The first thing you are likely seeing here is a recipe. I try to translate one recipe from a historical source every day, and here is where I post them. When I have time to experiment, I also post reports on actually trying out the dishes or short articles on other historical questions I find interesting. But mostly, it is recipes. I hope you enjoy them.
I was away over the weekend and having a computer taken care of took much longer than expected (I’m hugely grateful to the techie friends that went through the trouble). But before my online lecture tonight, a brief recipe from Balthasar Staindl:
Veal pastries
cxlviii) When the pastry crust is made from wheat flour, take the riech prät vom hindern pieg (? a cut, probably from the rump), scald it, remove the skin, and chop it very small. Take half as much fat as there is of meat. Chopped together (with the meat), salt it, season it a little with saffron and sprinkle it with a little vinegar. If you want to, you can also add egg yolks that are stuck (with spices). Once they are filled this way, bake them for half an hour.
Castrated ram
cxlix) Also make this from the meat of castrated rams, add onions to that and let it bake a little longer.
(…)
Pastries of castrated ram
cli) (It is) chopped into small pieces and scalded (?überbrennt), washed nicely, and seasoned with ginger. Add raisins or finely chopped onions and a little fresh butter or fat. Then cover it and let it bake about two hours or more.
This is a relatively straightforward set of recipes for meat pies. They are called Pastete, a pastry, but they are clearly not the same thing as the whole birds or joints we find under that name elsewhere. These are fairly small; the meat is chopped up, and they are baked quickly. The filling is also rather basic: meat, fat, seasoning, and potentially the familiar hard-boiled egg yolks stuck with cloves. I think I will try these fairly soon, they sound just right for a portable wintertime meal.
One aspect that is interesting is the meat being used here. The veal is taken from the riechbraten, a word that has puzzled previous scholars and me. I would say it clearly refers to a cut of meat, though as yet I cannot say which. It exists in both calves and roe deer. The other kind of meat is kastraun, a castrated ram. Though this is technically mutton, these animals were usually slaughtered young and the meat was likely much closer to what we consider lamb today. Hence I would recommend a pastry of either finely chopped (or ground) veal or lamb or, for the third recipe, bite-sized pieces of lamb baked in a raised hot-water paste container. The meat is cooked inside the pastry, so it will require thorough baking at a low temperature, especially for the coarsely chopped meat. If it works out, it should produce a nice amount of flavourful jellied meat juices inside. We aren’t told whether to serve these hot or cold, but I think cold is more likely. Either should work just fine.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
Here is another set of recipes from Balthasar Staindl that are broadly related to each other:
Pastries of capons
cxl) (sic!) When the pastries are made with dough, it must be made of wheat flour and with a fat broth or with water and fat boiled together. Then take a capon and break its limbs, and stick it with six or seven hard eggs. Take the hard-boiled yolks and a clove stuck into each yolk. When the capon was laid into the pastry, place the neck and stomach by its side and also the yolks of the eggs, salted, with it. Take plums or grapes, but if you do not have those, take lemons cut in slices. Also add bacon cut in thin slices, six or eight eggs, and good, fresh fat, a quantity according to how fat the capon is. Then make a flat piece of dough and cover the pastry with it. Let it bake for two hours, but if it is older than two years, it must bake for three hours. When it is put into the oven, brush it with beaten egg. Then look to it that when it rises, you cover it with paper so it does not touch the hearth. Close the oven. After it has baked for two hours, pour wine into it, about half a mässel, and then let it finish baking. Serve it warm. It is very good. When you want to serve the pastry, take an egg yolk or two, beat them, and add some vinegar. Let it warm up and pour it into the liquid that is inside the pastry. That way it becomes nicely schürlet (?). From Master Hans the treasurer’s cook.
(…)
Pastries of young chickens
cxliii) When the pastry is made, take the chickens and see they are well gutted. Break their limbs as you do with capons and lay in three or four, depending on how large the pastry is. First salt them, then season them with a good quantity of ginger and nothing else. If it is summer take grapes and bacon as you do for the capon, and fresh butter or fat in measure. Also cover it as described above with the capon and also brush it with egg. Let it bake for two hours.
