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.
Another recipe from the 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch by Balthasar Staindl. This one looks like an ancestor of the Dutch baby.
A risen (auffgangens) Reindel
lxiii) Make it this way: Take eight eggs and much more good cream than eggs. Salt it properly and add a spoonful of wheat flour. Take a pan (of the kind) you often use for (rendering) lard, one that is not light, and heat fat in it. Use a fair quantity, and pour in the cream and eggs. Set it on a griddle and put a pot lid with hot coals on it. Let it fry this way. It will burn (brown) on the top and bottom. When you want to serve it, take off the pot lid so that the koch (the batter) detaches itself from the pan. Then invert the pan over a serving bowl, that way the Reindel detaches. Add sugar and serve it.
Staindl dedicates an entire section of his book to egg dishes, and this recipe shows the sophistication and attention to detail Renaissance cooks were capable of. The dish is called a reindel, a name that often attaches to egg dishes cooked in a mortar or similar vessel, and the technique here is not fundamentally different from that of mortar cake. However, the decsription we get here is strikingly similar to wehat we know as a Dutch baby: A rich egg batter is poured into a hot, heavy pan and cooked at a high temperature with top and bottom heat. It rises, browns fast, and can be removed from the pan to be served immediately.
That this existed should only come as a surprise if you believed Renaissance kitchens were primitive, but actually having a fairly detailed description is still very useful. Staindl, who comes across as completist and a bit pedantic, isan excellent resource for that sort of thing. It is not always easy to see where his recipes differ from one another, but surely contemporaries understood the difference and we should assume one existed. This one is distinct, and probably quite delicious.
Balthasar Staindl’s work is a very interesting one, 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.
Another pair of recipes in Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Künstlichs und Nutzlichs Kochbuch describes a kind of sauce that we find again and again in sixteenth-century sources under different names.
To make apple gescherb
xlvi) Slice apples and fry them in fat. When they are well fried, pour on sweet wine. Take broth of venison or meat that is not too salty, colour it yellow, spice it, and add raisins.
A chopped dish (eingehackts)
If you want to make an eingehackts, chop the apples, fry them, and proceed as described above. You also make this with onions. Sometimes you also use apples and onions together. You serve this over venison, fritters (küchlen), or you can have your gescherb over whatever you want.
A sauce made of apples or onions that are first fried, then steamed or stewed until they fall apart, is found in many iterations across the German corpus of recipes. Here, as in many other cases, it is called a gescherb, probaly derived from a Scherben, a shallow pottery cooking vessel. It is also sometimes called a ziseindel or preseindel. As the second recipe helpfully points out, you can serve these sauces with just about anything, or at least that seems to be what people did.
I included this sauce in my Landsknecht Cookbook for its ubiquity and simplicity. Unlike many pfeffer sauces or those involving dried fruit or almonds, this would be affordable and manageable in a modest kitchen. Taken together with that other universal condiment of Renaissance Germany, the tart cherry sauce, and several recipes for using berries in sauces, these suggest that German cooks were indeed very fond of serving fruit alongside meat and fish dishes. Several travelers noted this with surprise at the time.
One possible point of interest in these recipes is the distinction between a gescherb and an eingehackts. Since both sauces use the same ingredients and largely identical cooking processes, it is possible that these are simply synonyms. If there is a distinction, though, it could be in consistency. If that is the case,m chopped apples might produce a distinctly chunky sauce while sliced ones, if cooked long enough, would make a smooth one. That could be a clue to the consistency expected of a gescherb – a smooth apple or onion sauce.
Balthasar Staindl’s work is a very interesting one, 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 have not had much time over the past fewdays, and with whast time there was, I allowed myself to be sidetracked. As a result, there is again no recipe from Staindl’s cookbook, but instead a brief excerpt from Konrad of Megenberg‘s Yconomia today:
A 1475 print of Konrad von Megenberg’s liber naturalis – the closest I could come for today.
