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.
Among the many dishes in the class of Mus in the Dorotheenkloster MS, there are two very meaty ones:
61 Another kind of gmüs that is black
Take a calf’s blood. If you cannot get that, take chicken blood of young hens and boil it in wine. Take boil chicken and chop it, and (take) half a semel loaf. Lay that into the boiling blood and let it boil up. And once it boils, season it with honey so that it is neither too sweet nor too sour. Sprinkle it with pounded cloves and ginger and sugar, and serve it.
62 Yet another gemüs
Take one pound (libra) of almonds and pound them small. Take a boiled hen and pound that small, and take roasting-grade (pretiges) veal and chop it with the hen and boil that in the milk (from the almonds). And the milk (must be put) altogether with everything into the pot. Let it boil properly. Do not oversalt it.
These recipes may not invite recreation, but they are an important reminder that no matter how familiar may dishes in the Mus or Gemüs category seem to us, this was not a class of porridges, breakfasts, or sweet dishes. They were part of the dining table and heavily spiced, rich meat preparations belonged to the class just as much as ephemeral jellies and light porridges. If we would rather not cook chicken or veal in almond milk (though we happily do it in cream to produce Frikassee) or eat our black pudding with a spoon, these are our sensibilities, not those of the time.
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.
Apologies for missing out on two days, I was preparing a lecture on latwerge next weekend. For today, this little recipe in the Dorotheenkloster MS caught my attention:
63 Of an elderflower müs in Lent
Take elderflowers and let them boil in water. Take one pound (libra) of almonds and pound them small, and pass the almonds through and let them boil. Add starch (ummerduz), that way it turns thick, and add sugar, that way it turns sweet. Do not oversalt it.
This isn’t very exciting as a dish. Basically, it’s a Mus, a spoonable dish, and what we would call an elderflower-flavoured blancmange. Ummerduz is an odd word, but just a variant spelling of umerdum which is, of course, amydon – starch. What makes it interesting is that there are a lot of recipes that use elderflower as a seasonal flavouring. This seems to have been an extremely popular thing to do in Germany. The time window for elderflowers is narrow, though, and I haven’t found any for preserving the flavour as we do today in beverage syrup. Since all surviving recipes depend on steeping or boiling the flowers in milk, they would be off limits on fast days. Except that here, the flowers are boiled in water which is then used to make almond milk, the upper-class standby for Lent. This could easily be used to make all the other recipes, from plain porridge as in the Munich Cgm 384 collection:
48 Elderflower muoß
Take elderflowers and boil them in milk and pass that through a cloth, and make a muoß with this as you please, and with grated white bread or other things, that will taste very good (gar wol geschmack) and also be healthy. You may also colour it and spice it if you please, but it has a good flavour by itself.
And all the way to the elaborate elderflower-flavoured pasta in the Innsbruck MS:
128 If you would make a chopped elderflower porridge, boil the elderflowers in good milk and pass it through so that the milk takes on the scent. Take two eggs or 3 and good flour, beat the eggs into it and chop it very well and prepare the porridge from that etc.
Another reminder, if we needed one, to keep in mind that cooks in the middle ages were just as inventive and creative as ever.
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 from the Dorotheenkloster MS again. This dish plays with the colour contrast of egg white and yolk.
58 A gmüß (spoonable dish) of eggs
Take 32 eggs and boil them hard. Take the whites of them, chop them small, and pound them cleanly (small? – read klain for rain). Take a little fine wheat flour (semelmel) with it. You must pass this through a cloth and add sugar and a little salt. You must pound the yolks separately. Add a little flour to them and saffron and add saffron and sugar. And you must strain (pass) it through a cloth. You must have a container (tegel) for each preparation (mues) and each one must have three holes. (Put) the white into one container separately and the yolk into one separately. Now you must have a “small rake” (rechel) for each container so that you can rub it through. You must press it so that the worms (expressed through the holes) become as long as your serving dish is wide. Now move once away from you and once towards you, and (lift the container) up. Now take the white container and move it crosswise across them for the (entire) length. And now the one with the yellow in it, move it across and back, and then take the white again, and after the white, the yellow, as long as you have of each.