Of pigeons
cxliiii) Treat young pigeons in every way as you do wild chickens (wilde huener), but you lard them as though you wanted to roast them.
Of herons
cxlv) Also prepare herons this way, but let them roast, depending on how old they are.
Of fieldfares
cxlvi) Also prepare fieldfares like this, but only let them bake for one hour. .
Ducks
cxlvii) Also prepare them like this. You can well add onions to them and they are very good to eat cold. If you want to serve all four pastries described before this point cold, open a hole at the top of the pastry, pour out the broth, and blow off the fat. Then pour the clear broth back in and let them cool this way.
I admit I am not entirely sure of some of the details, but the basic principle is clear and fairly ubiquitous: You take a bird or several, fit them into a pastry case together with some other ingredients to provide flavour, close the container, and bake them. The crust is likely a solid, unleavened dough given it is supposed to hold in liquids. Staindl describes what sounds like a hot water crust, much as we would use this today, but there may well have been more variety.
Recipe cxl (it is the second one with that number, clearly a printer’s error) is the most detailed and the most puzzling. Staindl gives as its source Master Hans the treasurer’s cook again. Clearly, he had some trust in the man’s abilities. It is similar to the capon pastries in Philippine Welser’s recipe collection: A capon is placed inside a pastry coffin with egg yolks, spices, bacon, fat, and fruit, which the Welser collection omits. I am not entirely sure what is going on with the hard-boiled yolks, but I assume they are arranged in some decorative fashion which suggests the lid would be lifted off whole to serve the pastry. Once closed, the pastry is baked and precautions are taken not to burn it. Wine is added part of the way through and egg yolk and vinegar just before it is served. I am not sure this is an effective way of producing an egg liaison, but maybe the liquid is first poured off and added again after thickening. These things often went without saying.
The unattributed recipes cliii-clvii refer back to each other and the capon recipe. The basic process is similar, and often we are just told the most salient differences: pigeons are larded, herons are roasted before baking, fieldfares cook quickly, and ducks require onions. Finally, we are told that all these pastries are usually served hot, but if they are to be served cold, the cooking liquid collecting inside must have its fat removed. It is poured off, the fat drawn off the surface, and the liquid returned to the pastry to congeal. I do not think these would have lasted long, but preservation was not the point here. This is ostentatious dining.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
Just a brief recipe today, and a reminder how much food preparation was seasonal work. Balthasar Staindl on smoking hams and the heads of pigs:
Pigs’ heads and hams
clix) (They are) cleanly salted and left to lie. In March, they are washed by a clean creek, cleanly scraped and washed so the salt is removed everywhere. Then they are hung up with string and juniper berries (kramatsber) put over them and attached (? befest). Do not smoke them too much, this way they turn out flavourful (rößlet) and taste good.
Early winter was the traditional season for slaughtering pigs, and much of the meat was salted away to east over the year. Here, we learn how and when to take some of it out of the salt and hung up to smoke. March was the tail end of winter, a cold Month, but not freezing, and you could expect rivers to be flowing again as the snow and ice melted. Now we can envision household servants of the urban upper class busily scrubbing and scraping salted pigs’ heads in the cold snowmelt and wrapping them with juniper branches. The smoking process is glossed over here, but we have more detailed instructions in other sources. The berries, of course, were dried – no fresh ones will grow in March – and I assume that befest, which means attached or fastened, means they were dried on whole branches which were then tied to the meat rather than ground up and rubbed over it as we do today. The meat is smoked until it is rößlet, a very general word derived from resch. This can mean spicy, crunchy, or savoury and really fills a niche modern German does not.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
In German, we say “das ist mir Wurst“, it is sausage to me, to mean that we do not care about something. These are sausage to Balthasar Staindl, though we would not necessarily call all of these dishes Wurst today:
Of sausages. Good sausages of the meat of lamb lungs.
clxii) Wash them or (?and) chop them very small. When it is very finely chopped, take the caul (netz) of the lamb as fat and also chop it into that. Break eggs into it and add a very small amount of cream. Add a little of the blood and spices. Add raisins. Then take the guts of the lamb or its stomach, or the gut of a calf or the thin gut of a cow. Fill it into these, but not fully, and boil it. To serve over these sausages, you make a gescherb sauce or a pfefferlin sauce with the cooking liquid, or whatever (else) you may want. You can serve these to a woman in childbed.
