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 don’t have much time to write this weekends, so here are two recipes for food colour – blue and white – that can stand without much commentary:
Eggshell white. Early 17th century Dutch painting, courtesy of wikimedia commons
141 If you would prepare coloured foods, be it purees or fritters, prepare the colour with wine or vinegar. Blue colour (is made) from cornflowers, dry them in a mortar and pound them very small. Then mix them with vinegar or wine and leave them to steep, or keep them as long as you please. Also prepare green colour this way from (parsley) juice etc.
142 If you would prepare white (colour), heat (pren) eggshells in a pot filled with eggshells, and heat them in a brick kiln or a lime kiln or with a potter. Grind this to dust and then mix the dust with egg whites, thus it will be white, or mix it with vinegar etc.
There is not much to add here, other than that both cornflower blue and eggshell white are more than figures of speech. The former can be used to dye liquid foods like porridges or jellies. I suspect the latter is not really suitable for that, but would work well actually painting foods, something that people did in medieval kitchens of the upper class. It would certainly be preferable to lead acetate and likely less gritty than chalk at least. Eggshells are still used in traditional painting.
The Innsbrucker Rezeptbuch is a manuscript recipe collection from a South German/Austrian context. It dates to the mid-fifteenth century and survives as part of a set of medical and culinary texts bound together. The editor Doris Aichholzer published it together with two related manuscripts and drew attention to the less elaborate, more practical recipes. The manuscript is of unknown provenance, but has been owned by the Habsburg emperors since at least the early sixteenth century. It is now held at the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. An edition, German translation and commentary can be found in Doris Aichholzer: Wildu machen ayn guet essen… Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher, Peter Lang Verlag Berne et al. 1999
Eggs were a central ingredient. Illustration for the Teutsche Speißkammer
79 If you would prepare a wreath of four colours, make sheets of eggs. (Make) white ones from egg white, yellow with yolks, green with (herb) juice and egg white, and black also in this manner. Roll them over one another and then cut them in the length of two digits. Then stick them on a reed (schin), one colour after another, and tie it together like a wreath. Prepare a strauben batter and lay it in that, then fry it. After it is fried, pull out the reed. Then cut it on the top all around so you see the colours etc.
After the four-colour jelly of yesterday, this is clear evidence that whoever commissioned the Innsbruck MS liked colourful foods. It really looks like an early ancestor of East Germany’s Papageienkuchen (parrot cake), the multicolored layered cake traditionally made with jelly powders. While it is very likely not a culinary revelation – basically fried egg arranged in a circle, battered, and fried – it would require quite some dexterity and skill to assemble correctly.
The Innsbrucker Rezeptbuch is a manuscript recipe collection from a South German/Austrian context. It dates to the mid-fifteenth century and survives as part of a set of medical and culinary texts bound together. The editor Doris Aichholzer published it together with two related manuscripts and drew attention to the less elaborate, more practical recipes. The manuscript is of unknown provenance, but has been owned by the Habsburg emperors since at least the early sixteenth century. It is now held at the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. An edition, German translation and commentary can be found in Doris Aichholzer: Wildu machen ayn guet essen… Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher, Peter Lang Verlag Berne et al. 1999
Saffron being harvested, Tacuinum Sanitatis (Vienna) c. 1400 courtesy of wikimedia commons
75 If you would make a jelly (sultz) of four colours, take calves’ feet or sheep’s feet and boil them until the bones fall out, and then make the sultz with that. The green colour is made with parsley juice, add the feet to that and let them boil together and pass them through. The black colour is made with tart cherries (weichsel) or with dark toasted (prenten) bread, also add the feet to that. The yellow is made with saffron. Season all four colours. The white is made of almonds or nuts. Pass them through, and boil each colour separately and add a little wine, but not to the white. When they gel (gerün) and you wish to serve them, rub a serving bowl with honey, and let the jelly (sultz) harden (uberslahen) so it does not run together.
This is a lovely example for how medieval cooks played with colour. In this case, it is apoplied to jelly, a fashionable food that may have been quite a novelty still at the time. The process of extracting gelatin from bones and connective tissues is described here, which clarifies the meaning of sultz in this case. That word, a cognate of Sülze and related to Salz and Latin salsa, could still refer to either a bread-thickened, spicy sauce or to a gelatin and sometimes to a cross between the two, which may be the origin of the jelly.
The colouring agents are not surprising: Green is produced with parsley juice, black with dark toasted bread or tart cherries, presumably their juice or a preserve, yellow with saffron, and white with almond milk. These are common colourants at the time and recur in other recipes.
