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.
There are some interesting recipes hidden among the interminable list of gmues in the Dorotheenkloster MS. This is one of them:
Generic mushroom illustration from the Tacuinum Sanitatis Casanatense, courtesy of wikimedia commons
122 A gmües of mushrooms (swammen)
If you want to make gmües of mushrooms, pick them in May. Chop raysling (probably Lactarius deliciosus) and rötling (today, Rötling refers to various Entoloma species, which are toxic. It may mean the St George’s mushroom, Calocybe gambosa, here). Let them dry, then you can keep them long. They are (good) in Lent, I must say that. They are also good before Carnival. You can keep them as long as you wish.
This is interesting for several reasons. First, it is rare for mushrooms to be named in medieval recipe sources. Here, we have two specific names: raysling and rötling. Aichholzer renders the former as Reizker, Lactarius deliciosus. Despite the fact that this mushroom is usually seasonal in autumn, not May, that is a plausible interpretation. The term rötling is harder to parse. Today, it usually refers to various toxic Entomola mushrooms, but that is unlikely to be meant here. It might be a reference to the similar-looking Calocybe gambosa which is edible and seasonal in spring.
Secondly, here is evidence in writing that people understood edible mushrooms, that they gathered them, preserved them by drying, and cooked with them in the context of a wealthy kitchen. Most medical literature of the time considers mushrooms unhealthy, if not dangerous. Clearly, the Augustine canons at least did not mind. Dried mushrooms are kept through the year – from May to Lent, which usually falls in March and April. Of course it is intuitive and people throughout Central Europe still do this, but it is nice to have documentary confirmation.
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.
Another set of interesting recipes from the Dorotheenkloster MS:
Green beans in beer-vinegar sauce (top) with reuschkuochen and snalenbergs sauce
106 Of green beans
Boil green beans with fine bread, pepper, and three times as much caraway (or cumin? kumel), saffron, salt, vinegar, and beer. Grind those (ingredients) together. Drain the beans. Pour on the ground, boiled ingredients (i.e. the sauce). Serve it.
107 Also make green peas this way
108 Of hard beans (read pon for buttern) and when you want to make butter from it
Make dried (gedigen) beans this way: Put them into boiling lye until the shells come off, and pour them out on a sieve or a colander (?reitt). Rub off their shells. Boil them with the above seasoning and serve them. You can make butter from those beans.
Beans were a very common food in the fifteenth century. These were, of course, broad beans (Vicia faba), not the more popular phaseolus beans which are New World cultivars. Here, interestingly, though not surprisingly, there is a recipe for fresh beans and one for dried. Both are served with the same sour sauce of vinegar, beer, and kumel, which at this point could mean either cumin or caraway. Given the simplicity of the recipe (except for the rather random addition of saffron), I suspect caraway in this case, but that is purely conjectural.
The recipe for fresh beans has a close parallel in the Mondseer Kochbuch, also from Austria. Both are paralleled in Meister Hans, and I am increasingly convinced that the original of that text is significantly earlier than 1460, possibly even 1400.
97 Of beans
Item boil green beans with nice (=white) bread, pepper, three times as much caraway (or cumin?), saffron, salt, vinegar and beer. Grind it together. Dry the (cooked) beans, pour the boiled-up cooked (sauce) over them and serve it. Also cook green peas like this.
98 Of hard beans
Item of hard beans, make them thus: put them into boiling lye until their shells come off. Then pour them into a sieve and rub the shells off them. Boil them with the aforementioned wine sauce and serve it. (From) these beans, you can (also) make bean butter.
Note the second recipe now mentions a wine sauce though wine is not included in the sauce described earlier. This is probably a transmission error, just as the repetition of ‘butter’ in the Dorotheenkloster MS likely is a scribal error. Other than that, these recipes are not just functionally the same thing, they are practically identical.
As to its culinary qualities, I actually made this for a crafting meeting of my medieval club last February and rather enjoyed it. Using a modern beer makes it more bitter than it would have been using a medieval brew, but the combination of spiciness, acidity, and fresh beans in a creamy bread-thickened sauce is attractive as a side dish.
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.
After yesterday’s recipe for the rather enigmatic topanitz to be served with morels, here is the morel recipe that follows in the Dorotheenkloster MS:
95 Again a dish (kostel) of morels
Take (them) and make a cake of eggs in a pan. Cut it into pieces and (prepare for it?) an egg sauce that is made of sage, mint, parsley, and old and young garlic.
