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.
Boil green (i.e. fresh) beans until they are soft. Then take fine bread and a little pepper, and three times as much caraway. Grind it together with vinegar and with beer, add saffron, and pour off the broth. Pour on the ground (sauce) and salt it in measure. Let it boil up in the condiment sauce and serve it.
The sauce described here is not unusual in any way. Spicy sauces thickened with bread were known widely as pfeffer, pepper sauces, a word we still find preserved in dishes like Hasenpfeffer. This is one of the fairly rare instances of a vegetable dish prepared with one, though. The beans referred to here are, of course, fava beans, not the phaseolus we call ‘green beans’ today. Those are New World cultivars. Other than that, the recipe is straightforward and I look forward to trying it out.
The Mondseer Kochbuch is a recipe collection bound with a set of manuscript texts on grammar, dietetics, wine, and theology. There is a note inside that part of the book was completed in 1439 and, in a different place, that it was gifted to the abbot of the monastery at Mondsee (Austria). It is not certain whether the manuscript already included the recipes at that point, but it is likely. The entire codex was bound in leather in the second half of the fifteenth century, so at this point the recipe collection must have been part of it. The book was held at the monastery until it passed into the Vienna court library, now the national library of Austria, where it is now Cod 4995.
The collection shows clear parallels with the Buoch von guoter Spise. Many of its recipes are complex and call for expensive ingredients, and some give unusually precise quantities and measurements. It is edited in Doris Aichholzer’s “Wildu machen ayn guet essen…” Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Edition, Übersetzung, Quellenkommentar, Peter Lang, Berne et al. 1999
A quick note before I go off to work: I returned to Jean Baptiste Labat‘s suggestion for a banana pie which he states can also be made with cooking bananas. Since I already know it works with sweet bananas, I got plantains this time. The instructions are fairly clear:
Plantains, (bananes), just like figues de l’Amerique, can be cooked in tartes. They are prepared with sugar, cinnamon, and a little lemon or orange peel.
I was in a hurry, so I used storebought puff pastry to enclose the pie. The plantain, left to ripen for ten days after purchase, turned out to be quite soft and sweet. I added just a little sugar, cinnamon, and the zest of a lemon to one pie, and the result was absolutely convincing. The filling stayed firmer and more cohesive than with bananas, but it was richly aromatic and intensely sweet without being overwhelming either way. The lemon taste really worked this time.
I suspect Labat intends the recipe for the kind of mature, almost overripe plantains The elsewhere describes being eaten as a breakfast food squashed into a porridge by hand. Still, just to see what happens I will try this with a firm, starchy one at some point.
Take grapes and pound sour apples together, mix it with wine and press it out. This sauce is good with roast mutton, chickens, and fish, and it is called Agrest.
33 A good sauce of shallots (chives? aslauch) in another way
Take shallots, peel them, and grind them with sage. Mix it with wine or with vinegar and press it out. This sauce is good with roast beef.
34 A sauce of sour grapes
Take sour grapes and add sage and two heads of garlic. Pound it together and and press it out, and serve this for a good sauce.
35 A sauce of crabapples (holtzäppfelen)
Take crabapples and parsley and pound that together and press it out when the parsley comes apart a little (ain wenig zuo far). This is also called Agrest.
This is basically variations on the theme of verjus or agresta, the sour juice of unripe grapes (or other fruit). It is interesting that two are specifically identified as Agrest which was the Latin and Italian term for it (agresta). It may indicate this is a recently imported idea at this point, but equally it may just be an explanation for the upper-class reader to use the correct term (and not whatever the kitchen staff may have called it). The preparation is not unknown – there is even a fairly direct parallel for #32 in the Königsberg MS – but a sauce that is neither thickened nor cooked is unusual in the German corpus of culinary sources.
The flavour combinations are also engrossing: Sour graped and apples or crabapples are just sour, but the addition of parsley is intriguing enough and the combinations of garlic, sage, and verjuice or shallots, sage, and vinegar sound worth experimenting with. Incidentally, the word aslauch/aschlauch probably refers to shallots, but it can also mean chives and in later recipes clearly does. It does suggest that if shallots are meant, they may have been preferred green and fresh rather than dry.
The Mondseer Kochbuch is a recipe collection bound with a set of manuscript texts on grammar, dietetics, wine, and theology. There is a note inside that part of the book was completed in 1439 and, in a different place, that it was gifted to the abbot of the monastery at Mondsee (Austria). It is not certain whether the manuscript already included the recipes at that point, but it is likely. The entire codex was bound in leather in the second half of the fifteenth century, so at this point the recipe collection must have been part of it. The book was held at the monastery until it passed into the Vienna court library, now the national library of Austria, where it is now Cod 4995.