We are not told how to serve the jelly, but the instructions to spread honey on the serving bowl and the reference to jelly running together (always a risk with imperfect quality control and no artificial refrigeration) suggest that it was cut into shapes and arranged on the bowl, possibly in a pleasing pattern. A similar recipe from the Königsberg MS imitates a chessboard.
This is still a long way from the jellies of the Renaissance both in terms of flavour – it cannot have been terribly attractive compared to the sweetened wine concoctions of de Rontzier – and its architectural ambition. But it represents the beginning of a grand tradition and an established medieval habit of conspicuous display: If you could not make your food interesting in terms of taste, you could still make it colourful.
The Innsbrucker Rezeptbuch is a manuscript recipe collection from a South German/Austrian context. It dates to the mid-fifteenth century and survives as part of a set of medical and culinary texts bound together. The editor Doris Aichholzer published it together with two related manuscripts and drew attention to the less elaborate, more practical recipes. The manuscript is of unknown provenance, but has been owned by the Habsburg emperors since at least the early sixteenth century. It is now held at the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. An edition, German translation and commentary can be found in Doris Aichholzer: Wildu machen ayn guet essen… Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher, Peter Lang Verlag Berne et al. 1999
77 If you would make filled dough sheets, make the sheets very thin with a rolling pin. Then take eggs and boil them hard, chop them, and prepare them as if you wanted to make halved eggs. Season it and also add honey, and spread this on the sheets. Then prepare a strauben batter and roll them in it, and fry them. Cut them into slices and serve them dry or serve a ziseindel sauce over them.
“Monks’ Eggs” rolled in dough sheets and fried.
Again, we find our ‘sheets’, and here they are clearly of a stiff dough that can be rolled out thin. Pasta dough or even phyllo works, though I prefer using a slightly thicker, leavened dough in most cases. The ‘halved eggs’ referenced here occur earlier in the collection:
54 If you would make halved eggs, boil the eggs hard, shell them, cut them apart and remove the yolks. Chop them and add parsley and season it and salt it, and mix it with another (raw) egg. Fill it back into the white, fry them in fat, and (serve) a pepper sauce (pfefferlein) or a ziseindel sauce over it, or serve them in a yellow sauce (prülein) and salt them, or serve them fried in strauben batter.
So we have cooked egg mixed with spices and parsley and slightly sweetened with honey rolled up in a thin sheet of dough that is then dipped in batter to seal it and fried. The principle was quite common, and I actually tried a fairly similar recipe from the Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch a while ago:
90 Item monks’ eggs (monnikeseigere). Take eggs, scramble them and make a sheet (of dough). And put the scrambled eggs into the sheet. And wrap it all around. Take eggs and close (brush) it all around. And fry it in butter or animal fat.
That was pretty good, though I suspect actually dipping the rolls in a thick batter would make them hold together better than brushing them with egg did.
The Innsbrucker Rezeptbuch is a manuscript recipe collection from a South German/Austrian context. It dates to the mid-fifteenth century and survives as part of a set of medical and culinary texts bound together. The editor Doris Aichholzer published it together with two related manuscripts and drew attention to the less elaborate, more practical recipes. The manuscript is of unknown provenance, but has been owned by the Habsburg emperors since at least the early sixteenth century. It is now held at the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. An edition, German translation and commentary can be found in Doris Aichholzer: Wildu machen ayn guet essen… Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher, Peter Lang Verlag Berne et al. 1999
81 If you would prepare a soup of hemp, take raw hemp and pound it well. Then pass it through. If you wish, boil it in a pan and cause it to curdle. Prepare a puree from the curds (topfen), add spices and honey, and leave it white as it is. Prepare it as thick as a thin porridge (ein prein, der len sein).
82 If you would press the hemp, also prepare it this way and press it, and then serve it sliced and put sweet spice powder (ein suss stupp) on it. That is good etc.
83 If you wish, fry it like pressed milk. But if you do not wish to eat it with fat, it is better sweetened (ersust) or you prepare it with a ziseindel sauce or pfeffer sauce.
84 If you would roast it, you can also well do that. If you eat fat (smaltz) on a Saturday, you can prepare and season it exactly like pressed milk.
85 If you would make a cake (chuechen) of it, prepare it in the same manner as a porridge (den prein) and pass it through, and also let it cook in a mortar.
Almost every German recipe collection from the 1400s and 1500s includes multiple mentions of almond milk and often instructions for making it. This is despite the fact that almonds were very hard to grow in a Central European climate and mostly had to be imported from the Mediterranean at great expense. Hemp thrives in Germany and was cultivated widely, but it is rare for a recipe collection to mention it more than in passing. That is what makes these recipes so interesting.