Thirty-sixth chapter: The cook (de coco)
The Magirus (cook) who is also called the cocus (cook), should be experienced in the choice of flavours (saporum) so that he knows which ones are more suitable for seasoning dishes and which ones of them are to be mixed for boiling or roasting. He must also know that there are various kinds of these so that, when the times (tempus – can mean season) call for it, he may season many varieties from few (ingredients) (ex paucis plures condiat). He must also be knowledgeable, if it becomes necessary, to be easily able to quickly augment the dishes if guests should inopportunely call at the hour of the midday or evening meal. He shall cleanly cook any dish, and it shall be enough. What is enough, (he shall not) excessively reduce nor add to even slightly. He must observe with Argus-like watchfulness his pots and cauldrons so no man may subject them to any fraud. Good cooks are esteemed like physicians because it is for cooks to know how to season foods with spices (condiendis cum aromatibus), and which others to boil or to roast. It is up to them, at least together with the physicians, to assign foods accordingly. Laudable is the cook who knows the steward’s (dapiferis) canonical order in the sequence of serving food, which is to serve first those dishes which are subtle and easily digested such as sauced eggs (ova sorbilia), young chickens, small birds, and their like. But those which are grosser and tougher follow later, which are beef and pork or similar meats. And those must first be eaten boiled because they are more easily digested this way than if they are roasted. Avicenna gives the reason for this order in the first canon of his regimen which states that if foods that are light and easily digested are eaten after strong ones, they float upwards, not having away to pass through. There they putrefy and also corrupt the strong foods which decay together and cause many ills. The above order likewise applies to spiritual and doctrinal nourishment, as in the Apostle’s first Epistle to the Corinthians, third chapter: I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it etc. (1 Corinthians 3.2). Neither must the cook salt the foods too much because, according to the words of Avicenna, all salty foods corrupt the stomach and hurt the vision. If a cook knows these things (and) what manner of foods are to be given together in which quarter of the year, that is in spring, summer, autumn, and winter, he is rightly called by the honourable name of physician-cook (cocus medicinalis), because the things described before are like medicine. …
(long quotes from Isidorus and Solinus)
…Thus the experienced kind of cooks working for enjoyment (cocorum gustabilium) are properly industrious (as well). I therefore think highly of good cooks, but I do not praise them in this, that they cut delicate fish in pieces through the middle or disfigure (apocopant) them with certain parts of wild animals (ferina).
Konrad of Megenberg, a secular cleric and intellectual active in the mid- and late fourteenth century, produced some writings that look more and more interesting. This is an excerpt for his Yconomia, a book of managing a household. Onlike later writers on the subject, he envisions a large, courtly establishment with a variety of specialised servants. Thus, this is the idealised description of a court cook serving the needs of a princely retinue.
There is little we do not expect here: the balance between artisanal and executive functions (selecting seasoning versus combating fraud), the guarded admiration for culinary skill carefully veiled in utility, a strong emphasis on health as the ultimate goal of diet, and of course, the performative rejection of excess. This is what anyone talking of cooks in public was expected to say. Pleasure in eating was suspect, close to the sin of gluttony, and especially German courtly culture seems to have taken a long time to get over this particular prejudice.
That said, we find a few interesting points. The order opf serving dishes, while commonplace, is emphasised rather heavily here, as is the concern over excessively salty food. Given the common use of salt as a preservative not just of meat and fish, but also butter, vegetables, and cheese, this would be difficult to avoid. If it was assumed to have detrimental effects on health, it is easy to see how this could become a central concern of healthy eating, much as avoiding ‘additives’ or ‘chemicals’ does today. This may go some way to explaining how “do not oversalt it” could become a trope to end recipes with, even if they do not include salt at all.
Finally, it is interesting that the excess the author singles out for criticism is the habit of cutting up fish and disfiguring (the verb has a very broad meaning of ‘harm’) them with ferina. In classical Latin, that word usually refers to furs or body parts of wild animals, and here it likely hints at the creation of culinary chimeras, joining for example cooked hares to fish tails. We do not have recipes for this in the German corpus, but the practice seems to have been known, or at least rumoured about. Perhaps it had as much bearing on the fare of Konrad von Megenberg as molecular gastronomy does on that of most of us, but we have heard of it at some point and probably developed strong opinions.
We have already amply demonstrated that Renaissance German cooks were very fond of dipping things in batter and frying them. The apple slices that we passed over yesterday seem to have been the most popular kind, and various versionsoccur in other sources. Balthasar Staindl also includes a side note on how to prepare quinces this way in his 1547 Kuenstlichs und Nutzlichs Kochbuch:
Quince tree, from Hieronymus Bock’s 1547 herbal courtesy of wikimedia commons
To make fried quinces
xlvii) Make it this way: Slice large quinces thinly, remove the cores and seeds, lay them into warm fat that is not hot and let them stand over the coals for an hour. That way they turn soft. Then take a thin batter made with wine and sugar, coat the slices in it, and fry them in fat so that the batter stays yellow.
Quinces generally look and behave a lot like apples, but they are much harder and must be softened before being turned into pies, pastries, or, as in this case, fritters. Admittedly, the method is rather unusual. Not that this wouldn’t work – slowly cooking things in fat is how you make confit, after all – but it is hard to see why you would choose this challenging and expensive method instead of just boiling or steaming them. Either way, they are then battered and gently fried without browning them. It could be an attractive dish if done competently, but I would rather not attempt it. The chance of ending up with a greasy, soggy mess is too high for my liking.