In terms of taste, this does not sound terribly appealing. It’s mashed hard-boiled eggs with a little flour and sugar. You can probably taste the saffron in this dish since there is so little else to flavour it. Visually, though, it must have been quite striking. Strands of bright white and golden yellow crossing each other in a serving bowl, forming a net or knitwork too pretty to eat.
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.
However, there are many species and types of plums and there are cerasa, cherries, that you would also like to count among the plums propter similitudinem (on account of their similarity), there are pruna sylvestria, sloes, Virgilius calls the bushes on which they grow spinos. Schleedorn (spiny sloes) are a good thing if you use them properly because you make sloe wine from them.
In many places, they also preserve them around Michaelmas after the frost has struck them and they have turned soft. You take mustard and grind it with vinegar, and when it has been ground very fine, you put the ground mustard into a new pot and add the sloes whole. Let it stand thus for fourteen days, and then when you eat dried meat, fried pickled herring, ham, or other things from which you usually get scurvy, eat it along with them from a small condiment bowl (Commentichen). This helps, next God, that scurvy will leave you alone and it is good to eat.
Last weekend, I met with friends from my medieval club and we opened one of the jars to try what it had become. As an initial experiment, this was just a basic combination of sloes, mustard powder, and white wine vinegar with a pinch of salt. After a few months in the jar, it turned purplish and more liquid, but neither fermented nor went mouldy. I expected the result to be sharp and sour, but it was surprisingly mellow and pleasantly fruity. It still stung on the tongue and was best used in small quantities, but this is a recipe with surprising depth and possibilities. I will try to find the time to develop it some more the coming year, both in terms of the base – different vinegars, dark or light mustard – and maybe spices. None of this is mentioned, but all of it could well go unsaid as a matter of course, or left open to the reader.
The alleged antiscorbutic properties may actually be real. Scurvy is an effect of vitamin-C deficiency, and sloes contain vitamin C. This is destroyed very effectively by cooking, but much less by pickling. The vitamin-C content in the finished mustard may be significant enough to make a difference at a time of the year when fresh fruit and vegetables were rare.
We have looked atfaux eggsfor Lent before. The Dorotheenkloster MS has a series of recipes for these things.
49 Of all kinds of eggs in Lent
Take two pounds (libra) of almonds and pound them small. Grind them with sugar and add a little water so it stays white. You must not let it boil, and it must be moderately thick. You can make eggs out of that this way: Take one part of the almonds mass and colour it red with saffron so it appears like a yolk. Make as many yolks of the red part as you please, the size of egg yolks. Then take a small white cloth and make a hole in it. Lay the yolk into it put the white over it so it is shaped like an egg. Make enough for a dish this way. And ½ (pound of?) raisins, wash them and grind them small. Take a slice of a semeln loaf and crumble it into them with sweet wine to make a pheffer sauce with sugar. This is called eggs in pheffer sauce.
50 Another dish of eggs
Take a few eggs (as described in the previous recipe?) into a reidlen (small cooking vessel) and make halved eggs and lay them in there, as many as you want. And take a quarter pound (vierdung) of sugar and lay it into a pan. When it has melted, you pour it over the eggs. They lie in it as in fat. And take whites of the eggs and milk and make it as thick as soft eggs, and add sugar in place of salt.
51 A different dish of eggs
Prepare whole eggs and stick them on a spit. Make them black or yellow, and do not forget the sugar.
The first recipe is fairly straightforward. These are what we would call marzipan eggs. I am not entirely sure what the role of the cloth is, but other than that it is basically a saffron-coloured yolk surrounded by white almond-sugar paste, a reasonable simulacrum of a hard-boiled egg. They are served in a sweet sauce of raisins thickened with bread which is actually a fairly common recipe for meat sauces, sometimes referred to as a pfeffer. There is a similar, but much more ambitious recipe for faux hard-boiled eggs in their shells in the 16th-century Künstlichs und fürtrefflichs Kochbuch, so the idea did not die out.
The second and third recipes, I assume, deal with the same faux eggs rather than real ones. In the first half of #50, a strong sugar syrup is used to simulate melted fat and produce the effect of deep-fried Eier im Schmalz. Again, we have a broadly similar idea in the Inntalkochbuch, but in this case what is simulated is more like pan-fried eggs sunny side up. The second half, I assume, aims to simulate a soft egg dish usding only the white almond paste. In recipe #51, we find sparse instructions for presenting the almond paste eggs like hard-boiled eggs on a spit, another popular conceit on wealthy tables.
