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.
It has been a week without posts for which I apologise. I was rather busy. Today, finally, I am back at my desk with a new entry from the Dorotheenkloster MS:
Harvesting saffron, Florentine Tacuinum Sanitatis courtesy of wikimedia commons
208 Of all kinds of fritters
For fritters, you must have seven colours. You find them one after the other and must seek them out throughout the year. You find the first in summer: blue flowers. You must have a lot of them and dry them in an oven that is not too hot. When they are dry enough, pound them cleanly. Keep the colour, and prepare a puree (gemüs) of sloes and add the colour to that. That turns it blue. Add honey, that makes it sweet. Season it with good spices and serve it.
209 If you want to cook with the same seven colours, cook them according to the time in the year
You will always find more. You can make cooked dishes (gmues) and fritters of them. Make red out of the berries of the guelder rose (Viburnum opulus, galian per). When they are ripe, press them out like wine. Once they are pressed, boil them and add honey, that way you can keep them all year. You prepare sauces and cooked dishes (gmues) from those. You will always find green easily. You make it from parsley or other herbs. You make cooked dishes (gmues) and fried foods with that. You can also easily have brown. You make it from tart cherries. You make cooked dishes of that, however you wish. You can also easily have grey. Mix white and black together, that way it turns grey. You easily make black yourself. Cook it from honey and gingerbread (letzelten). Yellow is also good. You make it with saffron, but see you do not use too much or it will turn red etc.
There are manyrecipes for coloured foods from medieval collections, but this is more detailed and systematic than mostothers. The planning and effort envisioned throughout the year to produce a ready supply suggests a large and wealthy household. The colours themselves are not terribly surprising. Cornflowers make blue, though I had not heard of preserving the colour in a mix of sloes and honey. Red from berries – the likeliest interpretation here is Viburnum opulus, but that is not certain – is treated similarly. Green is made with parsley, brown with cherries – most likely cooked down into a cherry sauce – and yellow with saffron. Black is produced by burning gingerbread, though I wonder what the effect on the flavour would have been.
There is a recipe in the same source that uses all colours, and I hope to get around to it tomorrow. They are also useful individually, though. The idea of laying in a supply of all of them through the year reminds us how important it was to harvest ingredients in their season and preserve them generally. Medieval cooks depended much more on things they made themselves.
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’m back from my trip to the seaside, but quite exhausted and looking forward to another outing tomorrow. tonight, I will have to just drop you a random recipe for colourful fritters from the Dorotheenkloster MS:
211 A different fritter
Take semeln (fine white) bread that is not newly baked. Slice it thin across the thin axis, not the broad. Take two kinds of filling: One is green, make the other black. Spread one filling on one side. If you cannot have green, make yellow and spread it on the slices. Then make a batter, it can be of eggs or of wine, and coat the slices in it. Lay two atop each other, fry them, and sprinkle sugar on them.
Basically, these are fried filled bread slices, a distant ancestor of grilled sandwiches, though here the point is the colour. Once put together, battered, and fried, the finished fritter would produce a striped effect if cut through: white-green-white-black-white. Green was typically derived from fresh herbs, black by browning gingerbread in honey or from mashed raisins. Yellow, of course, was made with saffron.
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.
Everyone knows the nursery rhyme and we all must have wondered if they really did that. It appears they did. This recipe from the Dorotheenkloster gives detailed instructions for making a pie that is both edible and will release live birds when cut.