In technical terms, there is nothing surprising here. You can make butter, curds, and cheese out of almond milk and though the latter was usually faked by thickening or gelling agents, there are descriptions of this in the sources. The fascinating part is that we have, assembled in one place, an alternative to the luxury option in all its versatility. Hemp seeds (or possibly entire seed pods) ground up with a liquid and strained will produce a milky emulsion just as almonds will. Hemp milk is still in use, and regaining popularity. It could be used to make curds that were then eaten fresh, with honey and spices, or pressed into a cheese that could then be sliced and eaten or used in other dishes. The suggestion of serving it in a ziseindel sauce – a combination of fruit and spices – vaguely recalls paneer masala,
It probably should be said here that the hemp referenced is European Cannabis sativa which produces very little THC and even if eaten in large quantities will not produce an appreciable psychoactive effect. Until the first half of the twentieth century, hempseed and hempseed oil were commonplace food items in Central Europe, though they were regarded as uncouth. Hemp was grown mainly for its fibres used to make rope and cloth. The seeds were a byproduct and usually eaten by those who could not afford more highly regarded oils. As the twentieth century progressed, hemp cultivation receded and the seeds increasingly became used as animal feed rather than human food. However, there are some traditional recipes that still use them. I will point out, in case this needs saying, that making milk or cheese with psychoactive cannabis oil is not recommended for a variety of reasons even where this would be legal.
An interesting point in recipe #84 is the mention of eating smaltz on Saturdays. In contemporary German, the words schmalz is not yet limited to rendered animal fat, but it does refer to melted and solidified animal or dairy fats in contrast to liquid vegetable oils. The author clearly envisions that some people will eat this on a Saturday (a meatless day in the stricter Christian tradition of the time) while others do not. I am not sure whether this refers to individual piety or regional distinctions in church jurisdictions, but it casts an interesting light on the way fasting practices could differ.
I have very little experience with non-dairy milks or with cheesemaking, but this may be worth trying out.
The Innsbrucker Rezeptbuch is a manuscript recipe collection from a South German/Austrian context. It dates to the mid-fifteenth century and survives as part of a set of medical and culinary texts bound together. The editor Doris Aichholzer published it together with two related manuscripts and drew attention to the less elaborate, more practical recipes. The manuscript is of unknown provenance, but has been owned by the Habsburg emperors since at least the early sixteenth century. It is now held at the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. An edition, German translation and commentary can be found in Doris Aichholzer: Wildu machen ayn guet essen… Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher, Peter Lang Verlag Berne et al. 1999
The Month of May, 16th c. Flemish Book of Hours courtesy of wikimedia commons
76 If you would make a gespot in May, take a flowing cheese and slice it into a courtly serving dish (hoff schüssel) (in pieces) larger than a finger. Break eggs into it, stir it well, and fry it in May butter etc.
We have come across this recipe more than once before, and compared to the recipes found in Meister Eberhard and both sections of Cod Pal Germ 551, this one is short. The instructions given there are more detailed and Cod Pal Germ 551 II specifies a stirring technique that unfortunately is hard to interpret:
35 A dish in May
If you would make a dish in May that is called a gespot (mockery?), take flowing cheese onto a serving dish and cut it into thin slices. Take six eggs with that and break them over the cheese. Also take May butter into a pan. Put the cheese with the eggs over a fire and draw it under the middle (zeuch es unter miten – I suspect a pushing motion from the sides to the centre of the pan) until it is smooth. Serve it, and do not oversalt it.
Above all, this is yet another of the dishes assocviated with the month of May that I spoke about at the culinary symposium of the Instytut Polski this April. It combines the culinary delights of the season – fresh cheese, eggs, and unpreserved May butter. I am not entirely sure how to interpret the intendecd outcome, but it may be meant as a kind of cheesy omelet, stirred until it is smooth and just barely cooked. I do not think the pieces of ‘flowing’ (i.e. fresh, not aged) cheese are meant to stay intact. As to why it is called a gespot or gespott, I have no idea. The word can mean a mockery, but that need not be the origin of the name. Regardless, it could be quite attractive.
The Innsbrucker Rezeptbuch is a manuscript recipe collection from a South German/Austrian context. It dates to the mid-fifteenth century and survives as part of a set of medical and culinary texts bound together. The editor Doris Aichholzer published it together with two related manuscripts and drew attention to the less elaborate, more practical recipes. The manuscript is of unknown provenance, but has been owned by the Habsburg emperors since at least the early sixteenth century. It is now held at the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. An edition, German translation and commentary can be found in Doris Aichholzer: Wildu machen ayn guet essen… Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher, Peter Lang Verlag Berne et al. 1999
I apologise for missing out another day. I appear to have caught a rather unpleasant virus. For today, here is an interesting recipe from the Innsbruck MS:
74 If you would make a filled chicken, remove its skin so that it stays whole. Take roastable (pratigs) venison and bacon with it and chop it small while it is raw. Add spices and return it to the skin. Put it into a pot and let it boil, and then serve it in a good sauce (prulein) or dry it on a griddle etc.