Sausages of veal
clxiii) Take roasting-grade meat of the veal Diechbraten (prob. leg). These sausages are for roasting and not for boiling first. Chop it very small as you do for meatballs (knoedlen) and chop the fat of a calf with it. Then also chop mace, peppercorns, and salt. Then take the caul (netz) of the calf if you can spread it (? so geets auseinander). Then take the chopped meat and lay it out lengthwise on the caul, but cut it off (at the ends) so it becomes rounded like a sausage. Tie it round and round and round with string and bend it like a sausage. If the caul is large, you can make three sausages in it. Then take a pan. You must add eggs and cream to the chopped meat and put it into the caul as is described above. Do not scald it too long, then roast it for a while until the caul bends of its own accord (?). After it is roasted, take off the string. Serve it on root vegetables. Cut it in slices and lay it all around a platter on the outside.
Of veal and beef sausages made from lung and liver
clxiiii) Take the liver of a beef (Rind) and also the lung. Chop each very small separately, then chop both together. Place them in a vat (Muelter), salt it, add pepper powder and take a small amount of good fat (lit: a good lesser fat, guets gerings faist). Cut that into it, not too small or it will boil away completely. Then pour on sweet cream and stir it together. Next, take the wide guts of an ox and put it into those, but properly loosely packed (eerlich laer). Tie it up with a string and scald it. These sausages are very good served on kraut or rueben, they are very mild. You can also make sausages of a calf’s liver, with or without cream.
To make a Lungel of beef
clxv) Take the stümpffel that is at the back of the mollen braten (molle can refer to a cow or calf, but here clearly means a cut, possibly from the rump) or any other tender (marbs) piece of the Diech (prob. leg). Chop it small. When it is chopped thoroughly, also chop fat into it. Break eggs into it and make it as thick as a choux pastry (pranter taig). You can also well add some cream, that only makes them milder. Have this chopped meat (ghaeckts) also encased in a gut, tie it at the ends, boil it, then slice it and serve a pfefferlin sauce over it. But if you want it in the gut (missing word: separated?), you must wrap it like a dumpling (knoedlein) in boiling water. You must wrap it large (in large pieces?). When you serve it, cut them apart from each other. This is a good dish if you have no venison. Serve a yellow or black pfefferlin sauce over it. You can also prepare this dish as described above from deer venison.
These are four recipes for rather different kinds of sausage, but apparently a good cook was expected to manage all four, and notably none are meant to be smoked and stored, but eaten immediately.
Recipe clxii is for a lung sausages. These are quite commonly found in German recipe sources, and I guess it is because you had to find a way of using the bitsnobody really liked to eat. German has no word for ‘offal’, it is all meat, but some meats are better than others, and lungs are very far down list. Here, the lungs are chopped together with caul fat and mixed with eggs, cream, and blood. Since we have no exact proportions, it is hard to guess what the final consistency is going to be, but my guess is closer to a red Grützwurst, coloured with blood, than a blood sausage proper. There is no mention of any cereal, though this was common in German organ meat sausages at the time, and it may go unmentioned here. The sausage is seasoned with unspecified spices and with raisins – still a component in some traditional North German recipes – and boiled to be served with spicy fruit or pepper sauce. Gescherb, a fruit and/or onion sauce, and pfefferlin, a thickened spice sauce, are as much standard in sixteenth century cuisine as ketchup and mustard are today.