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 brief recipe today, but potentially delicious:
47 Of crawfish tails
Take crawfish and boil them, and shell the tails. When they are boiled, lay them in a pot and put in vinegar and spices.
This is quite brief, but I suspect it describes a way of preserving cooked crawfish for later eating. The tails are the largest and most iconic, recognisable parts, and the rest – claws and legs – could be turned into other dishes. It reminds me of a similar approach taken to fish in the 1485 Kuchenmaistrey, the first printed cookbook in German:
1.viii Item if you would keep fish so that they stay fresh for long. Lay them in a wooden vat or earthen pot and pour good vinegar on them and put parsley into it and bury it in a pit of fresh earth. And when you take out the fish and vinegar, always pour on fresh vinegar again. And close it with a good cover again. That way, they will stay fresh for long and do not turn stinking.
I cannot exclude the possibility that the crawfish are simply served with vinegar as a condiment, but it doesn’t seem convincing to me. A pot (ein rend) is not a serving dish, and vinegar is sometimes referred to as available at the table for diners to add to their food, so adding it to cooked crawfish seems superfluous. A ready pot of crawfish in a richly spiced vinegar pickle, on the other hand, would be just the thing to demonstrate understated wealth. Just a quick bite, no need to bother the cook… No spices are named, but I can imagine a pungent combination of ginger, cloves, pepper and mace might work well. This sounds worth trying out.
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 not really sure what to make of this recipe, but I suspect it’s meant to mimic meat fladen
45 Of dishes in Lent
Take almonds, chop them small, and colour half of them with saffron. Lay them aside in a bowl. Take well-picked raisins and boil them so they become round and also lay them aside in the bowl. Along with these, take all kinds of fish roe except the roe of barbels and pound it in a mortar with a little white flour so it becomes like a straubem (a kind of pulled fritter) batter. Colour it and pour it on the fladen (a pizza-like flatbread dish) and bake that in an oven.
As we have seen happen before, this recipe is again repeated almost verbatim in Meister Hans:
Recipe #113 Ainen fladen jn der vasten mach also A fladen in Lent make thus Item a fladen in Lent. Take almonds and chop them small and place them in bowl, and colour half of them with saffron. And take well selected raisins and boil them up as they should be and lay them out in the bowl separately. And take all manner of fish roe, except barbel roe, and pound that in a mortar with a little flour so that it turns out like a strauben batter (a type of leavened fritter). Colour that and pour it on the fladen and bake it in an oven.
Fladen are mentioned frequently in surviving sources and we have some recipes for what they probably looked like. The most famous ones are the parallel, but not identical setsof recipes in the Mondseer Kochbuch and the Buoch von guoter Spise. It is probably not safe to assume that all of them looked like that – variation was likely considerable since a fladen could be anything flat that was baked, and some recipes are almost unintelligible.
Here, though, I suspect the intent is to mimic the kind of fladen described in the Mondseer Kochbuch. In place of the minced meat topping, we have mortared fish roe and the rather mysterious boiled raisins and party coloured almonds are added as a topping. The base would simply be the standard kind of dough used to make meat fladen, but since we do not really know what that was, we can use our imagination.
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 stands in marked contrast to the previous recipe. From the Dorotheenkloster MS:
34 If you want to prepare almond curd cheese (mändel ziger)
Make milk from one pound (talentum) of almonds. You must pass it through so it stays thick (i.e. through a coarse cloth or sieve). Let it boil, salt it, and add a little wine or vinegar. Pour it on a white cloth and weigh it down so it hardens. Then slice it as you please and (put it) on a platter and add cold milk with sugar. Stick them with almonds, that does no harm. Serve the curd cheese.
This is interesting, and I am honestly not sure that this will work, but I haven’t tried it. The method described here is, of course, how you make acid-coagulated cheese. We have a number of descriptions how it was done using vinegar, wine, or the acidic whey of the last batch. As far as I know, though, the process depends on coagulating the proteins in animal milk and thus should not work with almond milk. Here, it is assumed that it does.
An interesting point is the use of different term: Käse (ches) versus ziger. Today, the distinction is formal. Käse is made from milk, normally using rennet, whileZiger or Ziegeris made from whey using acid. It’s unlikely this already applied across the German-speaking world in the 15th century, but there seems to be a sense of distinction at work here that may hinge on the use of an acidic coagulant rather than rennet or a bacterial culture.