The collection shows clear parallels with the Buoch von guoter Spise. Many of its recipes are complex and call for expensive ingredients, and some give unusually precise quantities and measurements. It is edited in Doris Aichholzer’s “Wildu machen ayn guet essen…” Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Edition, Übersetzung, Quellenkommentar, Peter Lang, Berne et al. 1999
Take a lamprey and drown it in the best wine that you can have. Then cut it in six pieces. When it has been cut up, sprinkle it with salt, lay them on a griddle and roast them until they are done. Take the middle piece once it has been roasted fully and pound it in a mortar. Add the black crust of rye bread that has been soaked in vinegar beforehand. Also add pounded galanga, pepper, and ginger, caraway, mace, and cloves. But if you wish to keep it long, make it sharp with vinegar and with a little honey and boil it well. Lay it (the fish) in (when it is) cold.
There are numerous recipes for preserving meats by immersing them in thick sauces, effectively excluding bacteria. Most of these sauces also included vinegar which would further reduce spoilage. Here, we have another early example, though this time involving fish. Lampreys werefashionable throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, though most surviving recipes describe how to prepare them fresh. This is an unusual occurrence, but as the same source in a different recipe for such a preservative sauce specifically instructs the reader to apply the process creatively, not an unexpected one.
The Mondseer Kochbuch is a recipe collection bound with a set of manuscript texts on grammar, dietetics, wine, and theology. There is a note inside that part of the book was completed in 1439 and, in a different place, that it was gifted to the abbot of the monastery at Mondsee (Austria). It is not certain whether the manuscript already included the recipes at that point, but it is likely. The entire codex was bound in leather in the second half of the fifteenth century, so at this point the recipe collection must have been part of it. The book was held at the monastery until it passed into the Vienna court library, now the national library of Austria, where it is now Cod 4995.
The collection shows clear parallels with the Buoch von guoter Spise. Many of its recipes are complex and call for expensive ingredients, and some give unusually precise quantities and measurements. It is edited in Doris Aichholzer’s “Wildu machen ayn guet essen…” Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Edition, Übersetzung, Quellenkommentar, Peter Lang, Berne et al. 1999
Take milk that is not fat and that has gelled (gelebret) and break the pot if (?) it does not slide out easily onto a sackcloth. Let it be tied up in this and weight it, at first gently, then more. Let it drain (read seihen for sieden – boil) from morning till evening. Then slice it thin and skewer it, and sprinkle it with salt. Lay it on a wooden griddle and let it roast well, and throw on a little pepper (pipeus), and spread it witgh butter or with fat if it is a meat day.
Aichholzer reads the instruction as wrapping a pot in cloth and submerging it in boiling water for a day, but though the verb sieden supports this, I do not see how it would achieve the desired aim. I thus believe the word is a misreading of seihen, to drain. This emendation produces a clearer reading of the rest of the recipe as well: the coagulated milk is removed from the pot, wrapped in sackcloth, and gradually weighed down to drain the liquid. The resulting solid is then spitted on skewers and roasted on a griddle. The parallel recipe in the Buoch von guoter Spise (#25) does not use either verb, but instructs us to let the milk lie as it is weighted down.
Of course, roast milk recipes are adime a dozen in our sources. Here, we do not learn the most interesting aspect: how is the milk coagulated? Some recipes use egg, but I suspect here we are looking at the bacterial action that also produced the solid, edible sour milk infamous as peasant food. Roasting it and adding butter or animal fat and pepper would elevate it for a lordly table.
The Mondseer Kochbuch is a recipe collection bound with a set of manuscript texts on grammar, dietetics, wine, and theology. There is a note inside that part of the book was completed in 1439 and, in a different place, that it was gifted to the abbot of the monastery at Mondsee (Austria). It is not certain whether the manuscript already included the recipes at that point, but it is likely. The entire codex was bound in leather in the second half of the fifteenth century, so at this point the recipe collection must have been part of it. The book was held at the monastery until it passed into the Vienna court library, now the national library of Austria, where it is now Cod 4995.
The collection shows clear parallels with the Buoch von guoter Spise. Many of its recipes are complex and call for expensive ingredients, and some give unusually precise quantities and measurements. It is edited in Doris Aichholzer’s “Wildu machen ayn guet essen…” Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Edition, Übersetzung, Quellenkommentar, Peter Lang, Berne et al. 1999
Just a short recipe today, I’ve had a long day at work:
19 How to prepare pigs’ guts and stomachs in a condiment sauce
Take boiled pigs’ guts and stomachs. Cut the boiled guts into four parts. Also cut the stomachs narrow (smal – in strips?). And cut the stomach and the guts as small as you wish. Take parsley, pennyroyal, and mint, boiled (gesoten) sage, hard-boiled eggs, fine bread, the greatest quantity of caraway, not much pepper, and one egg to a dish. Grind (make) it with vinegar and with broth (söde) so it does not become too sour, and pour it on the condiment. Add fat and let it warm up, and take it up before it becomes too thick and serve it.