In recipe clxiii, the quality shifts and we have a dish made of high-grade muscle meat. With the addition of eggs and cream, we might call this a meat loaf rather than a sausage, but Staindl uses an earlier, broader concept here. Fine meat, most likely from the leg (that is what diech usually means), is chopped very fine with fat, has egg and cream added, and is seasoned with pepper and mace, a sharp mixture that would also not interfere with the fairly light, creamy colour of the dish. It is wrapped in caul, not in guts, which was commonly done with dishes meant for roasting. Stabilised by being wrapped in string, these sausages were then cooked, apparently first given a quick scalding, then roasted over the coals. We see that they are done by how they bend (sich selbst beügt). I have not worked with similar recipes enough to understand this, but this is the kind of thing cooks were trained to observe and it would make sense to anyone in the know. Finally, the sausage is unwrapped, sliced, and arranged around a dish of rüben. This could refer to any number of root vegetables, from turnips to carrots and skirrets, and was generally thought of as a peasant dish. Very likely, this is a playful way of imitating common foods with expensive ingredients.
Recipe clxiiii returns to organ meats with a mix of liver and lung that I suspect is rather close to Leberwurst. Lung and liver chopped very finely, interspersed with larger chunks of fat and cream to carry flavour, suggests a soft consistency. The sausages are also cooked in the inedible large intestines Leberwurst traditionally is and served over kraut (leafy greens) or rüben (root vegetables), two quintessential peasant dishes. The expression gering faists is interesting. It could be a misunderstanding or misprint, but it suggests some hierarchy of animal fats. Here, something less desirable would do fine.
Recipe clxv is made with muscle meat again. Staindl calls it a Lungel, but it has no connection with lungs. Instead, it looks like a bratwurst sausage: It consists of high-grade meat, and a closer study of the various terms for cuts would probably clarify exactly which. Fat, egg, and cream, along with presumably salt and spices, are added and the mass, of a fairly thick consistency comparable to a choux pastry batter, boiled in gut casings. The description of how to cook it in separate segments is quite convoluted and potentially garbled, and may mean nothing more than making short sausage links, though it may also describe a distinctive shape I do not know. Once cooked, the sausages are served with a thoroughly unexceptional yellow or black pfeffer sauce.
All these are sausages to eat fresh and would have been available within a few days of slaughter, as an animal was processed. They are also clearly thought of as fit for a wealthy table, despite the deliberate appearance of rusticity. They may well be a good approximation of the sausages eaten as feast day fare by the peasantry, though with the addition of spices and refinements that probably did not grace village tables.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
I am sorry for yet another long silence and must say that, for reasons mostly good, there are more demands on my time coming up and I expect more such dry spells. However, I will continue to try and post as I can. Today, there are two recipes for venison party from Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 cookbook:
Hot venison pastries
cxli) Of deer or roe deer. When the pastries are made with rye flour, take the venison and singe it. Make two long cuts into it, wash it in three or four changes of water, and take fresh oxmeat. Chop that and a little bacon with it. Add a handful of marjoram, (the meat is) salted and seasoned (with) ginger, pepper, and other spices mixed together. Moisten it a little with vinegar, and see no bone is in the pastry. You can also add lemons. Let it bake for three hours and serve it warm.
…
Cold venison pastry
cl) Take the venison when it is scummed (verfaimt), larded lengthwise so the bacon reaches well into the meat. Salt it and spice it with twice as much pepper. Then take ginger, mix the spices together, and when the meat is seasoned well, it is laid into the dough thus dry. The dough must be made of rye flour. It must not be auff dönet (raised?) but you must use a finely bolted rye flour kneaded with hot water and worked thoroughly. Then take the dough, roll it out flat and broad, lay the above described venison on it, and fold the (dough) sheet over it the way you make krapfen. Let it bake this way for two hours. It is also good, if you want it, to take fat meat and lard it (with that?).
These two recipes are interesting because they are so similar – they are large pieces of venison baked in a rye crust – but differ in crucial details because one is meant to be served hot, i.e. immediately, the other cold.
