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.
I spent Saturday with friends in South Germany, had some good conversations on very serious topics in my life, and travelled back on an overnight train, so I am not in the proper mindspace for anything complex. However, during my visit, I also had the chance to go to a local flea market and brought back some treasures that I am happy to introduce here.
The first find is a vintage cookbook. This is nowhere near as old as I usually work with, but fascinating in many ways. Baltisches Kochbuch – Alte Rezepte neu bearbeitet (A Baltic Cookbook – old recipes updated) by Brigitte von Samson-Himmelstjerna was created to preserve the cúlinary heritage of the Baltic German community after the forced resettlement of 1939, but was published in the early years of the Federal Republic. The book was a modest success and went through several editions until the 1960s. This copy has no year or print run given and no price indicated. The poor quality of paper and binding suggest that it was produced in the postwar years, but, since there is no note that the Allied military government approved it for publication, it likely dates to after 1948, probably after 1949. A handwriten dedication shows it was gifted in 1953, making a handy terminus post quem. This may be a first edition copy.
West Germany saw a proliferation of similar books and media riding a wave of nostalgia for the life of the German community in Eastern and Central Europe. After the ethnic cleansing that followed the Second World War, most of these people were resettled in West Germany, where they became a vocal political presence through their Vertriebenenverbände organisations. Much of this output is mawkishly naive and stridently anticommunist, often tinged with more or less overt racism. During the Cold War, it became popular reading matter well beyond the immediate group affected, and many dishes that were regional to places like Silesia and East Prussia entered the nationwide culinary mainstream this way. The semantic contortions involved in Königsberger Klopse, for example, deserve their own blog post at some point.
This book, written by a member of a prominent noble family, avoids overt political positioning. That is adroit, given the majority of Baltic Germans were forced to resettle as part of the pact between Hitler and Stalin to divide up Poland and the Baltic, not, as most other ethnic Germans were, by the victorious Soviets in 1944-46. The cuisine it describes is rich, but not overly complex, and culturally fascinating. That is not surprising; The Eastern Baltic was home to a German-speaking upper class that descended from settlers brought to local towns by the Teutonic order. Many of these towns were members of the Hansa and partook in its Low German-speaking culture, and newcomers of Dutch or Swedish extraction were largely assimilated into this milieu. The Baltendeutsche continued to maintain both their cultural identity and their prominent social position after the area became part of Russia, and many such families rose to prominence in imperial service. When they referred to their “Kaiser“, they meant the Czar.
Thus, the Baltisches Kochbuch casually groups together Sakusken (zakuski) and Piroggen (pierogi) with fruit soups, potato dumplings (Kartoffelklöße) and Frikadellen, and Maibowle along mead and Kwas (kvass). This is not a case of a settler culture adopting foreign dishes the way the Anglo-Indians took to curry, but a genuine local cuisine in which familiar dishes had several names in different languages and the cultural dominance of St Petersburg was accepted as unquestioningly as that of Paris was further west. Baltic German culture is as truly a lost world to us as the Holy Roman Empire, and it repays study richly.
Some truly fascinating points come up at first glance: Baltic cuisine sometimes preserves dishes in a form that seems closer to medieval ancestors than the more French-influenced tradition further west does. It also includes – by German as well as borrowed names – foods that we associate firmly with Russian, Polish, or Scandinavian cusine. As with the frequent overlap between German and Ashkenazi cuisines, Eastern Europe was a culinary continuum that united many influences. This book reminds an observant reader of that fact at every turn.
By way of an example, this is a recipe for a Sakuske or Vorschmack, a starter, that reminds me strongly of fifteenth-centuryliver Mus.
The calf liver is cleaned of sinews and membranes and twice put through the meat grinder together with the onion. Then the butter is stirred until fluffy (lit. zu Schaum, foamy), add liver, egg yolks, grated bread, salt, and pepper, and mix the mass thoroughly. In the end, the beaten egg whites and, if no onion is used, the parsley are mixed in carefully (zieht…unter). The mass is filled into a greased pan, stome grated bread is spread on top, and it is baked for 3/4 to 1 hour. Tomato sauce is served with it.
As an aside, another thing I found was two (separate) antique cookie cutters.
One is an octogram, an eight-pointed star, which is uncommon. Most cookie cutter stars are either six-pointed or, more rarely, five-pointed. The other is a pig, a traditional symbol of good luck and prosperity for the new year in Germany. And this means, of course, that I finally have there wherewithal to make some proper Hogswatch cookies. HO! HO! HO!