Chicken minus skin – this is easier than it looks if you are willing to leave in the wings and legbones.
This may strike us as strange, but it was definitely not an unusual idea. I found (and tried) a similar recipe in the Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch a few years ago:
30 Item if you would make roasted chickens without bones, scald them well to measure and make (pluck) them clean. Clear them out (loosen the skin?) all around before you take them out. Cut them open a little above the wings or higher (?ofte up). Take out the insides (ingheweide – usually entrails) altogether there so that the skin stays undamaged. Then take the meat and the liver and the stomach and cook them until done. Take out the bones and chop it finely (thohope wol thomate clene lit: a lot and small in its proper measure). Add eggs and spices and bacon and raisins. Fill it back into the skin. Parboil it in water so that it hardens. Make as many of these chickens, as you need. You may boil or roast them. When they are done, serve them.
Boneless chicken, sliced open. Admittedly it looks more like roast bullfrog, but it was a first attempt.
First of all, this recipe tells us the idea was more general than a single recipe. Here, the meat is filled out with bacon and egg and the entrails are parboiled separately while the Innsbruck MS adds venison and the whole is cooked in the skin only (which no doubt required a great deal of skill and attention). Secondly, there is a bit more guidance in technical aspects. Unfortunately, the text is less than clear, but I suspect the intent of the possibly garbled sentence is to cut off the wing joints. Getting the wings out of the skin may well be impossible and is certainly more difficult than I would attempt. Much of the rest of the skin is surprisingly easy to loosen and remove.
It is rather difficult to have these chicken skins keep their shape (though that may be different if they are not delivered with the entire stomach cavity opened up, as modern chickens bought at market invariably are). I can only imagine that serving them whole and slicing them like a sausage must have made an impression on guests. That at least seems to be the intended effect in a boneless chicken, as the Mittwlniederdeutsches Kochbuch calls it.
The Innsbrucker Rezeptbuch is a manuscript recipe collection from a South German/Austrian context. It dates to the mid-fifteenth century and survives as part of a set of medical and culinary texts bound together. The editor Doris Aichholzer published it together with two related manuscripts and drew attention to the less elaborate, more practical recipes. The manuscript is of unknown provenance, but has been owned by the Habsburg emperors since at least the early sixteenth century. It is now held at the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. An edition, German translation and commentary can be found in Doris Aichholzer: Wildu machen ayn guet essen… Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher, Peter Lang Verlag Berne et al. 1999
The Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch (Middle Low German Cookbook) aka Wiswe MS or Wolfenbüttel MS is the earliest of the very few Low German recipe sources we have. The collection of 103 recipes was written in the late 15th or very early 16th century and edited by Hans Wiswe, a German scholar, in 1956. Very little is known about its context, but it shares some recipes in parallel with the Harpestreng tradition.
I am not entirely sure how these work, but they are fascinating:
Rolled-up. deep-fried pancakes, these are a much simpler version
68 If you would make filled sheets of eggs, take eggs and beat the whites separately. Take a little fat into a pan, only enough to cover the bottom, and pour the eggs into it. Make very thin sheets and also make sheets from the yolks. Spread the sheets (with) roast apples or with raisins or figs and then roll them over each other (welig si dann uber ein ander) and cut them like fatty sausage (rosen wurst). Stick 4 or 5 of them on a skewer of wood. Prepare a batter and roll them in it, then fry them, withdraw the skewers, and cut them open lengthwise.
69 If you would make filled slices (gefult sniten) in this manner, lay one slice atop the other. If you spread them (bestreichst), use four (apiece). Also fry the in the same manner and also cut them open into pieces (snitzen) etc.
This recipe is not only interesting in itself, but also for vwhat it tells us about the ubiquitous Blätter, the sheets variously described at times as of egg or of dough, but usually left undefined. Here, they are made of egg only, the whites and yolks separated, and I wonder how strongly the whites would have been beaten. The principle of turning egg whites into a froth was understood, but it is not attested for culinary use this early. Given the sheets are specifically described as thin, I suspect they are made of liquid egg white.