Recipe cxli is not easy to fully interpret. I think the idea is to have a piece of venison with two long, deep scores along it that are filled with a mixture of beef and bacon. The whole is seasoned with marjoram and spices, drizzled with vinegar, wrapped in a rye dough, optionally with lemon slices, and baked. This would be sliced and served out at the table, hence the admonition to have no bone in it.
Recipe cl is simpler: the meat is parboiled (most likely to clean rather than cook it) and larded through along its long axis, making sure the fat reaches all the way inside. Rubbed with spices, it is wrapped in the dough dry and cooked for a long time. This could be kept for a while and cut open as needed, and it would be rather similar to a roast in its flavour profile. It is also very similar to one of my favourites from a century earlier.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
clxxviii) Take half a pound of almonds, three small egg yolks are added to it, and chicken liver, (grated) semel bread as much as two eggs, and two pfenning worth of cream. Then take the broth of old hens, well boiled, and pass the pounded almonds through a cloth with it, or take young chickens. Then take cinnamon, cloves, and salt in measure. Then lay the chicken meat that has been boiled before into the broth and let it warm up together. See the broth is not too thin. It should not have any colour from spices except that which is written above (i.e. do not add saffron). Serve it.
I started out with a rather small bird, the kind we call a Suppenhuhn in German, and boiled it for broth. My schedule required me to do this in intervals, so it must have been five or six hours altogether, and I suspect actually simmering it overnight would produce better results. As it was, I was left with about 1.2 litres of dark amber broth and a thoroughly cooked, sodden chicken. I stripped the meat for later use and discarded the skin and bones.
The next morning, I made almond milk from the broth and about 100g of blanched, chopped almonds in my blender. I only strained it through a sieve rather than a cloth because I was pressed for time, but though some small pieces of almond remained in the soup, that did not turn out to matter very much. I returned it to the stove and, once it was boiling hot, threw in about two tablespoons of dry grated bread which I stirred in and then smoothed out with a stick blender. The proper method would be straining it, but I lacked the patience.
Next, it was cream – about 100g – salt, cloves, and cinnamon. It came out tasting cohesive and smooth, but the scent of cinnamon was jarring to my modern expectations. Finally, I decided the yolks of two medium-sized eggs would be more than enough to thicken it, and I was right. The result was a creamy, rich soup. It tasted good enough that even my eight-year-old son, despite the alternative option of storebought tortellini, opted for it. With the meat added in to heat through, he cast the deciding vote for (modern) rice over (historically accurate) bread as an accompaniment.
The result is a lovely dish for cold, wet days, though one very rich in animal fat and protein and markedly lacking in vegetables. Adding some peas and carrots would make it almost a modern Hühnerfrikassee. I could also see it as a first course in modern ‘historic’ feasts, though it probably functioned as a standalone meal originally.
The previous day, place the chicken in a pot with the whole, peeled onion and cover with water. Salt lightly and simmer for several hours in a closed pot. Allow to cool, remove the chicken, and pick off the meat. Refrigerate meat and broth (or keep on the balcony, in German October).
Heat the broth in a pot and place the almonds in a blender. Add the hot broth to the blender, process thoroughly, and return to the pot straining through a fine sieve or cloth. Return the liquid to a full boil and stir in breadcrumbs, blending or mashing as required, until they fully dissolve. Then stir in the cream and season to taste with salt, cinnamon, and cloves. I think it might produce better results to add the cloves to the broth from the start, relegating their taste to the background and foregrounding cinnamon alone. Certainly, cloves should be used sparingly.
Finally, remove some of the soup from the pot to mix with the egg yolk. Heat the soup to almost boiling point and stir in the egg yolk mixture. Continue stirring until it thickens, then remove it from the stove. Cut or tear the meat into small pieces, heat it in the soup, and serve.
Have the hams taken out of the skin so that nothing else, no braet, attaches to them. Cut them, salt them, and let them lie in the salt for three weeks. Then break them out (hacks auff) and let them hang in the smoke for three or four weeks. Then they become like the Italian ones. You boil them whole and eat of them for eight days cold.