Innards were commonly eaten, so this was likely a commonplace dish. The sauce with its mixture of herbs and vinegar sounds like it could be appealing, though I am leery of the large quantity of caraway. Altogether, I think I want to try this once, but I am not certain I am likely to enjoy it.
The Mondseer Kochbuch is a recipe collection bound with a set of manuscript texts on grammar, dietetics, wine, and theology. There is a note inside that part of the book was completed in 1439 and, in a different place, that it was gifted to the abbot of the monastery at Mondsee (Austria). It is not certain whether the manuscript already included the recipes at that point, but it is likely. The entire codex was bound in leather in the second half of the fifteenth century, so at this point the recipe collection must have been part of it. The book was held at the monastery until it passed into the Vienna court library, now the national library of Austria, where it is now Cod 4995.
The collection shows clear parallels with the Buoch von guoter Spise. Many of its recipes are complex and call for expensive ingredients, and some give unusually precise quantities and measurements. It is edited in Doris Aichholzer’s “Wildu machen ayn guet essen…” Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Edition, Übersetzung, Quellenkommentar, Peter Lang, Berne et al. 1999
The abundance and delicacy of this fish causes everyone to eat it, and it does not require much effort to give it a good taste. You can make do with boiling them in water with salt, chili, and a bundle of fine herbs. They have neither scales to remove nor stings to fear and they carry their own butter with them because though they are small, it does not stop them from being fat.
You also put them between two plates with a little fresh butter, fine herbs, pepper, salt, and orange skins and when they are ready to serve, you finish them with a sauce bound with an egg yolk and vinegar and grate a little nutmeg on top.
Of course, we do not actually catch fish larvae during spawning season any more, so it is not easy to replicate what this would have tasted like. I had hoped to get small sardines or whitebait of some kind, but the smallest fish the shop carried that day were immature milkfish. These are, of course, a Pacific species, but I still wanted to try the sauce and so I went ahead.
Ready to go
The technique of cooking the fish ‘between two plates’ is a familiar and traditional one in which two ceramic bowls are inverted over each other to produce an enclosed space, sometimes closed with water paste or clay, and placed near the fire. Today, this is easiest to replicate using a deep pan with a lid on a low heat. I melted butter in it, dropped in orange skin, herbs, salt and pepper, and added the fish one it was hot enough to gently cook it. As soon as the fish were cooked on one side, I flipped them over. After removing the orange skin, I added a good splash of vinegar and some water because I was concerned the whole was getting too dry. After another miunute of cooking, I removed the fish and tried to thicken the liquid with egg yolk. I mis-guessed badly and produced more of a scrambled egg than a sauce, but it tasted rather good. So I returned the fish to it and served it with a pinch of nutmeg.
I now assume the original dish is intended to be deeper and more liquid, and the fish, being quite small, will fall apart in cooking. The result would be a kind of fish stew rather than discrete fish in sauce, which I tried to acvhieve. But the taste was very good.
I spent a very enjoyable Saturday testing out recipes with good friends as part of my buccaneer cooking project, and easily the most successful one was a banana pie based on a description by Jean Baptiste Labat:
Banana pie
Plantains, (bananes), just like figues de l’Amerique, can be cooked in tartes. They are prepared with sugar, cinnamon, and a little lemon or orange peel. Note that the Spanish call the figue d’Amerique the banane and the banane the plantain.
The good father’s linguistic bemusement is understandable. The word families surrounding banana and plantain were used to refer to various fruit of the genus throughout the 17th and 18th centuries not just in different European languages, but by different writers in the same language. Following his description, though, we can be quite certain that what Labat calls a figue d’Amerique, an “American fig”, is what we would call a banana today, though one smaller and rounder than out modern Cavendish. That gave me the first indication modern bananas would not be out of place in this recipe.
The second question was what Labat meant by a tarte. In seventeenth-century usage, those could be both open and enclosed, much like pie in modern English, and there are descriptions of several kinds of edible crust. Those crusts were typically ‘short’ by having fat and/or eggs added. I decided to go with a modern tarte crust because I was much more interested in the filling.
The next question was how to prepare the filling, and here again parallel recipes are little help. It turns out fruit could be put into tartes raw, pre-cooked, or turned into a mash, and Labat gives no indication which he means. For my first experiment, I mashed banana with sugar, cinnamon, and lemnon peep. The fruit almost immediately liquefied and though the small hand pies I made were acceptable, the filling leaked.