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.
Almond cheese is faux cheese produced with almond milk using a variety of thickening processes. There are many surviving recipes. The Dorotheenkloster proposes a kind of jelly. It is a nearly identical parallel of a recipe in the Innsbruck MS.
33 Again a different dish
If you want to have an almond cheese, you must have isinglass and you must have 2 pounds (talenta) of almonds for one dish. This is how you make the almond cheese: Grind (the almonds) nicely and pass them through a white cloth. And (take) one lot of isinglass and boil it in water. And you must pass the isinglass through (a cloth) together with the almonds with the boiled water. The milk should not boil. Sweeten it with sugar, one quarter pound (firdung) and add it to the cheese. Take a glazed bowl and pour the milk into it, then it will become firm. Let it stand for a while so it turns into a cheese. Add sweet almond milk to it. And you can cut (the cheese) into four parts so the milk passes inbetween. Stick it with almonds and serve it.
There are a few differences, but basically this is the same recipe as in the Innsbruck MS. The proportion of almonds to sugar is slightly higher – 2 talenta versus 1 1/2 pounds – but otherwise it is identical in all important points. Almond milk is made from a significant quantity of almonds – even assuming a low weight for the ever variable pound, we are not getting below 600-700 grammes. This is then mixed with gelatin cooked from maybe 12-15 grammes of isinglass and sweetened with about 120 grammes of sugar. The resulting jelly will be familiar to all modern diners, though to our tastes it would probably seem bland. Cutting it into quarters and serving it in a platter of (almond) milk completes the illusion of eating green cheese, and the decorative almonds stuck in add to its visual appeal.
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.
Since I’m not sure I’ll be able to post much over the next few days, I’ll be putting up three recipes today. The Dorotheenkloster MS parallels recipes for decorative hedgehog subtelties found in the later Meister Hans collection very closely:
38 A white hedgehog
Take a pound of almonds, pound them very small, add sugar, mash it together and shape a hedgehog from it. Take 12 almond kernels and cut them lengthwise. Stick the hedgehog with them in the middle and all over (misplaced here: 1 talentum) like spines. Do not oversalt it and serve it.
39 A black hedgehog
Take a pound (libra) of raisins, wash them nicely and pick them cleanly so nothing unclean remains. Fry (swaissen) them nicely in a pan and let them cool. When they are dry, pound them small and add cinnamon, cloves, and sugar. Mash it together and shape a hedgehog. When it is ready, stick it all over with cloves, those will be its spines. You must give the hedgehog a gilded nutmeg in its mouth. Do not oversalt it, and serve it.
40 A red hedgehog
Take a pound (libra) of figs and wash off the flour. Let them dry again. Then chop them small, pound them with good spices, and add saffron. That makes it red. You must not forget the sugar. When it is pounded small, you must mash it together and shape a hedgehog. Stick it with silvered cloves. Those will be its spines. Give it a fig in its mouth.
These are not quite exactly the same recipes. Meister Hans omits silvering the cloves on the red hedgehog and makes a quip about healthy food for hedgehogs on the black one, and most centrally, has ginger instead of the more plausible raisins as its main ingredient. However, they are clearly very closely related. The fact that a manuscript most likely dating to around 1414 so closely parallels one dated internally to 1460 and purporting to be the work of a named individual is a salutary reminder not to trust what our sources say about themselves too much. Meister Hans may be the work of an individual, but date to a much earlier time than its surviving copy. It may be ascribed to an individual at that tiome, but in fact be a compliation of earlier material. Or the dating of either manuscript may be wrong. Certainly, things are not as straightforward as they appear when looking at just one source.
As recipes, these three are very attractive. A hedgehog is and easy shape to master, and they make lovely centrepieces on a dining table arranged into a small family. The white one, mild and sweet, and the more intensely flavoured black and red with their spicy spines will offer something for everyone, eaten as the meal comes to a close. Especially white almond hedgehogs, not an uncommon recipein various iterations, are also a fun activity for children taking their first steps in historic cooking and can be made with storebought marzipan if you are in a hurry. But with enough effort and talent, they can be turned into stunning pieces of art.
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.
