimed for is a light, soft custard, slowly cooked at a gentle heat. The herb juice would coour it an even green, and of course it would be very sweet. If it was cooked in a greased and floured pan, removing it in one piece must have been a challenge.
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).
A continuation of yesterday’s cheese tart, this recipe from Philippine Welser’s collection is referred to as ‘English’, putting it in the direct tradition of a number of earlier sources.
49 If you want to make an English tart
Prepare as tart base (bedalin) as for any other tart, and take a cheese filling (kes tayg) as for the cheese tart described before. To bake it, you must do as follows: Put it into the tart pan and bake it for a good while until you think it is half baked. Then take it out and pour hot fat over it. Then put it back in straight away and let it bake well. When you want to take it out, take it out again and brush it with dissolved sugar (er lasnen zucker) and put it back in for a while. That way, it will turn nicely brown from the sugar. It should also be sprinkled with rosewater, that way it is proper.
There are a few interesting aspects to this, and it resolves that the er lasnen zucker of both this and yesterday’s recipe very likely is a clarified and caramelised sugar syrup. It also suggests that what made a tart “English” was at least in part a method of preparation, not just its ingredients. The sequence of baking the tart, removing it from the pan to soak it in hot fat, baking again, then brushing with sugar syrup and browning it over is fascinating and suggestive of the things that may be left unsaid in terser instructions elsewhere.
The filling is that of yesterday’s tart:
First take a good, sweet, fat cheese that is not old or crumbly (resch). Grate it small and put the grated cheese into a bowl, as much as you please. Add 2 times as much egg and 4 times as much butter so it can become like a thin batter (diner tayg), and add a very small amount of flour to it. Stir it well in the bowl, but do not make the batter too thin, so that you can keep it on the tart base (boden). Last, add some dissolved sugar (der lasnen zucker) to it. Then bake it nicely small, and when it is baked, sprinkle sugar on it while it is hot. Thus it is proper and good.
Like I said before, the proportions feel off to me, but not so much as to suggest an error. Depending on the relation of flour to egg and the consistency of the cheese, this could work. Here, the cooking technique involves a higher heat and may produce soome rising, especially if the egg is beaten thoroughly. I wonder what the purpose of applying hot fat may be, given there is already so much butter in the mix. It may be for browning, or to prevent sticking, or perhaps the crust is expected to absorb so much of it. This is certainly a recipe worth playing with.
Finally, it is a recipe we should keep in mind when inmterpreting earlier instructions for making “English” tarts such as this one from the Meister Hans collection of around 1460:
Recipe #95 Ainen ennglischn fladen mache den also
Make an English fladen (flat pie) thus
Item (take) soft cheese, butter and pepper, mingle it together, make a pastry case of dough and fill it with the cheese over half (halfway full). Let it bake in a pot (baking dish). This is called an English flad(en)
Clearly this is not the same recipe. However, it may be aiming for a similar technique, a certain fluffiness produced by high top heat, and maybe browning on top. I haven’t tried this or its parallels yet, but if I do, I will certainly take the recipe in Philippine Welser as a guideline for my experiments. Extrapolating backwards is perilous, especially in a tradition as allergic to proper names as the German one, but the recipes are too similar to be unrelated. It is at least a plausible approach.
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).
Another brief recipe: Cheese Tart from Philippine Welser’s collection.
46 If you want to make a cheese tart
First take a good, sweet, fat cheese that is not old or crumbly (resch). Grate it small and put the grated cheese into a bowl, as much as you please. Add 2 times as much egg and 4 times as much butter so it can become like a thin batter (diner tayg), and add a very small amount of flour to it. Stir it well in the bowl, but do not make the batter too thin, so that you can keep it on the tart base (boden). Last, add some dissolved sugar (der lasnen zucker) to it. Then bake it nicely small, and when it is baked, sprinkle sugar on it while it is hot. Thus it is proper and good.
Thus is an interesting recipe, if not an innovative one. It is quite similar to the rich “English” tarts found in a few earlier sources. These would typically combine cleese and butter with or without eggs. The addition of sugar is not surprising in the sixteenth century, but I am not entirely sure whether the der lasnen zucker mentioned here is sugar syrup (see clarified sugar) or melted sugar. In any case, clarifying sugar does not preclude caramelising it to some degree.
The proportions of 4 parts butter and two parts egg to one part sugar seem improbable, but bound with fine flour, this could become something like an extremely rich batter. It is not an ancestor of Yorkshire pudding though – baking at a low temperature would keep it from fluffing up. I am tempted to try it just to see what it will actually do.
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 need to limit myself to shorter posts for a while because I have a lot going on at work. Today, sixteenth century pine nut tarts. First by Philippine Welser:
44 If you want to make a pine nut tart
Take pine nuts, soak them and then clean them. Add sugar, cinnamon, and raisins and put it on the tart base. Prepare a crust (blad) on top and cut it, and when it is half baked, pour fat on it and let it bake fully.
Pine nuts belong to a set of fashionable luxury goods imported from the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century. Like lemons, oranges, and Parmesan cheese, they aided in imitating an Italian lifestyle aspired to by the very wealthy. They are not native to Germany. Thus, despite the simplicity, this is a very luxurious recipe. It is not easy to read how this would turn out because much depends on proportions and cooking techniques. The related recipe in Marx Rumpolt does not clarify much:
41 Also make a tart of pine nuts (piuni), small black raisins mixed in, and made nicely sweet.
(p. clxxviii v)
Good pine nuts are quite soft and will not be hard or crunchy, especially if the soaking takes place soon before adding them to the tart. It is possible that this is simply meant to blanch them – remove the brown skin covering the kernel – and they would be dried beforehand, though. This will make a difference to the consistency, with soaked nuts softening almost to a paste, especially if hot water was used. I used to use them as a base for sauces in Roman recipes before they were priced out of my range.
The next question is the quantity and consistency of the sugar being added. We have seen before that clarified sugar, which is called for in some recipes, was used as a thick liquid. This, added to soft nut meats in quantity, could easily produce something akin to the beloved modern American pecan pie. Crystallised sugar, on the other hand, is more likely to produce something crumbly and dry.
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).
Philippine Welser’s recipe collection also has a pumpkin tart:
43 If you want to make pumpkin tart
Take pumpkin and let it boil long (jber syedenn) and chop it small. Take grated bread and cheese and put it in. Add saffron, pepper, cinnamon and mace to it and also break 6 eggs into it and add a little fat. Put it on the tart base and let it bake nicely.
This is another pumpkin pie/tart recipefrom pre-1600 Germany, and it looks quite attractive. Combining boiled pumpkin or gourd with cheese, egg, and spices should produce something unexpected to modern diners, but potentially delicious. Note that around 1550, we cannot say for sure whether Eurasian lagenaria gourds or American curcubita pumpkins would have been used. The American cultivars quickly overtook the original, less palatable ‘pumpkin’, but the process was not complete this early. It is entirely possible that the distinction did not matter to the recipe’s writer. I intend to try it with one of the more aromatic curcubita versions for sale this autumn.
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).