This recipe is really too short to attempt a full interpretation, but it is interesting in a number of ways. First, there is something to Italian hams that makes them special, and Staindl is trying to replicate it north of the Alps. Of course as long as I don’t know what that something is, I can’t attempt informed guesses what Staindl is doing here. The instructions themselves are very brief, but there are some points that may indicate differences to common practice.
A Hamme is basically a ham, though Grimm indicates that it can specifically mean the foreleg of the pig. As per the recipe, the leg is detached from the body with no other meat – presumably of the neck or back – attaching to it. It is then skinned, and this seems to indicate a difference because hams in contemporary art are shown with the skin on. The instruction to ‘cut’ (schneids) probably refers to trimming them, smoothing the surface and removing sinews. The next step is dry-salting in a large quantity of salt from which the meat needs to be hacked free. It is then smoked for a number of weeks and is ready to serve.
This still lacks almost all the vital information: How do you prepare the ham? How much salt is used? Is the liquid drained or kept? What dryness and consistency do we aim for? How warm or cold is the smoke supposed to be? How are we supposed to cook the ham afterward? What spices and sauce go with it? All of this, no doubt known to the author in practice if not in theory, would help us replicate the dish with greater confidence. It is, however, still an interesting piece of kitchen lore and more than we usually learn about these things from other sources.
Finally, the kind of Teutonic domestic bliss that is evoked by the image of a whole ham, boiled and ready to slice off pieces as desired for days on end, is sort of funny. But it bears remembering that a lot of things people ate on a regular basis were not cooked freshly. Eating cold foods was common enough. Boiled ham like this surely made a welcome addition to a wealthy householder’s Schlaftrunk, the late night bite that traditionally ended a long drinking session.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
I am just back from a brief and spectacular sojourn in Paris (it wasn’t me!) catching up with work, so this post will be brief. I have postednumerous times on the subject of blanc manger in the German tradition and how often it is called by different names. Balthasar Staindl, too, has a recipe for this dish that dare not speak its name:
Still feeling a bit dizzy
A good dish of capons
clxxvii) Take a capon, scald it, salt it, and stick it on a spit. Roast it. Then take half a pound of almonds and pound them as well. Make a thick milk of them. Take the capon, have all its meat taken off, but make sure the skin is not included. Tear up the meat very small, not too long (i.e. not into long fibres). Then take rice flour, mix it with the meat, season it with spices and sugar, and boil it in the almond milk until it turns dry. Add fat again (repeatedly?). That is how it is made.
You also take the white meat of capons that are roasted and cut it into cubes, only the white part. Then take it and pound it in a mortar. Pound rice into flour, and take good, thick almond milk. Take the pounded meat, put it into the almond milk, and let it be thin. Now add the rice flour, also boil it in this. Add sugar. Let it boil until it seems to be enough to you. Serve it as a side dish (gemueß) and sprinkle triget or good mild spices on it.
There is absolutely no question what this recipe is, but again, it is named an anodyne “good dish of capons”. I honestly have no idea why that keeps happening, but there is general tendency in the German tradition to favour descriptions over specific names. Perhaps that is all the explanation there is. In culinary terms, it is very traditional: white chicken meat, rice flour, almond milk and sugar, maybe some additional spices and fat. There is little to recommend it on that account.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
We do not have a lot of soup recipes surviving, and this one from Balthasar Staindl looks like it will even be tasty:
To make chicken broth of almonds
clxxviii) Take half a pound of almonds, three small egg yolks are added to it, and chicken liver, (grated) semel bread as much as two eggs, and two pfenning worth of cream. Then take the broth of old hens, well boiled, and pass the pounded almonds through a cloth with it, or take young chickens. Then take cinnamon, cloves, and salt in measure. Then lay the chicken meat that has been boiled before into the broth and let it warm up together. See the broth is not too thin. It should not have any colour from spices except that which is written above (i.e. do not add saffron). Serve it.