Balthasar Staindl’s work is a very interesting one, 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.
Today, we return to Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und Nutzlichs Kochbuch to assemble a recipe he spreads out over several pages. We find it tacked on to casual instructions on how to fry apples (a common process, apparently):
To fry apples
xlvii) You fry them in many ways. Many people make a batter with beer, coat them in it. You also add an egg, or you make the batter with wine, or dredge them (the apples) in flour and fry them in hot fat, those become greasy. Item when you make tarts of the black koch (fruit puree), you must roll out a sheet (of dough), put the black (filling) into it and bake it like other tarts. You can also stick it with large raisins (Citweben) or red pine nuts (zirnussen), these turn out well.
If those look like two separate recipes, it’s probably because they are. The editing process of Staindl’s first edition was slapdash and we find repeating numbers, sentences from previous recipes used as titles for following ones, and here very likely two separate paragraphs joined together. I would argue that the tarts are meant to be separate. There is a recipe for a black koch earlier in the book:
To make a black koch of apples and pears
xlii) Take sweet apples and cut them in thin slices. Fry them in hot fat until they brown and chop them very small. Put them into a handled cooking vessel (düpffel) or a pan, pour on sweet wine and a good amount of sugar, and boil it for a while. Season it with mild spices and top it with anise coated in sugar. You can also do this with pears.
The word koch usually refers to a person – the cook – but here, as it often does, it clearly means a kind of mush. It can be a grain porridge or a fruit puree. As far as I can tell, a koch is distinguished from a mus by being thinner, but the dividing line seems to have been tenuous. Here, apples or pears are browned in fat, chopped, and further boiled down with wine, sugar, and spices. That actually fits the theme of the recipe we began with and I wonder whether this one is not misplaced where it is.
The black tart recipe is also followed by another, very similar dish, though this one is not labelled a koch but a muoß, as if to keep the reader on their toes:
A very good mouß that is black
xlix) Cut good apples into a pot and add one part of red tart cherries or plums, also a good part of the crumb of a semel loaf, and pour wine on it. Let it boil all together until it is nicely soft, then pass it through a sieve or cloth. Add sugar and good mild spices and let it boil in a pan. Serve it cold or warm.
This clearly is a different dish. It is thickened with bread rather than boiled down, and its colour derives from adding plums or cherries, very likely as dried fruit for much of the time apples were available. Still, it is black, and it is found directly next to the black tart, so it does not seem too far a leap to suggest this could have served as a filling. Both probably would work fine, the former more than the latter, though.
Once cooked, these purees would be filled into a free-standing crust and baked in a pan that was stood in the embers and had glowing coals heaped on its lide, much like a Dutch oven. Staindl’s version of the dough to be used looks like a ‘short’ crust made with fat and hot water, but that is a matter we will have to turn to in a future post.
Balthasar Staindl’s work is a very interesting one, 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.
My gratitude for everyone’s patience as the intervals between posts lengthen; I was miserably sick these past days, but still managed to do one thing I wanted to, which was go to Berlin to deliver a gift and go to the Neues Museum for the Inselfest. The museum collections are quite overwhelming, but a few things especially stuck with me. Some of them are food-related and will go up on my blog in the near future, and this is one.
Probably in 260 CE, a group of most likely Alamannic raiders on their return journey from looting Gaul had a very bad day. We don’t know how – possibly in an encounter with Roman troops, or just through bad luck: Several carts full of valuable loot ended up in the Rhine and lay in the mud and gravel until the remnants were found in the 1990s.
If this looks like a well-assorted kitchenware shop, that is partly the fault of the very traditional presentation. This is, however, a genuine treasure. People risked their lives plundering this in the Roman Empire and carried it home for hundreds of kilometres, expecting it to vearn them fame and status once they got home. If it’s not what our minds may conjure up when we think of the hoard of the Nibelungen, we must blame centuries of media distortion. This was most likely what royal treasure looked like: Part silver and gold, but mostly metal implements of bronze and iron, rich tableware, decorative household gear, and of course weapons, which we do not find much represented here.
Some of these items are familiar from grave finds. Especially the elaborate wine strainers were often interred with the wealthy dead east of the Rhine, as were bronze cauldrons, probably used to serve alcoholic drinks. Note, though, that the looters also took kitchen knives, ladles, and a chain to hang a pot over the fire from. All of this represented wealth.
Cooking, in this world, was not just a common chore. It was a central necessity on any household, one that depended on treasured and valuable possessions. A proper kitchen was a major investment, often the most valuable items in the home, and possibilities expanded in line with the resources you could dedicate to it.