I will likely be away over the weekend and may not have time to post any recipes, so for today, have a longer one from the 1547 Künstlichs und Nutzlichs Kochbuch. Balthasar Staindl plays with food in a grand tradition:
Jellied Almonds that Can Have any Colours You Want
xviii) Almonds are white by themselves. Make it yellow with saffron and green with parsley. Red can be had from an apothecary. A thing called a coloured cloth (farbtüch) from the apothecary should be taken and boiled, then the water will be red. You can make almond (jelly) with that, but you must boil isinglass in it and mix in a good amount of sugar, just like with the egg cheese.
xix) You make brown colour this way: Take ground almonds and add tart cherry sauce, and the almond (jelly) will turn brown. To make it black, you take cloves, (and?) spice powder (gstüp) and water that has been boiled with isinglass. Boil peas in it and strain the pea broth through a cloth, and sweeten it with sugar. It will turn black.
To Make Red Color
xix) (the number occurs twice) Make it this way: Take water in which isinglass has been boiled, sweeten it, and strain it through a cloth. Then take red color from a sworn (i.e. guilded) apothecary, let the abovementioned water cool, and stir in the color. Pour it soon, as it will gel. You can pour it into any mould you want.
To Make an Almond Cheese that Has as Many Colours as You Want
xx) Make it this way: Pour one of the abovementioned (liquids) into a cup a finger high and let it gel. Afterwards, pour another color into it, not hot, only cold, or they will flow into each other. Pour in as many colors as you want until the cup is full. After it has all boiled and gelled, immerse the cup in hot water, but take it out again soon and turn it out over a bowl and you will have all the colors. Cut the pounded almond (jelly) lengthwise so you see all the colors one after another.
This is an impressive achievement if you can make it work, but it’s not exactly innovative for its day. In fact, there are similar recipes from much earlier sources. Again, Staindl works in the tradition of his forebears, as we should rightly expect from a respectable craftsman.
The Dorotheenkloster MS preserves a list of food colourings that is very similar to Staindl’s: Yellow from saffron, green from parsley, brown from tart cherries. Here, red is made with berries and black with toasted gingerbread rather than cloves. The list also includes blue, made from cornflowers, which Staindl omits here (but mentions in other recipes). Interestingly, where the earlier text emphasises the self-sufficiency of the well-run kitchen, Staindl twice mentions that red colour should be bought in. I am not sure what the ultimate source of this colour would have been, but the mention of a dyed cloth and dissolving it in water suggests it might be what contemporaries called a lac or lake. These could be produced from a number of materials, including kermes beetles and brasilwood, which are reasonably safe to eat. Staindl also mentions brasilwood as an ingredient in another recipe (vii).
Balthasar Staindl’s work is a very interesting one, and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
Another short recipe from Staindl’s 1547 cookbook:
Jellied Almond Paste
xi) You make jellied almond paste thus: Take isinglass and boil it in water. Then take parsley, chop it very finely, and stir it into a third part of the almond milk and sugar it well. This will be the green colour. Then take the other two parts, boil them in a pan, sugar them well and keep boiling. Boil one part to be white in one pan and make the third part yellow. Also pour the green part into a pan and leave it to gel. That way you have three colors. Then dip the pans into hot water and turn them out onto a clean board or bench. Cut them in a chequerboard pattern (geschacht) and arrange them in a bowl, once white, once yellow, once green, until the bowl is full, then serve it.
As we will see in a few cases, this recipe looks quite familiar from the earlier manuscript tradition. We find almost the same dish in the Königsberg MS about a century earlier. The text here clearly suffered in transmission, but the recipe obviously belongs to the same textual tradition:
If you want to make a jelly of three kinds
Take isinglass and boil it in water. Then take thick almond (milk) and parsley chopped small, grind the almond milk into a plate, add a third of the milk and sugar it well. That will be green. Then take these (other?) two parts and boil them in a pan, sugar them, let them boil and pour off one part of it into a small pan as white. Make the third part yellow and pour and pour (repeated) that into a small pan too. Boil and boil (repeated) the green color in a pan, too, and pour all of it into a pan. Thus you have three colors. Let it stand until it hardens, then lift it over the fire, pull it off again quickly and turn it out onto a board. Cut it schagzaglet (chequered i.e. ‘like a chessboard’) and put it into a bowl, once white, then yellow, then green, until it is full. Do not oversalt.