The instructions are not entirely clear, but we can discern a general principle: This is chicken soup. You start with the broth of old chickens, the kind we call Suppenhühner in German, and use it as the base for making almond milk. I am not entirely clear why you would want to do that given the recipe also involved eggs and cream, providing enough fat and white colour, but freshly made almond milk can provide a discernible flavour, and perhaps the point was simply to include it for health and status.
The list of ingredients that seem to be, counterintuitively, added to the almonds are fairly clearly actually added to the almond milk made from the broth: egg yolk and grated bread to thicken the soup, cream for richness and colour, the chicken livers, presumably pounded into a mush, also to thicken and enrich it, as was commonly done. We are more used to thicken our soups with starch or just cream, but grated bread and mashed liver, often in combination, are a familiar method in historic recipes.
The proportion of ingredients is unfortunately left unclear to us. The author, of course, knew how much cream a pfenning coin bought and had a clear idea how much broth to make for one pot of soup. We do not, and are thus left guessing. I suspect we are not looking at too much broth, given the resulting soup is meant to be thick and presumably white, and half a pound of almonds and three yolks will only go so far. I would thus go for a fairly rich and creamy mix, seasoned cautiously with cinnamon and cloves and lightly salted. Interestingly, this dish is expressly not to be coloured, something that may have needed saying in a cookbook where it seems every other recipe includes the instruction gilbs – colour it yellow.
Finally, the meat of the boiled chickens, at this point probably gelatinously soft and fairly tasteless, is heated in the soup and the whole served. Again, I would argue for a fairly high proportion of meat to broth, making sure a bit of meat comes with every spoon. It does not say so, but I suspect this recipe is meant to help people recover their strength and health.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
Here is another recipe from Staindl’s cookbook that goes back to a deep tradition:
To make a chicken ‘put back on the bone’ (angelegts Huen)
clxxi) Take a hen of a capon, either old or young, cut it apart, remove the meat from the leg bones raw, and chop it quite small. Break raw egg into it and stir it with a spoon. If you have raisins, add them. Season it with good mild spices, colour it yellow, and cover (bschlags) to every limb of the hen with the chopped meat. Lay it into a chicken or meat broth in that state and let it boil until it has had enough. This kind of food is quite good for women in childbed (Kindbetterin) or to people who have been bled (Aderlassern). Item, you may sometimes also chop veal into it, that makes it mild. You must also chop in fat (faist). You also sometimes take a small amount of cream if it is not eaten by women in childbed.
Item you can also make dumplings this way of hen or capon meat, but the meat must be raw. If it is cooked, it will become dry (sper).
This is an interesting addition to a tradition I had already looked at earlier: Faux chicken legs that are basically dumplings or chicken nuggets with bones stuck in them. Comparing this one to the parallel in the Inntalkochbuch (a manuscript dating to c. 1500) also illustrates the difference between continuing a tradition and transmitting a text, as in the case of the fire-breathing boar head:
<<14>> Von rohen hünern
Of raw chickens
Take the meat from the bones, chop it, but keep the bones. Take hot broth and take 2 eggs and the meat and shape patties out of it around the bones and put them into the broth. If you have bacon (speck) or beef or meat of castrated ram (castrauneins), (add that and) and chop that with parsley or sage.
This is clearly the same dish in spirit, but the two recipe texts are completely unrelated. We also find similar dishes made with cooked meat and both boiled and covered in batter and fried. Clearly, this was a popular thing to do.
Staindl’s recipe is gratefully detailed and clear: Raw chicken is chopped finely, the mass held together with egg and enriched with veal and animal fat. The word faist means this is fat as it is taken from the body, not melted into schmalz. The mass is them seasoned with spices and saffron, carefully shaped around the bones, and cooked in broth, most likely very gently poached.
The author considers this a strengthening dish and recommends it for people who need to recover. It is fit both for women lying in (this is not an uncommon recommendation) and for people undergoing bleeding, a common medical treatment that could quite literally take a lot out of you. I am sure, though, that it was also served for the novelty of it.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