Another recipe from Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und Nutzlichs Kochbuch. A simple soup, but an expensive one:
To make raisin soup
xxxii) Take raisins, pick them over nicely, and pound them in a mortar so they become quite soft (gantz kochig). Pound a slice of rye bread with them and pass them through with wine that is sweet. Then season it with mild spices like cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. Mix water with the wine when you pass it through, that way it is not too strong for sick people.
Not every upper-class recipe was complicated. Raisins with wine and spices, thickened with rye bread, make a sweet, rich soup that can be whipped up quickly and, by the lights of the time, was considered healthy. The tradition of such soups made with various dried fruit continues, for example, in the Swedish fruktsoppa, but also various regional versions of Rosinensuppe, though these are not as popular in Germany. There are also earlier recipes for making a raisin galantine in a similar manner, so it’s not new at the time.
Again, we need to remember that simple does not equal modest. Early cookbooks were written for wealthy readers and the recipes in them reflect that. This soup could be produced in an hour or so with what you had on hand – assuming what you had on hand was sweet (and hence imported Mediterranean) wine, raisins from Italy or France, spices, and the indispensible metal mortar that cost more than many poorer people’s entire kitchen. Serving this makes a statement.
As an aside, since this is intended at least among others for sick people, it is likely the soup was served without additional bread. In that case, it should be made quite thick, more a thin porridge. If you are serving it over toasted bread, as was the custom for soups generally, it can be thinner and the rye bread limited to just enough to give it a little body.
Balthasar Staindl’s work is a very interesting one, 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.
This is another recipe from Balthasar Staindl’s Kuenstlichs und Nutzlichs Kochbuch of 1547. It is interesting for the instructions it gives and because it illustrates the pitfalls of familiar words:
Egg koechlen (cake)
v) Take twelve eggs and one grated semel loaf, some fine white flour (semelmel), a spoonful of fresh melted fat, and clean water so the batter is a little thicker than a strauben batter. The oven must be very hot in the back, and thoroughly wiped. Then pour it into the pan that you pour kuochen into in the oven on the bare surface (auff dem bloßen herdt) and let it bake a quarter of an hour. When you take it out of the oven, cut it apart across its breadth (i.e. slice it). Take some fresh fat or butter and pour it around that a little, put sugar into it and on top, and bring it to the table hot.
This recipe is useful beyond the dish it describes in a number of ways. First, it makes it clear that semelmel does not mean greated white bread, as it usually does in modern German as Semmelmehl, but the fine white flour used to make semel bread. Both are added at the same time here, so they must be different things.
Secondly, it is one of the rare instances where the use of an oven is described in any detail. Only wealthy homes had ovens of their own, and using one to make this cake would be extremely wasteful, but it could easily be put in as the oven cooled, while it was still too hot for bread. As I learned when I had the opportunity to use a wood-fired thermal mass oven earlier this year, it gets very hot and takes a long time to cool. This would be a good use of the initial high heat.
When an such oven is fully heated, the soot burns away and the embers and ashes are either raked out or pushed towards the back. The oven must be thoroughly wiped with a wet cloth to remove ash and grit that could get into the bread, a step the recipe emphasises. Next, the batter is poured ito a pan and slid towards the back of the oven – the hottest part – to bake quickly. We should not take the quarter of an hour literally since kitchen clocks were not in common use, but as an indication of a short time. Once removed, the resulting cake would likely have bubbled up and risen from the high bottom heat, a feature bakers used to make even unleavened doughs palatable. Like proper pizza, this is not easily replicated with a modern baking oven which usually achieves top temperatures of 220°C or 250°C. A wood-fired oven can easily go beyond 400°C.
The cake is then sliced, drizzled with butter, and sprinkled with sugar before being served, still hot, to the waiting diners. This is the time to spare a thought for the amount of planning that was needed to make sure the baking oven was heated to the right temperature – a process taking several hours – at the time the cake was wanted. Perhaps this dish was less part of a meal and more a baking day treat, the way a rich, meaty bread porridge accompanied slaughter days.
As an aside, the name koechlen I am blithely rendering as ‘cake’ here meets us variously as küchlein,küchlin or kiechla elsewhere and often means fritters rather than anything like a modern cake. Meanwhile, a very similar recipe presented in Philippine Welser’s recipe collection is called a tart despite having no bottom crust. It is baked in a tart pan, not an oven, though. Even earlier recipes fry a batter of eggs and breadcrumbs to make pancakes, a treatment I included in my Landsknecht Cookbook. If the pan was filled high enough, the dish would not have looked very dissimilar.