Prepare a stiff dough with cold water or with quite hot water that can be shaped. Form (draw) it high, and make two crusts (choph) of it that are one inside the other. Make one one hand wider than the other. Slide them into an oven and let them bake. When they are ready and you are about to set them into each other (i.e. before baking), take two egg yolks or onions, that way they stick to each other before you put them into the oven. You can fill them this way: You must fill the inner crust. Take a roast partridge and small birds along with it. The birds should be fried in fat. Add a sweet sauce (sueppel) to it as you do with herons. Season it with sugar and spices. Cut apart the partridge like a capon, lay it in the inner crust, and add the small birds so it is full. Cover it with a broad sheet (of dough) that reaches across both crusts. Now take three yolks and brush them with it so they take on colour, and press down the dough sheet all around, that way it becomes one pie crust. Set it in the oven again. When it is dry, make a little gate in the side. (Take) Twenty live birds, and take a slice of bread that you make a door out of which you can open and close. And take 20 birds that are alive, and make the beak of one of them silver and the other gold, and before, also gild the front of their wings. Put them in (the outer crust) and cut a little window into it so they do not suffocate, or 2 or 3 (windows). Now close the little door, that way they stay inside. The 1 partridge and the (cooked) birds must be hot. Make a hole at the centre of the pie crust as big as it (the inner crust) is, and when you are about to serve, pour in the sauce so it does not harm the live birds. Take the cover you have cut out, put it back in place, and serve it.
This recipe is quite fanciful – there are a few similarly elaborate ones in related manuscripts suggesting a lost common source – but it also looks practical and manageable; Two pie shells, the inner one large enough to accommodate a good portion of gamebirds, the outher holding live songbirds, equipped with air holes and a closeable door. This would not be easy by any description, but it could be done.
Of course we would like to know more details. What kind of crust was used? The distinction between cold and hot water suggests this was more complex than plain water paste. but we don’t know. Neither do we have much of an idea what sauce the inner pie was served with, though there is one recipe that mentions honey and spices with heron. Of course we also do not know what kind of birds were confined in the pie, but most likely we are looking at small songbirds captured with glue traps. Needless to say their role in the process must have been an ordeal.
The Dorotheenkloster MS is a collection of 268 recipes that is currently held at the Austrian national library as Cod. 2897. It is bound together with other practical texts including a dietetic treatise by Albertus Magnus. The codex was rebound improperly in the 19th century which means the original order of pages is not certain, but the scripts used suggest that part of it dates to the late 14th century, the remainder to the early 15th century.
The Augustine Canons established the monastery of St Dorothea, the Dorotheenkloster, in Vienna in 1414 and we know the codex was held there until its dissolution in 1786, when it passed to the imperial library. Since part of the book appears to be older than 1414, it was probably purchased or brought there by a brother from elsewhere, not created in the monastery.
The text was edited and translated into modern German by Doris Aichholzer in „wildu machen ayn guet essen…“Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Erstedition Übersetzung, Kommentar, Peter Lang Verlag, Berne et al. 1999 on pp. 245-379.
The Dorotheenkloster MS includes a version of a very popular recipe for cheese fritters, with a twist:
Bent cheese fritters with cherry sauce
214 For crooked fritters
Grate good cheese and take half as much flour, and break eggs into it so it can be rolled out. Spice it well and roll it out on a board so it looks like sausages. Make them thin and bent like horses’ arses (rossorsn) and fry them in fat.
For bent fritters like horseshoes, you shall grate good cheese and take half as much flour and break eggs into it so that it can be rolled out better. Season it enough and roll it on a board so that it becomes like sausages. Then shape bent fritters like horseshoes. Those will turn out very good and are quite healthy, and you shall fry them in fat.
This is very similar, and it supports my idea that recipes were transmitted through dictation. It would explain how you go from rosseysen (horseshoes) to rossorsn (horses’ arses) without it being noticed. At least I assume a transmission error is what happened here, though you masy want to try and twist some of the fritters aroubnd your finger like tight, puckered calamari in case it actually was intentional. You never know, with medieval Germans.
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.
Aspics were becoming very popular in the fifteenth century. Here is a way of dealing with one that turned out greasy:
197 A galantine (sulz) of chickens
Take galantine of chickens. Take young chickens and boil them in vinegar. You remove their sweetness that way. Note that all chickens that you prepare for a galantine (zu galraid) must be boiled halfway in water and halfway in vinegar, both old and young ones, after they have been boiled in broth (? noch der wall der suppem). But if the galantine is too fat on top once it gels, take and pour boiling water on it, that way it becomes clear. Then tilt the bowl to one side so the water does not stay on it for long, otherwise it will melt.