As a dish, this is not challenging, though pulling it off without reliable gelatin or modern refrigeration can be. It is interesting that some recipes pass from an earlier manuscript tradition into print. Seeing this close connection makes makes me wonder whether the attention to detail, ingenious gadgetry, and care for quality that are often considered Renaissance innovations also passed into the printed books from an earlier generation of cooks who did not write these things down.
Balthasar Staindl’s work is a very interesting one, and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
A playful dish from Staindl’s 1547 Künstlichs und Nutzlichs Kochbuch:
Chanterelles made from Almonds
x) Take ground almond as you grind it in a grinding bowl (reyb scherben) and mix it with sugar and rosewater so that it becomes quite white and stays thick. Press the almond paste into the mould of a chanterelle so it comes out again as the stem. Serve it nicely in a bowl and pour almond milk over it.
This recipe is not terribly unusual. Many things could be made of almond paste (not least fried or hard-boiledeggs for Lent), and while mushrooms are probably not the first thing that comes to mind, faking them is not that unusual. We have many recipes for faux morel caps. People liked illusion food.
What struck me reading this is the casual way it mentions a chanterelle mould. This is far from the only such instance, but it did not register with me quite how many different carved wooden moulds would potentially be hanging around a well-appointed kitchen: partridges, fish, crawfish, morels, and of course the usual ones for decorating marzipan or gingerbread. It is unlikely their manufacture ever supported an entire business, but surely it produced regular income for woodcarvers. Surviving examples are often beautiful and intricate, though it is hard to say whether they were usually like that, or whether these were kept because they were exceptionally so.
Balthasar Staindl’s work is a very interesting one, and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
As promised, here is the first recipe from my next project, the 1547 Kuenstlichs und Nutzlichs Kochbuch by Balthasar Staindl. It is fairly conventional:
Gerendte Milk
Take rice and pound it fine, strain it through a sieve, then take almond milk, make it boil in a glazed pot, and when it comes to a rolling boil, add the ground rice as it boils. When it thickens, pour it onto a wet bowl, let it cool and cut it in pieces. Serve it in a bowl, pour cold almond milk over it, and stick cinnamon bark into it. You can also color the gerendte milk using saffron or whatever other coloring you can get. Also arrange this in the bowl neatly.
Almond milk, rice, and sugar; There seems to have been no better way of signaling health-conscious luxury. At least here, the presentation is interesting. As a dish, this is a continuation of a long line of sweet, bland, white foods of no particular distinction.
Obviously, this is not a recipe for actual milk but intended to look – very broadly – like a dairy dish. The word gerendte is as cognate of gerinnen which today means to curdle or coagulate, but that is not what happens here. I suspect the dish was, at some point, meant to mimic curd cheese in whey and retained the name though at this point, sliced and coloured, it has very little in common with the original.
Balthasar Staindl’s work is a very interesting one, and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
My apologies for the long silence. I had planned to post a new recipe Sunday, but was laid low by a nasty GI infection that made it hard to write anything, least of all anything about food. Today, I’ll be posting what is probably going to be the last entry from the Dorotheenkloster MS. That translation is now done, and I will be starting on Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Künstlichs und Nützlichs Kochbuch and, time permitting, some excerpts from Konmrad von Megenberg’s Yconomia. But for today:
246 How to prepare meat in August
You can make all kinds of meat this way in August: When you want to boil it, let it boil up well. Pour off the broth. Pour on fresh water again. Let it boil until it is fully done, and serve it.
Absent refrigeration, dealing with meat in the heat of summer must have presented challenges. The legend that medieval cooks used spices to overpower the smell and taste of decay seems to be ineradicable, but is largely unsupported by evidence. This, however, is a genuine medieval technique for addressing the problem. Immersing raw meat in vigorously boiling water would certainly kill any bacteria and fungi that had colonised the surface, and discarding that water with the telltale ‘slime’ cooks will be familar with from meat improperly stored would have minimised any ‘off’ flavours.
Needless to say, I do not recommend the process. But medieval people did not have the facilities to safely store fresh meat on hot days and often wouldf not have had the luxury of simply buying new, either. Demand outstripped supply on urban markets most days, and in a large household that did its own slaughtering, you could hardly kill another calf or pig to get that specific piece again. They would take the chance rather than go without.
The Dorotheenkloster MS is a collection of 268 recipes that is currently held at the Austrian national library as Cod. 2897. It is bound together with other practical texts including a dietetic treatise by Albertus Magnus. The codex was rebound improperly in the 19th century which means the original order of pages is not certain, but the scripts used suggest that part of it dates to the late 14th century, the remainder to the early 15th century.