At first glance, this looks like a straightforward mushroom omelet. What else would the kuchen in der phanne von ayern be? That is possible, and the sauce of various fresh herbs thickened with egg sounds rather attractive as an acompaniment. However, it is unfortunately not that simple.
First, we must be wary of recipes that mention an ingredient in the title, but not in the text. The emendation in the first sentence is pure conjecture. It makes sense here, but we should keep in mind that the same manuscript contains another recipe with morels in the title that is for a raisin confection. This one could similarly be for pancakes in a herb sauce.
Secondly, we find a large number of recipes for faking morels. Their distinctive large caps, traditionally served stuffed with a scrambled egg mixture, were imitated usingegg batter or meat paste. It is also possible that this recipe, however poorly, describes a similar process. However, morels were also simply fried, and those would work well on or in a kind of omelet.
As to how it combines with the topanitz – I don’t know. If we read the latter as dish of toasted bread, it could be topped with a mushroom omelet. If it is more porridgelike, it could be used as a base or a side dish. Without at least another parallel, or ideally a better description, we are left guessing. However, I can imagine fried mushrooms in a fluffy omelet on a fragrant slice of toasted white bread and topped with a garlicky herb sauce as quite delicious.
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 recipe from the Dorotheenkloster MS is not very clear, but very interesting liguistically:
Semel loaves on their way into the oven
94 What topanitz you should make with the morels
The topanitz. Take cinnamon and boil it well, and strain it through as sieve. Add butter and saffron and put toasted semeln bread on top (bestrewe). You can also make a topanitz from peas. But with that, you must use saffron and caraway (or cumin, kumel)
This is the kind of recipe where you really wish for a parallel somewhere to clarify what on earth it means. Alas, no such luck yet. The name at least is a possible lead: Topanitz is a Slovene word and later describes a dish of toasted bread. but there seems to be no living tradition of making it.
This recipe can be read as a dish of that kind: Cinnamon is boiled in water to extract its aroma, then discarded and the water used to produce a sauce for toasted white bread slices. It is hard to see how that can be reconciled with the verb bestrewe, though. It usually means sprinkle with a powder, so it suggests the bread would be crumbled. That would make something closer to a porridge and explain how the same dish can also be made with peas. Alternatively – because medieval recipes can be like that – the peas could be meant as an alternative basis for the broth. Pea broth is a common ingredient in Lenten foods.
The morels that this is meant to be served with are not much clearer. The subsequent recipe is indeed for morels, or at least its title says that it is. The text itself never mentions them and it’s not a lot easier to interpret. I will look at it in more detail tomorrow.
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’s recipe is not very interesting culinary terms, but for technique. From the Dorotheenkloster MS:
Pears from the mira calligraphiae, late sixteenth century. Image courtesy of wikimedia commons
78 A müs of pears
Take a clean, dry pot and put pears in it. Remove the stems and the flowers (the remnants of the flower at the bottom). The pot must not be greasy. Lay the pears in it and shut the pot well with wooden pieces (verspetl) so the cannot fall out. You must have a pot of water ready that is boiling. Set the pears atop (oben auf) the pot with water that is boiling, that way they cook (praten) in the steam. Take them down when they are soft. Let them cool, pound them small and pass them through a cloth. And you must have honey ready, let that boil until it turns brown. This will give the dish a brown colour. If you want it to be yellow, add saffron. You can serve it hot or cold. When you serve it, sprinkle on (spice) powder on it. You may use ginger, sugar (and?) cloves for that. Also put that on it.
Combining pears with caramelised honey and spices is bound to be good. This is not an exciting recipe in that sense, and you can do more interesting things with the fruit than mash them. What is interesting is the technique of steaming them: secured with several wooden skewers or just branches across the opening of a pot that is then inverted over another pot with boiling water. This is a method described in more detail by Walter Ryff in the mid-sixteenth century, but was already known well enough to be casually mentioned over a century earlier. This is important to remember: We may find it hard to see how the equipment of a medieval kitchen would allow for anything but the simplest dishes, but our forebears were resourceful, creative people.
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.
Another recipe from the Dorotheenkloster MS that we don’t see very much of: Cooking cabbage.
Harvesting cabbage, Taciunum Sanitatis courtesy of wikimedia commons. Cabbage heads were not as solid as they tend to be today, with looser leaves.