The filling is very likely cooked into a homogenous mass. With apples, this was typically done with honey and spices, raisins were cooked in wine until they were soft enough to mash. This could be spread even on thin and fairly fragile egg pancakes. Up to here, the recipe is clear. What I have yet to fully understand is how they are then rolled up and sliced, but I suspect we basically stack up pancakes, roll them into a long sausage and cut it into slices that are then skewered across their diameter. Knowing how one usually cut a rosen wurst, a sausage made with the rib meat of pork, would probably make this clearer.
The whole skewer is then dipped in a batter and fried. The description of rolling them in it suggests it was a fairly thick, heavy batter that would produce a solid, crisp crust. The resulting fritter would thus hold its shape as the skewer is withdrawn and the whole cut apart in the middle to reveal the spiral structure with its complex colours – white, yellow, brown or green, and likely a golden crust all around. I can absolutely see the appeal.
The second recipe for sniten, slices, is a bit more enigmatic. These may be bread slices, but that is not certain. If they are, they would have to be cut fairly thin and I suspect there was no way of actually rolling them, so they would just be stacked. It is then a simplified, cut-rate version of the first.
The Innsbrucker Rezeptbuch is a manuscript recipe collection from a South German/Austrian context. It dates to the mid-fifteenth century and survives as part of a set of medical and culinary texts bound together. The editor Doris Aichholzer published it together with two related manuscripts and drew attention to the less elaborate, more practical recipes. The manuscript is of unknown provenance, but has been owned by the Habsburg emperors since at least the early sixteenth century. It is now held at the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. An edition, German translation and commentary can be found in Doris Aichholzer: Wildu machen ayn guet essen… Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher, Peter Lang Verlag Berne et al. 1999
Modern conical spit for Baumstriezel, courtesy of wikimedia commons. The principle in this recipe is very similar.
64 If you wish to make a hollow roast (holpraten) of meat, chop the meat small and break eggs into it. Salt it and season it and add a little flour. Take a spit that is as large as a rolling pin (welg holtz). Make it pointy, but leave it thick in the middle. Wrap the meat around it and roast it (basting) with fat, and take it off once it turns hard. And if you wish to fill it, use raisins and figs and almonds, or birds in a ziseindel sauce, or fish and bread. Roast it again/more (paz) on a griddle and do not burn it.
This is an interesting recipe. There are other references to Hohlbratenand the idea of filling something into the hole left by the spit – often scrambled eggs – but here, the principle is exploited to the full. It really is more like a Baumstriezel or kurtosh kolach made of meat, cooked on a deliberately large wooden centre. That tradition, too, already existed, so the inspiration may have come from there. I am not entirely sure how hard this would be to get right, but I think I would like to try it just to see what happens.
The Innsbrucker Rezeptbuch is a manuscript recipe collection from a South German/Austrian context. It dates to the mid-fifteenth century and survives as part of a set of medical and culinary texts bound together. The editor Doris Aichholzer published it together with two related manuscripts and drew attention to the less elaborate, more practical recipes. The manuscript is of unknown provenance, but has been owned by the Habsburg emperors since at least the early sixteenth century. It is now held at the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. An edition, German translation and commentary can be found in Doris Aichholzer: Wildu machen ayn guet essen… Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher, Peter Lang Verlag Berne et al. 1999
57 If you would make rice out of eggs, boil the eggs hard and then take the hard egg (daz hert) and chop it very small. Take good milk and boil the (cooked) white in that, and if you wish, take egg white and a little fine flour and beat that together. Pour it into the pot that has the rice in it. Thus it will become thick. Do not oversalt it.
The recipe itself is neither complicated not implausible. It is easy to see how one would do it, but not so much why. Many surviving recipes for illusion food are intended for Lent, a way of simulating meat, dairy and eggs on days when they were prohibited. Others are complex and playful, cooking chickens in jars or preparing large fish to appear cooked in different ways along their body. This is just mashed and cooked eggs to mimic rice cooked to a mush. This, incidentally, was how Europeans prepared rice at the time. Cooking it to keep the grains separate, as was the custom in the Ottoman Empire, was uncommon and worthy of note. Rice, of course, was never prohibited, and though dairy was on certain days, this dish does not substitute the milk. It really looks as though whoever came up with this just liked playing with food.
The Innsbrucker Rezeptbuch is a manuscript recipe collection from a South German/Austrian context. It dates to the mid-fifteenth century and survives as part of a set of medical and culinary texts bound together. The editor Doris Aichholzer published it together with two related manuscripts and drew attention to the less elaborate, more practical recipes. The manuscript is of unknown provenance, but has been owned by the Habsburg emperors since at least the early sixteenth century. It is now held at the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. An edition, German translation and commentary can be found in Doris Aichholzer: Wildu machen ayn guet essen… Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher, Peter Lang Verlag Berne et al. 1999
