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.
This sauce from the Dorotheenkloster MS looks very good indeed.
Harvesting garlic, fr0m the late 14th-century Tacuinum Sanitatis Casanatense courtesy of wikimedia commons
183 A sauce (condiment) with roast chickens
Grind garlic with salt, and peel the heads well. Mix 6 eggs into it without their whites, and add vinegar and a little water, not too sour. Let it boil up so it stays thick. You can make (serve) roast chickens with this or whatever you wish. Do not oversalt it.
Medieval upper-class cuisine had a complicated relationship with garlic. On the one hand, it stood for everything antithetical to gentility: growing in the earth, cheap, plentiful, and pungent. It made you smell like a peasant. On the other hand, they were not going to forgo something that just tasted this good. This sauce is one example of this.
Garlic, salt, egg yolks, and vinegar would make for a rich, creamy, and uncluttered flavour that should appeal to modern tastes as much as to medieval. Absent oil or fat, this is not aioli but a sauce that surely required very careful heating to produce the egg liaison that held it together without curdling the egg yolks. This also illustrates nicely the complexity behind the verb sieden. I usually render it as ‘boil’, but it really covers all forms of heating food in liquid, from a rolling boil to a gentle simmer. Here, we are probably talking of slow, gentle heat to induce the sauce to thicken before it is served, stopping just as the surface begins to stir.
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, I only have a brief note from the Dorotheenkloster MS, but an interesting one. Again, not really a recipe, but serving instructions:
173 Note what kind of game should have spices added to the pot or not
You must prepare spices for all kinds of game and add it to the pot. For a roast roe deer or boiled deer, you set the prepared spices aside in a separate serving bowl. But with hares, squirrels, and all birds, you add the spices to the pot. Now note: You must not salt any pheffer or prepared spices that you serve separately with game, because the game is salted already.
There isn’t very much of a story here, but we learn some interesting things. First, spices were blended to be served along specific foods. We sort of knew that, but it is good to have confirmation. Second, there were rules for how to do this. Specifcally, a bowl of blended spices would go with a large piece of venison while small game was seasoned in the cooking process. Thirdly, the use of the word pheffer is interesting here. It usually means a spicy sauce, but that looks implausible here. Apparently, it can also refer to a spice blend.
Unfortunately, we are still left high and dry as to which spices to blend. There seems to be no German equivalent to the generally agreed-upon apothecary blends of powder fort and powder douce.
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.
Just a short entry for today. This is from the Dorotheenkloster MS again:
Slaughtering scene from the Hausbuch der Mendelschen Zwölfbrüderstiftung (1450), wikimedia commons
161 A good dish of calf skin
Take the skin of a calf, wash it well and prepare it cleanly. Cut it into small pieces. Season it with saffron and good spices and with parsley.
This is really barely a recipe, just a few notes, and it leaves out the most important step, but it is also very interesting and opens up avenues of speculation. Skin is not commonly eaten in Europe today, so it is tempting to dismiss this as a sort of makeshift, a famine food, but it is pretty clearly not that. Anyone who could afford saffron and spices could also pay for proper meat and wanted to eat the skin in this instance.
You can eat cooked animal skin. Cowskin is even considered a delicacy in parts of West Africa. The reason why Europeans did not usually eat the skin of the cattle they consumed was not that they tasted bad, but that they were needed more urgently to make parchment, rawhide, and leather. Keeping the people of the continent in shoes alone required vast quantities.
Here, someone is making the conscious choice to keep and cook a calfskin rather than pass it on to a tanner or parchment maker. It may be a way of displaying status – this household has no need to monetise the (already expensive) calf efficiently – or a local tradition preserved in writing. It is certainly interesting.
Unfortunately, the recipe doesn’t record what is actually done with the skin. Cleaning is specifically mentioned, and that is an important step with all skins. Laborious defleshing, removing the hair, and cleaning precede any cooking. What happens next is a mystery, though. I would speculate that the skin pieces are simmered for a long time to soften them before they are further processed.
Once softened, the skin pieces might have been fried, producing crispy, spicy bites with a chewy centre. We can easily imagine a dish full of them speckled with green flecks of parsley. Serving them in a thickened sauce, a spicy cooking liquid, or an aspic is really equally probable, though. We simply do not know.
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.
From the British Libray Harley Bestiary: Two dolphins swimming in the ocean while eating some sort of spherical object.
…About fish one must know that the grosser of flesh, the harder to digest and of greater superfluity and humoral nature (i.e. the more out of balance) they are, the more they need hotter and sharper condiments. And this is true not only for fish, but also for meat. From this follows that ‘bestial’ (animal-like) fish and especially the porpoise (lit. sea pig, porcus marinus), whether roasted or boiled, need hotter and sharper sauces. And this is similarly understood for other fish according to how much or little they resemble the porpoise.