So this time, I sliced the bananas thinly and layered them in a pie dish lined with crust. The first layer was topped off with sugar, cinnamon, and fresh zest. One tart was prepared with orange and two with lemon to see how the result varied. A second layer of banana slices followed, and then we covered one of the tartes with a lid and the other two with a latticework of strips leaving some space between. That way we could see whether the taste would differ between an open and enclosed filling.
Bananas with sugar, cinnamon, and lemon zest
The closed tarte was the clear favourite. Open to the air, the bananas quickly turned an unappetising brown and dried out. The filling in the closed tarte stayed white and juicy and retained a fresher taste. We also found that the orange zest complemented it better. I am happy with this recipe, but will try variations with plantains, sliced raw and pre-cooked, and weith smaller, more aromatic bananas if I can get them.
My apologies for the prolonged absence, I was busier than usual and am travelling to do some more experimental cooking this weekend. Today, all I have is a recipe from the Mondseer Kochbuch to take us a little closer to the (probably illusory) medieval chicken nugget:
Take (meat) of the breast of a chicken and chop it small, and pound it in a mortar. Add a little flour or bread, pepper and ginger. Salt it in measure, according to the quantity. Stir this well together Cut to small wooden pieces (klupplein) the length of a finger, (shaped) like a spear shaft (eln schafft – probably read “rounded like a spear shaft”). Shape smooth ‘beaks’ (snebel) in your hands and mould them around the shaft (spis) like a morel. Pull them on the outside so they become uneven (kraus). Lay them in a pan and let them boil with the sticks (stecklen). As you take out one, put in another, and prepare as many as you wish. When they are done, take them out. Stir a chopped muos with butter and fill the morels with it. Stick them on a skewer for a while. Heat them and drizzle them with butter and serve them. You can also prepare morels of pike or of salmon or whatever you wish this way.
This is another illustration of how it is never safe to rely on the titles of German recipes. This is not really a muos except in the sense that it is mashed. It is a close relative of the faux morel recipe made with egg batter we find in Cod Pal Germ 551 and Meister Eberhard. All those recipes try to replicate the stuffed heads of morel mushrooms, also a commonlyfound recipe for example in Cod Pal Germ 551 and the Munich Cgm 384 collection. It looks like an interesting, if fiddly thing to do. This specific recipe again has a parallel in the Buoch von guoter Spise (#23) though this is simply titled “a good dish”. As is often the case in the Mondseer Kochbuch, it is with reference to this we can figure out what is going on here.
The Mondseer Kochbuch is a recipe collection bound with a set of manuscript texts on grammar, dietetics, wine, and theology. There is a note inside that part of the book was completed in 1439 and, in a different place, that it was gifted to the abbot of the monastery at Mondsee (Austria). It is not certain whether the manuscript already included the recipes at that point, but it is likely. The entire codex was bound in leather in the second half of the fifteenth century, so at this point the recipe collection must have been part of it. The book was held at the monastery until it passed into the Vienna court library, now the national library of Austria, where it is now Cod 4995.
The collection shows clear parallels with the Buoch von guoter Spise. Many of its recipes are complex and call for expensive ingredients, and some give unusually precise quantities and measurements. It is edited in Doris Aichholzer’s “Wildu machen ayn guet essen…” Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Edition, Übersetzung, Quellenkommentar, Peter Lang, Berne et al. 1999
Hans Staden, landsknecht in Portuguese service and prisoner of the Tupinamba in the 1550s, made some interesting observations about the foodways of his captors. We saw a reference to fire-dried, ground fish in the last post on cassava. Here, he goes into a little more detail as he discusses fisheries and seasonal migration:
Various Native Americans cooking and fighting, engraving by Theodore de Bry to accompany Staden’s account courtesy of wikimedia commons
Also those far from the sea often come here, catch many fish, roast them dry, pound them and make flour of them which they dry well so that it may last long. They take it home and eat root flour (cassava) with it. For if they were to carry home roasted fish, they would not last long because they do not salt them. Also the flour can be packed better than whole roasted fish. … They also make flour of fish and meat, they do it thus, they roast the meat or fish above the fire in the smoke and let it become all dry. Then they pluck it apart and still dry it once again over the fire in vessels which they baked for that purpose called Yneppaun. Then they pound it small in a wooden mortar and searce it through a sieve, that lasts very long. For they have no custom of salting fish or meat. Such flour they then eat with the root flour and it tastes quite good.
As with cassava and the boucan technique of slow-roasting meat and fish on a raised platform over a small fire, we have confirmation of this from Jean de Lery, another European who spent time among Native Americans on the Brazilian Atlantic coast. Jean-Baptiste Labat also describes this practice among the inhabitants of the Antilles. I am really curious how that worked and tasted by now. De Lery describes the dimensions of a boucan quite precisely, I may try to build one next summer.