The basic recipe here is clear and unsurprising: Cooked chicken is set in a sour, gelatin-based aspic. It clearly is an aspic in this instance, though both the words sultz and galraid can also be used to refer to thick sauces well into the sixteenth century. There are no instructions on seasoning or serving, but we can draw on similar recipes for those. Basically, this is still how we make Sülze in Germany today.
The interesting part is the instruction how to deal with an aspic that turns cloudy with excess fat. That is a common mistake to make, and not always easy to spot ahead of the gelling phase. It is not very significant if you serve your aspic sliced, as we usually do today, but if it goes to the table in a bowl, as was customary in the fifteenth century, transparency was important. Pouring hot water on the surface to melt the grease, then quickly pouring it off is a ready solution to this. It takes dexterity and good timing though.
The Dorotheenkloster MS is a collection of 268 recipes that is currently held at the Austrian national library as Cod. 2897. It is bound together with other practical texts including a dietetic treatise by Albertus Magnus. The codex was rebound improperly in the 19th century which means the original order of pages is not certain, but the scripts used suggest that part of it dates to the late 14th century, the remainder to the early 15th century.
The Augustine Canons established the monastery of St Dorothea, the Dorotheenkloster, in Vienna in 1414 and we know the codex was held there until its dissolution in 1786, when it passed to the imperial library. Since part of the book appears to be older than 1414, it was probably purchased or brought there by a brother from elsewhere, not created in the monastery.
The text was edited and translated into modern German by Doris Aichholzer in „wildu machen ayn guet essen…“Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Erstedition Übersetzung, Kommentar, Peter Lang Verlag, Berne et al. 1999 on pp. 245-379.
Though today’s recipe looks quite odd, it is not, in fact, an April Fool‘s joke. Rather, it seems to be an example of robust creative culinary humour, an illustration of ‘playing with food’.
Woodcut by Albrecht Dürer: The Cook and His Wife, c. 1496/1497 courtesy of wikimedia commons. Lacing points are visible on the cook’s jerkin.
190 A galantine of deer(-skin) laces
Take off the skin of a roe deer and scald it so that all the hair comes off. Then boil the skin well and let it shrink quite well (? scheph sy gar wol zu sammen). When it is boiled, cut off laces a span in length and two fingers wide, and make a galantine of it.
Again, there is a parallel recipe in the Meister Hans collection, and in this case the dish is actually referred to as made of laces for hosen.
Lacing was a way of holding clothes together. Laces, often strings, but also made of leather, were passed through holes in the fabric and tied shut. Hosen, the precursors of modern trousers, were laced to the belt to hold them up, so hosen laces were familiar items to everyone. eating them, of course, would have been ridiculous.
in culinary terms, the recipe is surprising, but not implausible. We know that skin was cooked and eaten on occasion, if not often. The process described here, careful de-hairing and thorough boiling, is reasonably plausible and should turn a raw deerskin into something edible. Cut into pieces resembling lacing points, it was covered in aspic and served to the amusement of diners. Such a dish would testify to the skill and creativity of the cook and might even have been enjoyed for its flavour.
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.
To mark the occasion of today, I would like to take some time away from the Dorotheenkloster MS to present an addition to the Bologna MS of the liber de ferculis malis. I already referred to the gloss in the Vatican copy, and this one, while not exactly corresponding, appears to parallel the second gloss found in this.
Piscis Vasconum sive Aprilis
Recipe piscem marinum magnum et durum. In baculos uno digito non largiores subtiliter secatur quasi quadratos et ob[line]tur ovis batutis, micae (sic!) panis conspergatur. Ne videtur piscis per aur[a]tam crustam. In sartagine bene assati, infertur pisa viridia oryzacumve diebus ieiunibus. Et erit avium in oculo. [?]