The condiment that is appropriate for the porpoise is strong boiled black pepper sauce whose composition is to be of of black pepper and cloves and toasted bread soaked in vinegar, and mixed with broth of fish.
And if one should wish to preserve them for several days, a galantine is made whose composition is: Take cinnamon, galingale, and cloves and mix each two m. (unit of weight), (and) toasted bread, half a loaf worth two imperials (unit of currency). The bread has boiled wine vinegar poured over it. Thus galantine is made with the cooking liquid of water and wine used for the fish. And the fish are cooked in water and wine, and the galantine is to be sufficient for ten people.
While the anonymous author(s) of the Dorotheenkloster MS most likely described their porpoise dishes based on hearsay, it is likely that Maino de Maineri, a highly reputed Italian physician who wrote in the mid-14th century, had personal experience to go on. Porpoises were eaten in the Mediterranean, along with a wide variety of other sea fish. His medical advice concerns the condiments to serve them with.
The author clearly recognises the mammalian (“bestial”) nature of the porpoise, though this does not lead him to place it outside the class of fish. Rather, it represents one end of the spectrum within that class and, being so much like meat, requires spicy sauces. The one he recommends is actually a familiar one to German recipe readers – pfeffer, a highly seasoned sauce made with the cooking liquid and thickened with toasted bread. The powerful taste of black pepper and cloves heightened by vinegar was thought to counteract the cold and moist qualities of the porpoise.
The second recipe is harder to parse, but it seems to describe a galantine of the bread-thickened type. Here, a thick sauce is poured over cooked meat or fish to exclude the air as it congeals, preserving it for a short time. Seasoned with cinnamon, galanga, and cloves, it would impart a characteristic flavour to the meat.
This is clearly not the only way porpoises could be prepared. Maino de Maineri’s work is focused on sauces which were considered medically indicated with many foods, not the culinary possibilities of an ingredient. But here, we at least have an idea of what was done with those porpoises.
Another entry in the Dorotheenkloster MS, not exactly a recipe:
From the British Libray Harley Bestiary: Two dolphins swimming in the ocean while eating some sort of spherical object.
186 (no title)
You can make good dishes from a porpoise (merswein). They make good roasts, quite like other pigs do. You also make sausage and also good venison of their blood and the meat. And you can make pheffer (sauce dishes) from it and other good gemues (side dishes).
This is more of a culinary briefing than a recipe, and it is clear why: No matter how healthy the ecosystem, nobody living in and around Vienna ever got to see a living porpoise, let alone cook one. The idea here is not instruction in any practical aspects of cookery, but in providing the kind of information an educated eater would be expected to have. Notably, in the second sentence a ‘they’ slips in – they cook porpoises. We have some practical recipes e.g. in the Opusculum de saporibus, but these are not that.
The descriptions are superficial, but interesting. Apparently, porpoises were cooked as meat despite the fact they were canonically classed as fish. Their name, merswein, literally sea pig, suggests as much, and here it is explicitly said they are treated like any other pig. Today, of course, the word Meerschwein refers to a guinea pig, but they are still called Schweinswal in modern German.
It is possible that salted or otherwise preserved porpoise meat was actually brought to the Alps. If it was, though, it was not likely a major trade item and certainly not usable for many of the dishes described here. Rather, these may have bewen familiar to people from their travels to coastal regions of Italy or Western Europe. The upper classes of fifteenth-century Europe often travelled widely, after all.
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.
The Dorotheenkloster MS has another three partridge recipes:
Hunting partridges by hawk, from the Tacuinum Sanitatis Casanatense courtesy of wikimedia commons
168 Of partridges
Take partridges, boil them, and take them out of the broth. When they are properly cooked, add anise and grind mustard with honey. Salt it and add pounded ginger, and lay the partridges in that. Cut them (though?) the chest or disjoint them.
169 A different one
Take partridges and boil them. Chop bacon into it and add a little wine or vinegar. Also add pepper and saffron.
170 A different one
Boil partridges in vinegar, disjoint them, make a galantine (galreid) with it and spice it well.
These three recipes are not only separated by some distance from the ones I posted before, they are also much more concise, so much so they may well be drawn from a different original source in compiling the collection. They are, however, clearly different and complement rather than repeat the first. This is not always the case in medieval recipe collections where dishes and instructions are often duplicated.