Balthasar Staindl’s work is a very interesting one, 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’s yet more sixteenth-century kitchen gadgetry from Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Künstlichs und Nutzlichs Kochbuch:
A Schachbrettkuchen mould, 1980s, my collection
A parti-coloured muoß in bowls of four or six colours
xxiiii) Make it this way: Take a tinned mould (sturtz) that can be put together in four or six parts so that it exactly (gerecht) fills the bowl you mean to make the mouß in. Set the same sturtz into the bowl so it touches the bottom of the bowl and touches (the sides) at every corner. Take of gemueß that is red, white, brown, black, or blue, and pour each one in its specific place and invert (misreading for: pour?) that into the bowl. Have the müser all be in the same thickness and pour each one as high as the others in the bowl. Then pull out the sturtz you set into it from the gemueß upwards.
This recipe contains two of the chameleon-words that haunt our attempts to read German cookbooks: Mus and Stur(t)z. A Mus is any kind of dish, purees, porridges, jellies or other things, of a soft consistency, but not liquid. Mus or gemues (not Gemüse) are typically eaten with a spoon, so the word could be rendered ‘spoon dish’, but it’s best to leave it untranslated. Stur(t)z comes from stürzen, in a culinary context to invert or turn over, and can describe a number of things, beginning with a lid to cover a pot or pan. Here, it means a metal inset that is placed inside a serving bowl.
The process described may be familiar to German readers from making Schachbrettkuchen, chequerboard cakes. A metal inset is placed in a bowl, making sure that it reaches the bottom and sides everywhere. The spaces now separated by the inset’s walls are then filled with different colours. Once the filling is in place and at rest, the inset is removed and the colours stay separate. The cake would then be baked, but here, the bowl with different-coloured soft foods is served as a showpiece.
Again, as we look at this recipe we need to keep in mind that metal implements and bowls in fitting sizes are not a trivial expense. Sixteenth-century Germany was a world where most kitchen consisted of a knife and a few pots and pans. This is ostentatious display, the kind of item a wealthy household or a cook-for-hire might own.
Balthasar Staindl’s work is a very interesting one, 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 Balthasar Staindl, and it illustrates once more just how prolifically gadget-minded Renaissance cooks could be:
Half of a brass bullet mould, probably Early Modern, courtesy of wikimedia commons
xxiii) Item make eggs in Lent this way: Have a wooden mould made, or one of another material, that consists of two parts fitted together like one that you use to pour bullets (büchsen stain), brushed with almond oil or nut oil. Pour in almond (milk) strengthened with isinglass so that it is or remains yellow and sweet, and let it gel. That is the yolk. For the egg (i.e. to make the egg), then take the yolk from the mould when it is fully gelled. Then take almond (milk in a quantity) that is as large as an egg is. Lay the same yolk into the (larger, egg-shaped) mould and pour the almond milk infused (gesterckten) with isinglass into the same mould the yolk is in. Also let that gel. That way, the white surrounds the yellow. Serve this for hard-boiled eggs and serve malwasier (malmsey wine) for vinegar and sugar for salt.
As illusion food, this is not exceptional. Fake eggs are a fairly common conceit and Staindl himself offers a different recipe for them. What makes it remarkable is the casual way in which it calls for two more moulds, similar, in this case, to those used for casting bullets. These would be familiar tools to most German townspeople in the mid-sixteenth century. This was a militarised society. The empire was just coming out of a period of brutal internal warfare, towns made military service and ownership of weapons a condition of citizenship, and especially shooting competitions were a popular form of entertainment which people travelled for days to attend. Not everyone had a gun, but everyone knew someone who had one and had seen one fired. It made sense to describe it in those terms.
Obviously, you could not use an actual bullet mould for this purpose. Even if we were as cavalier about the toxicity of lead as our ancestors, the metallic taste would be very unpleasant. As we saw in an earlier post, carved wooden moulds of many kinds were an essential tool in the kitchens of the wealthy. Spending the money for a professional carver to produce something that you might use a few times a year – especially something as technically demanding and understated as a sphere – was an excellent way to telegraph serious wealth.
Given this social usefulness, it is almost irrelevant what the final product tasted like, but in this case there is a decent chance it was quite good. Sweet almond milk jelly, probably dyed with saffron, can be delicious, especially if a fair amount of almond solids stay in suspension. Hard-boiled eggs would have been served with salt and vinegar, and replacing this with granulated sugar and sweet wine would harmonise with the rich, but rather bland jelly. Needless to say, almonds, sugar, and malmsey wine were also luxuries. These eggs were not a trivial item.
Balthasar Staindl’s work is a very interesting one, 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.