Gascon or April (?) fish
Take a large and firm sea fish. It is cut skilfully into almost rectangular pieces no larger than a finger and is brushed with beaten egg and strewn with bread crumbs. See that no fish can be seen though the golden crust. It is well fried in a pan and served in fast days with green peas and rice. And it will be conspicuous to birds (lit: in the eyes of birds)
Both copies of the liber de ferculis malis are incomplete, but both the scribal hand and the presence of this gloss suggest the Bologna MS is of more recent date. The association of the Vatican MS with Angus Og of Islay or his brother Alasdair Og Mac Donmaill, Lord of the Isles, gives us a reliable terminus post quem about 1200. The question remains open whether the glosses were already present when the first manuscript was brought from Scotland or are later additions by Italian scribes. The style in which it is written suggests the author was very enamoured of his own erudition, but far from proficient in classical Latin.
The recipe itself has some puzzling aspects. It is ascribed to Gascons/Basques (in the Vatican MS putatively to Frenchmen), though the association with Basque cusine seems far-fetched. Perhaps this is simply due to the reputation of the Gascon Atlantic seafarers as fearless whalers and fishermen. Neither can we make any sense of the final line. How is the dish ‘conspicuous to birds’, or literally ‘in the birds’ eye’? We do not know. The alternative title of ‘April fish’ is equally confusing.
A final note: When the Bologna MS was rebound in the 16th century, a scribe added the crude drawing of a bearded figure in long trousers and a doublet with the legend “Schiffsherr vom Schneehause”. It is uncertain whether any association with the text exists, but the connection with Atlantic fisheries suggest it may.
With regret, I will have to reduce the frequency of my postings here for the time being. Life, work, lectures and unfinished manuscripts are making demands on my time I cannot ignore. I will still try to be up here once or twice a week, though, and get back to more frequent posts as the situation allows. Today, I have a recipe for fake head cheese from the Dorotheenkloster MS:
Sixteenth-century woodcut of a fisherman, courtesy of wikimedia commons
193 A pressed dish of fish
Take pike and tench mixed, or whatever fish you want, but do not take barbels. Take the fish and boil them. When they are boiled, break them to pieces with the skin on and remove all bones. Then you must have one lot of isinglass and boil it for this (dish), but see there is not too much broth. Spice it nicely, pour the isinglass over the fish and stir it together. Lay it into a cloth folded double and weigh it down together. Lay it on a chest or a table and lay a board on top. Weigh it down with stones as heavy as two stone men (?) or heavier. Let it cool, and then take gingerbread, grind it small, add sugar, and boil it cleanly. Pour sweet wine into it and let it become (omission: thick?). Season it with good spices and saffron, and add a add half of a quarter pound of raisins and as much almonds. Put them into the sauce, let it cool, and serve it.
In principle, this is quite similar to a more cursory recipe in the Königsberg MS, but the technique is described more clearly here. The goal is to simulate Presskopf, head cheese, i.e. a dish in which pieces of cooked meat, traditionally from a pig’s head, are held together by aspic. We have a surviving recipe for the original meat dish, though it adds a layer of complexity that is not really necessary. Here, expensive fresh fish is used to simulate it. This is intended to amuse the wealthy on fast days.
The recipe begins with boiling fish whole, then breaking them in pieces and deboning them. This is actually easier using the fingers, which is also why fish was not cut with a knife at the table, and since the pieces are meant to be small, the process did not need to take account of damaging them. Meat could be shredded very fine for some aspic dishes.
Unlike with pig’s feet or heads, the broth here needs added gelatin to make aspic and it is provided by isinglass. These dried swim bladders were the go-to source for medieval cooks and of course legal to eat on fast days. Once it is ready and seasoned, the broth and fish are wrapped tightly in several layers of cloth, laid under a board, and weighted down. I am not sure how to read the specification of weight. Technically it would mean ‘two stone men’, but there could well be a scribal error or some meaning that is unclear to us in it. Certainly it cannot mean the weight of two life-sized statues. In practice, unless you were making a very large amount, a few bricks should do nicely.
Once the gelatin has set, the fish can be unwrapped and sliced. At this point, you are also supposed to make a sweet sauce of gingerbread, sugar, wine, spices, raisins, and almonds to serve with it. It’s not what modern eaters would expect, but a fashionable taste in the fifteenth century.