The preparations themselves are not complicated. In recipe #168, the birds are boiled and served in a honey-mustard sauce. This is also how small songbirds were sometimes cooked. Recipe #169 has them boiled with bacon and served in their broth, much like boiled chickens were, while #170 is for a galantine (galreid). That termn can refer to either a thickened sauce or an aspic, but in this case it clearly means the latter. The actual instructions are so cursory that we cannot reconstruct the dish beyond the most basic level.
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.
Yes, the Dorotheenkloster MS includes recipes for many creatures:
Red squirrel. Drawing from the Felix Platter collection (c. 1550), image courtesy of wikimedia commons
167 Of squirrel
You must boil squirrels and chop fat meat with them and take spices. Roast squirrels and disjoint them. Take onions and fry them in fat, lay the squirrels in with them and let them boil a little in it.
Our forebears in Europe were quite ready to eat squirrels, though they mainly hunted them for their fur. This recipe looks very workaday and quotidian, though it is not entirely clear whether it describes one mode of preparation or several discrete ones. I think we are looking at a complex preparation in which the squirrel is first parboiled with spices and bacon, then roasted, disjointed, heated in an onion sauce and served that way. This is close to how rabbits are prepared in the Tractatus de preparandi … omnia cibaria, and I have found that recipe works very well. It makes sense for other small animals.
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.
This is a recipe I’ve written about before, but it is interesting it also occurs in the Dorotheenkloster MS:
134 Of chicken liver and stomach
Take chicken livers and stomachs. Slice them thin and fry them in fat. Add eggs, pepper, caraway (or cumin, chummel) and salt. Stir it together as soft as poached (gestuffelt) eggs. Pass (streich) them into boiling fat in a pan. When it is fully cooked, serve it.
Again, the naming problem rears its head. The same dish is known as larus in the Mondseer Kochbuch and lanncz in Meister Hans. Here, it is given a bland, descriptive name. Another way the three differ is in describing the consistency aimed for. Here, it is gestuffelt which means poached eggs. The Mondseer Kochbuch had getüfftelnt which makles little sense but I thought might be a badly corrupted version of the phrase for scrambled eggs. In truth, the scribe might not have understood. Meister Hans simply has foilled eggs, a different class of recipes entirely and a likely response to the writer not understanding an original they were working from.
Note I am not saying the Dorotheenkloster MS recipe was the basis for the Mondseer one which was copied into Meister Hans. Surely, the number of surviving recipe books is small compared to those lost, and such direct connections are very improbable. It is clear they belong to a continuum though.
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.
If there is one dish no medieval recipe collection can be without, it seems to be blanc manger, chicken breast cooked with almond milk and rice. The Dorotheenkloster MS has three such recipes:
126 A courtly gmüs of old chickens that is called plamencher
Take ½ pound (talentum) of almonds. Let the chickens boil until they are tender, blanch the almonds and pass them through with clean water. Take a quarter pound (virdung) of rice and pick it clean, pound it, and pass it through a cloth or sieve. Take the meat of the hens and chop it small. Boil the almond (milk), put in the meat of the hens and mix it together. Let the almond milk boil until it it is done (zeitig) and add a pound (phunt) of pig fat (sweinens smaltz). When it begins to thicken, pour in the pig fat and stir it vigorously. As soon as it begins to boil, add a quarter pound (virdung) of sugar. When it is boiled halfway, add the sugar and let it boil well, and keep doing that until it gives back (separates out) the fat. Thus the dish is prepared. Serve it with a good, solid spoon that is deep (nust) enough, and spread it out with the spoon so it becomes smooth. That gemuez is called plamanscher.
138 A blanc manger (plamenschir)
Take thick almond milk and chicken breasts that were picked apart (gezaist). Add them to the milk and stir it with rice flour. Add enough fat and enough sugar, and serve it.
139 Again a blanc manger (plamenschir)
Take picked apart and (probably an unnecessary conjunction rather than a lacuna) chicken breasts and good almond milk. (Put) the stirred chicken into the milk with rice flour and colour it well with colourful flowers. Add enough fat and boil it very well. Add enough sugar, that is called a plamanschir.
I talked about the issue of names before, and it is evident again here: This dish has many. Whether it is described innocuously as a zuckermus, called by the Latinate fantasy name Pulverisei, or by any number of derivations from its French or Italian designation, it is all over the place, and that seems deliberate. Here, we find a names that derive from the French blanc manger. The recipes seem most closely related to those in the Mondseer Kochbuch and the Buoch von guoter Spise, but theyare not exact parallels. Indeed, the third one specifically mentions colouring the resulting dish with flowers which runs counter to the original intent of a white dish, though it would surely make a great canvas for that.