The Augustine Canons established the monastery of St Dorothea, the Dorotheenkloster, in Vienna in 1414 and we know the codex was held there until its dissolution in 1786, when it passed to the imperial library. Since part of the book appears to be older than 1414, it was probably purchased or brought there by a brother from elsewhere, not created in the monastery.
The text was edited and translated into modern German by Doris Aichholzer in „wildu machen ayn guet essen…“Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Erstedition Übersetzung, Kommentar, Peter Lang Verlag, Berne et al. 1999 on pp. 245-379.
A Happy Beltane and First of May to all! To properly honour the occasion, I finally set aside the time to edit and clean up the last source translation I finished: The 1550 recipebook of the Augsburg patrician and later morganatic wife to Archduke Ferdinand II Philippine Welser.
This manuscript contains 246 recipes, most of them culinary, with a heavy emphasis on pies and pastries and many elaborate fish dishes. It was probably produced for rather than by the owner, though it seems to include later additions in her own hand. If the dating to c. 1550 is accurate, it was likely part of her intended dowry, preparing a then teenage patrician woman for her future role as head of a wealthy household. Two similar works from the same city and time period survive, making comparison an promising exercise. One is the recipe book of Sabina Welser, a member of the same patrician family, which has already been translated into English. The other belonged to one Maria Stengler and only survives in a heavily normalised edition from the 19th century. I may undertake a translation at a later point, especially if the original manuscript should ever resurface.
Another short but interesting recipe from the Dorotheenkloster MS:
This painting of a bustard dates to 1731, unfortunately. I could find none earlier. Courtesy of wikimedia commons
243 Of a bustard’s neck
Fill the neck of a bustard or another bird this way: Take pork, hard-boiled eggs, sage, and herbs (kraut). Chop all of it together, fill the neck with that, and boil it. When it is boiled, lay it on a griddle while it is hot. Brush it with eggs or with an egg batter. Drizzle it with fat and with saffron and parsley and millet (?phenich). Grind that to a sauce (condiment) as best you can and serve it.
Many birds that people ate had long, flexible necks and cooks got creative in using them separately. This is one example of that: the neck of a bustard (Otis tarda) is stuffed with a herbed pork filling, roasted separately from the bird, and served as a dish in its own right. It is not quite clear what the baste consists of. Fat, saffron and parsley make sense as a yellow-green, flavourful liquid that would also stop the skin from drying out. The egg or egg batter would coat it from the outside, perhaps creating a crisp shell. The addition of phenich is a bit puzzling. As written, this could mean Italian millet (panicum). It is not easy to see how that would be included in the baste – as flour, cooked, or and entire grains? As ever, we cannot exclude the possibility of a scribal error. Perhaps, the solution is as easy as hoenich (honey). Still, it sounds like a fun idea to play with.
The Dorotheenkloster MS is a collection of 268 recipes that is currently held at the Austrian national library as Cod. 2897. It is bound together with other practical texts including a dietetic treatise by Albertus Magnus. The codex was rebound improperly in the 19th century which means the original order of pages is not certain, but the scripts used suggest that part of it dates to the late 14th century, the remainder to the early 15th century.
The Augustine Canons established the monastery of St Dorothea, the Dorotheenkloster, in Vienna in 1414 and we know the codex was held there until its dissolution in 1786, when it passed to the imperial library. Since part of the book appears to be older than 1414, it was probably purchased or brought there by a brother from elsewhere, not created in the monastery.
The text was edited and translated into modern German by Doris Aichholzer in „wildu machen ayn guet essen…“Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Erstedition Übersetzung, Kommentar, Peter Lang Verlag, Berne et al. 1999 on pp. 245-379.
Today, just briefly, a recipe from the Dorotheenkloster MS that resolves issues with a garbled one found in both sections of Cod Pal Germ 551:
248 A dish of a goose
Take a goose, stick it on a spit, and boil the innards. Take 4 hard-boiled eggs, a crumb of bread, caraway (or cumin – kummel) and a little pepper and saffron, and take 4 boiled chicken livers. Grind that together with vinegar and chicken broth (and cook it over) moderate fire. And peel onions, (cut) them thin and put them into a pot. Add fat and water and let them boil so they soften. Add 4 apples, so that it stays soft, and the put the ground ingredients and the apples and onions all into one pan. When the goose is roasted, cut it apart and put it into a clean serving bowl and (pour) the sauce over it. Serve it, do not oversalt it.