The Dorotheenkloster MS is a collection of 268 recipes that is currently held at the Austrian national library as Cod. 2897. It is bound together with other practical texts including a dietetic treatise by Albertus Magnus. The codex was rebound improperly in the 19th century which means the original order of pages is not certain, but the scripts used suggest that part of it dates to the late 14th century, the remainder to the early 15th century.
The Augustine Canons established the monastery of St Dorothea, the Dorotheenkloster, in Vienna in 1414 and we know the codex was held there until its dissolution in 1786, when it passed to the imperial library. Since part of the book appears to be older than 1414, it was probably purchased or brought there by a brother from elsewhere, not created in the monastery.
The text was edited and translated into modern German by Doris Aichholzer in „wildu machen ayn guet essen…“Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Erstedition Übersetzung, Kommentar, Peter Lang Verlag, Berne et al. 1999 on pp. 245-379.
The Dorotheenkloster MS contains this very attractive recipe:
191 A galantine of figs
Take a pound (talentum) of figs, wash them nicely, and let them boil up once. Leave on the stalks, and set them into a bowl so the stalks point upwards. When they are boiled, you must have one lot of isinglass and boil it in good wine, it should be Italian wine. Then take the broth that the figs were boiled in. Take as much of it as you need for the figs (i.e. to cover them). Season it with good spices and saffron, but not too much, just so the figs are covered with the broth. Serve it etc.
Figs, spices, wine, jelly – what is there not to like? I already translated and cooked a very similar recipe found in the Meister Hans collection, so I refer anyone wanting to try it for themselves to thast blog post. It is indeed delicious.
What interests me today is the close parallel between the two recipes. In Meister Hans, it reads:
Galantine of figs
Item a galantine of figs, if you wish to make this, take a pound of figs. Wash them nicely and give them one boiling. Leave the stalks on, and set them in a bowl so that the stalks point upward. When they are boiled, you shall have isinglass and boil this in good wine and take the broth that the figs were boiled in (as well). And take of this as much as you need with the figs. Season it with good spices and saffron, and see that there is not too much of the broth, (just) so that the figs are covered.
This really is the same recipe – indeed, much of the difference between the translations comes from me having refined my rendering of the same Middle German words over the past three years. This indicates first of all, as I pointed out elsewhere, that the Meister Hans text is not a solitary and does not originally date to the 1460s.
Interestingly, the wording of the recipe is very similar overall. The small difference that the Dorotheenkloster MS seems to indicate a limited amount of saffron while Meister Hans more plausibly calls for a limited amount of liquid can be explained by a scribal oversight. Still, there are points where the texts diverge: The Dorotheenkloster MS specifically calls for Italian wine in an awkwardly appended half sentence that is lacking from Meister Hans. Meanwhile, Meister Hans introduces the recipe by naming it twice and adding a formulaic opening. I think this is best explained if we assume copying was done through dictation. A reader might well add a piece of information (Italian wine, mind!), a copyist include or leave out a formula that added no knowledge of value. That is how I think these texts were transmitted, and it may go some way towards explaining their occasional errors.
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.
Take three chickens for a dish. Take their sheer (pretig) meat and chop it small. Season it with good spices and with parsley and grated bread and with chopped bacon and egg, and chop this all together. Take some of the chicken. Shape small balls in your hand and cover the bones with them so that it sticks out a little at the bottom. Lay them in boiling broth that is not excessively salted and let them boil until they are done. Chop bacon and parsley over it and serve it.
185 A different dish of lamb
Take half a lamb for one dish. Detach the ribs and all the bones and prepare the sheer meat (gepret) as described before. You must have Italian raisins. Prepare it the same way that you made it (in the previous recipe). Serve it. Do not oversalt it.
The idea of chopping or grinding up meat, making a seasoned paste, and putting it back on the bone to cook was a common one in medieval recipe collections. We meet it especially with chickens, with parallels in the Inntalkochbuch, the Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch, and the Kuchenmaistrey. The resulting meatball-drumsticks can be boiled or fried. Here, interestingly, the same process is applied to lamb ribs. I imagine the dish would have been somewhat more rustic, with serious gnawing involved.
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.