92 Of young white cabbage (kraut)
Take young white cabbage and cut it into wedges. Lay it in the pot and let it boil, then pour off the water. Have ready boiled meat in a different pot, mutton or beef, and lay the meat in with the cabbage. Then take eggs and boil them hard. Peel them and fry them in a pan whole. When the meat and the cabbage are nearly boiled, put in the eggs and hard cheese and let it boil together again. Make it quite fat. But if you do not want to cook it with meat, put on eggs prepared in the pan as described before and the cheese, and serve it.
We do not get a lot of recipes for things like boiled cabbage compared to almond milk jelly or complicated fish preparations, but these dishes were more common even on the tables of the wealthy. This way of preparing it surely is not poverty food. Noter that the first cooking water is poured off – commonly prescribed for cabbage for health reasons and to get rid of the smell. The cooked cabbage is then served with boiled meat. Mutton or beef were less desirable types of meat, especially the quality that was suitable for boiling rather than roasting, but meat in quantity was still a sign of wealth.
The eggs are an interesting touch. Actually frying whole hard-boiled eggs would not have occurred to me, but surely it works. I am not sure how to read the addition of cheese. It is possible to simply cook chunks of cheese with the cabbage, but depending on how dry the dish is, it may be meant to melt and coat the other ingredients. I could imagine this in a pan with a relatively small amount of rich broth, meat chunks and hard-boiled eggs on a bed of cabbage, with cheese melting on top, and I think I want to try it before winter ends.
As an aside, the reference to making this dish without meat will not make it suitable for fast days since it still contains eggs and dairy. Given it comes from a monastic context, it may be intended for diners who are forbidden the meat of quadrupeds even on regular days.
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.
There is an interesting and rather oddly titled recipe in the Dorotheenkloster MS:
96 Of a good portuns kraut (purslane?)
You must pound mustard. When that happens, pour boiling water into it and stir it like a batter. Do this for three nights in a row, and always pour off the water in the morning and stir it again with new boiling water. On the third morning, grind it with good beer vinegar. Then take horseradish that is cut small and parsley that has been pounded with the root and forced through a sieve. Italian raisins, blanched almond kernels and liquid honey (hönig sam), put all of these on the kraut, to each layer (lecht). You should rightly pay its weight in silver for this, that is how healthy it is. It is healthy to eat in the heat of August.
The title portuns kraut would suggest a dish of greens made with purslane, but that is clearly not what is described here. We are looking at a mustard sauce, and that is indeed what a more puzzling (and probably corrupted) parallel recipe in the Meister Hans manuscript calls it:
#145 Mustard make thus
Item, take and pound (stampff) the mustard. When that is done, pour boiling water on it and stir it as though for a dough/batter. Do that three days in a row, and pour off the water in the morning, and stir it again with boiling water. On the third morning, grind (reib) it with beer (and?) vinegar (the text supports both reading beer and vinegar or alegar, depending on how seriously you take the scribe’s punctuation). Take horseradish (read kren for grains, keren) that are cut small and ground parsley together with the spices (or root? würcz) and boiled cooking pears and ground coriander, sifted through a sieve, Italian raisins, blanched almonds, and liquid honey (hoenig samen – read hoenig seim). Place that upon the kraut, and do this with every layer. This is rightly paid for in silver, that is how healthy it is. Also always add cinnamon to the mustard.
In each one, we have a few issues that the respective other recipe helps us solve. First off, there is no purslane involved. The comma between beer and vinegar in the Meister Hans recipe seems to be superfluous, it means beer vinegar. The enigmating grains (keren) found there are horseradish (kren) and the ambiguous würcz, potentially spices, is a reference to the root of the parsley. The samen of honey is of course not seed, but seim, first quality liquid honey. Conversely, the instruction to layer this in a pot is unclear in the Dorotheenkloster MS, but clear in Meister Hans. Finally, the step of passing the parsley through a sieve – presumably cooked, but that is not a given – makes it clear we are looking at a fairly liquid consistency overall. That leaves the rather odd final sentence in the Dorotheenkloster MS. I assume it belongs to the original, now lost purslane recipe. Composite mustard sauces like this were usually considered winter fare, and the ingredients – parsley root, cooking pears, and horseradish – are not really seasonal in summer.