And thus we understand that the rather enigmatic ‘chicken pears’ of both recipes in Cod Pal Germ 551 are actually a scribal error and the recipe calls for chicken broth. Now the sauce makes sense, though it still seems excessively complex. I’m not quite ready to exclude the possibility that this recipe mashes together two or three alternatives.
As written, we have a sauce made with the cooked organ meats of the goose, chicken livers, breadcrumbs, hard-boiled eggs, onions, and apples. None of these are unusual in their own right. Meat, including roast liver, were often served in sauces made with pureed cooked liver that could include onions. Sauces thickened with ground-up hard-boiled eggsand/or breadcrumbs are also commonplace, and those made with onions or apples, or more rarely both, feature especially later in the sixteenth century. All of them in one sauce is possible, and I should try it at some point. But is is equally possible that a lost original recipe described one or the other.
The Dorotheenkloster MS is a collection of 268 recipes that is currently held at the Austrian national library as Cod. 2897. It is bound together with other practical texts including a dietetic treatise by Albertus Magnus. The codex was rebound improperly in the 19th century which means the original order of pages is not certain, but the scripts used suggest that part of it dates to the late 14th century, the remainder to the early 15th century.
The Augustine Canons established the monastery of St Dorothea, the Dorotheenkloster, in Vienna in 1414 and we know the codex was held there until its dissolution in 1786, when it passed to the imperial library. Since part of the book appears to be older than 1414, it was probably purchased or brought there by a brother from elsewhere, not created in the monastery.
The text was edited and translated into modern German by Doris Aichholzer in „wildu machen ayn guet essen…“Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Erstedition Übersetzung, Kommentar, Peter Lang Verlag, Berne et al. 1999 on pp. 245-379.
I am headed out to a medieval club event this weekend and have time, so it is just a brief recipe today. The Dorotheenkloster MS includes this gem:
Titivillus, the demon of scribal errors
213 For fritters in Lent
Pound nut kernels and figs together in a mortar, spice it well, and rub it through a cloth with cinnamon flower and mix it with mustard. Stir it with liquid honey (so that it becomes) quite like wax beads (? wachs pert). And whenever you want to, take a little of that and rub it with wine. That way, you have mustard.
It does not take long to realise that this is really two recipes, and we know at least the second one very well. The instant honey mustard that needs to be dissolved in wine for later use shows up in the Munich Cgm 384 collection:
12 Mustard
For a good mustard, take mustardseed and dry it cleanly and then pound it in very small in a mortar. Then pass it through a tight cloth (and pound) cinnamon flower and mix it into the mustard and stir it together with honey, properly like beaten wax (?recht als der wachs bertt). If you wish (to serve it), take a little of this and rub it with wine, and you will have good mild mustard.
The first half has parallels in both the Meister Hans collection (#114) and the Rheinfränkisches Kochbuch (#1), where it reads:
1 If you would make small fritters (kreppelin) in Lent, take nuts and figs and pound them small with each other and season it according to your will and heat it in oil and fry them in a leavened (erhabendem) dough in the way of dumpling-style fritters (kreppelin) in a pan and serve them cold at the table, those are well-tasting fritters
There are notable parallels between the Dorotheenkloster MS and Meister Hans as well as other South German cookbooks, so this is not surprising. It appears a number of recipe collections circulated and were recombined at will. This particular error may have occurred when a scribe paused mid-recipe, then continued at the wrong point. It suggests the copyist was either not familiar with culinary matters, or just did not care.
The Dorotheenkloster MS is a collection of 268 recipes that is currently held at the Austrian national library as Cod. 2897. It is bound together with other practical texts including a dietetic treatise by Albertus Magnus. The codex was rebound improperly in the 19th century which means the original order of pages is not certain, but the scripts used suggest that part of it dates to the late 14th century, the remainder to the early 15th century.
The Augustine Canons established the monastery of St Dorothea, the Dorotheenkloster, in Vienna in 1414 and we know the codex was held there until its dissolution in 1786, when it passed to the imperial library. Since part of the book appears to be older than 1414, it was probably purchased or brought there by a brother from elsewhere, not created in the monastery.
The text was edited and translated into modern German by Doris Aichholzer in „wildu machen ayn guet essen…“Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Erstedition Übersetzung, Kommentar, Peter Lang Verlag, Berne et al. 1999 on pp. 245-379.