Aside from the relative reluctance to adopt foreign names in many instances, what I find interesting is the variety among the terms that make it into the manuscript tradition. Here alone, we find plamencher, plamanscher, plamenschir and plamanschir. These are close to the plamensir of the Buoch von guoter Spise, and quite a distance from the plamauschy, bla manschy or (Italian-influenced) manschy plamby of Philippine Welser, let alone the Italianate manscho blancko of Marx Rumpolt. Most of these terms are derived from the French, and clearly they are spelled phonetically. This is a salutary reminder that while we study mainly manuscripts, a large part – quite likely most – elite culinary culture was oral. Nobody reading a copy of the Viandier would come up with pla mauschy, but someone speaking French, even quite well, could easily get there. This, too, changes in the transition to Early Modern print culture, where the joke is on the ignorant person insisting on pronouncing a word as it is spelled (usually possible in German, challenging in French, impossible in English).
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 apologise for the length of gaps between posts. My life and my other obligations leave me increasingly little room. Here are three ways of serving partridges from the Dorotheenkloster MS:
Hunting partridges by hawk, from the Tacuinum Sanitatis Casanatense courtesy of wikimedia commons
156 Of partridges
Take three partridges, clean them well, but leave on the feet and the necks. Then take chicken broth that is sweet and boil them in this. Take 1 lad (Lot) whole pepper, wash it well, and put it in with the partridges. Let them boil as long as chickens, but do not let them overboil (versieden). Then cut an apple into long, thin slices and season it. Season it with spices. When you want to serve the dish, put the apple on it. Item, if you want to have it yellow, add ten almond kernels to the cooking liquid (sultz) or more, and serve it.
157 A furhess of partridges
Take three partridges and the blood of other birds (hunern). Cut each partridge in four pieces and boil them in the blood. Take an apple and an onion, blacken (fry?) it together and boil it in (the dish). If the blood is too thin, take a crust of bread, toast it dark (prenn) and add it. Season it with spices, but add no saffron if you want to have a furhess.
158 Again another dish of 3 partridges. A cold dish
Take three roast partridges, let them cool, and split each one. Take white semeln bread and toast it for a pheffer sauce that is not black. Take vinegar and wine and add it to that, and also add honey. Prepare a good, thickened (chebundes) phefferl sauce and do it justice with all kinds of spices and saffron. Add a quarter of a pound (virdung) of raisins, blacken (sautée?) them nicely, and add 2 lot of almonds to it. Stir it together, pour it on (the partridges) and let it set. Cover it so it cannot ‘smell out’ (verachen i.e. lose its scent) and serve them cold.
Partridges were highly desirable gamebirds fit for the tables of the nobility. Here, we see them prepared in three ways, each of which is fairly typical of medieval German culinary sources.
In the first recipe, the birds are boiled whole in clear chicken broth. I assume the reference to ‘sweet’ means fresh and clear, not old or cloudy, rather than actually sweetened. That is also how fresh butter, milk, and cream are described. A remarkable quantity of pepper (a Lot was 1/32 of a pound, about 15 grammes) is added to the cooking liquid and further spices before serving. The dish is decorated with apple slices and served with either the broth or a sauce made with it. Sultz, the word used here, can refer to a thickened sauce, but also to a jellied broth. The instruction to make it yellow by adding almond kernels is somewhat puzzling, but it may refer to the change of colour a rich chicken broth will undergo when it is made into almond milk.
The second recipe is for a fürhess, a class of dishfrequently described in our sources. At its most basic, this was made from the blood of a small animal and the meat of its less desirable parts, basically a civet. Here, the process is a good deal more elaborate: The entire bird is used and the sauce calls for blood from a different source. That is likely because there would not be enough in a partridge to make sauce for the whole body – usually, fürhess was made with the meat of forelegs, necks, and feet. The word huner usually refers to domestic chickens, but since it is also part of the name of the German word for partridge (as well as moorhen and capercaillie), it could refer to gamebirds here. Either way, and presumably it would not matter much, the blood is turned into a sauce with onion and apple and, if necessary, thickened with toasted bread. This seems to have been a popular flavour combination. The goal is to have small pieces of meat in a thick, dark, richly seasoned sauce.
The third is to be served cold and is one of a class of dishes that use a thick, spicy sauce to cover and thus preservecooked meat. In a wealthy household, this might well be the kind of thing you would have ready in case of need, or prepare in advance of a visit. Vinegar and wine, spices and raisins, and fine, white bread to thicken it made this a strong and expensive concoction poured over the cooked meat while hot and allowed to congeal to exclude air. The technique is quite old, found as early as the thirteenth century, and may be the origin of modern aspic. At least the same words are used in Middle High German for both.
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.