It is possible to read this as a compost, but it makes more sense as a chutney-like sauce to me. The primary ingredient is mustard made with alegar. This has horseradish added to give it extra bite. Finely mashed parsley leaves and roots give it colour and body, and the sharpness is cut with honey, raisins, almonds, and pears for the fashionable sweet-sharp mixture so popular in medieval sauces. I can imagine this rather attractive after some aging and will probably try it this year.
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 short recipe from the Dorotheenkloster MS today, but an interesting and delicious one:
92 Of leeks
Take the white bulbs and (cut) them small. Lay them in cold water overnight. In the morning, take them and press them out, and cook them in boiling water by a good fire. When he has boiled them, pour off the water and pour in almond milk or poppyseed milk. If you wish, cut the fat of sturgeons (or hare? hausen daz vaist) or bacon into it and let it boil.
This is the kind of plain but attractive vegetable dish we do not find often in the medieval recipe corpus. Of course it is still elevated by the addition of almond or poppyseed milk (I assume that this is in place of the milk that would normally be used) and the rather enigmatic fat of sturgeon (hausen) or, if we assume a copying error, no less unusual hare (hasen). At bottom, though, it is the whites of leeks cooked in milk with added fat. I’ve made it frequently and redacted a parallel in my Landsknecht Cookbook.
There is a parallel for the idea of cooking leeks with milk in the Munich Cgm 384 recipe collection:
14 Kraut of leeks
Take leeks, greens (krutt) and cabbage and cut them the length of a digit (aines gelides lang). Sauté them in fat, pour on water, and let it boil up. Then put it into a sieve so that the water runs off. Lay it into a pot and pour on milk that has been passed through a cloth with white bread, and add fat.
This is clearly not the same thing, but it suggests that the practice was widely known. A more interesting thing yet is a record from the monastery at Reichenau in 843 that mentions a dish called warmosium to be given to sick brothers. To make it required leeks and the milk of four cows, which are the reason it is recorded in writing (they are provided each by one rent-paying village). This tradition may go back a good deal farther than the fifteenth century indeed.
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.
Last January, we had instructions for hulling oat grains. The Dorotheenkloster MS also includes a recipe for cooking them whole:
87 Oat grains
Take oat grains as you find them. Wash them nicely and pick them clean. Parboil (swell) them in water. Put them into sweet cow milk. Let them boil in it, but see it does not overboil. Take 12 egg yolks to a dish and beat them well. Take a little fine wheat flour, too. When you are about to serve it, stir that in and do not let it boil again. Serve it.
This is neat, useful, and relatively easy to follow. It is also quite rich and probably not the way oat porridge was usually prepared. In fact, it is very similar to a recipe for cooking rice earlier in the same collection:
82 A gmüs of rice
Take 1 pound (libra) of rice for one dish. Wash it well and pick it clean. You must not let it overboil, but it should be swollen well. Now you must have good cow milk that must be boiling, and you put the swollen rice into it. Take 24 egg yolks and beat them well. When you are about to serve it, stir the yolks into it so it is thick enough, and add clean fat or butter. See that the rice is not overboiled.
No doubt the similarity is intended. It is quite possible this way of cooking cereals – whole, hulled grains rather than porridge – carried status. It will certainly look more attractive than a flat bowl of oatmeal, textured, milky soft, and golden yellow from the egg yolks. The technique is well attestedfor rice, and would surely work for other grains as well.
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 recipe with parallels elsewhere, and mislabeled in the Dorotheenkloster MS:
90 Of fried morels
Take Italian raisins and pick them clean. Pound them in a mortar. Then take blanched (geschelt) almonds and pound them with it, and mix in sugar and ginger. After that is done, mould it in your hand so it is shaped like a pear. Take whole almond kernels and thrust them in at the bottom like stalks. Serve it.
This kind of sweet and rich dish could serve to end a meal, both to impress the guests and give them something to nibble with their drink. The recipe is mislabeled, probably a scribal error during copying, but the description is absolutely clear. Meister Hans has a very similar recipe with the correct title:
#129 Make a dish shaped like a pear thus
Item take well-selected Italian raisins and pound them in a mortar. Take blanched almond kernels and pound them together with that. Mix ginger and sugar into it. When that is done, knead it in your hand so that it is shaped like a pear and stick a stalk into it.
It is easy to make, flavourful, and familiar enough top most modern palates to be welcome almost universally. Shaping the pears and sticking in the stalks also makles a good activity to do with children. I used cloves for the bottoms and bay leaves for the stalk, and am not convinced the blanched almonds is not also a scribal error.
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.