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.
This weekend, like last year, I was invited to participate in a culinary history extravaganza by a dear friend in the Netherlands. This year’s theme was an eighteenth-century road trip through Western Europe. In Early Modern Europe, it was customary for wealthy young men to spend a year or more travelling to places that were considered central to a gentleman’s education. In Germany, this was known as a Kavaliersreise. To the English, the primary destination was Italy, and they called it the Grand Tour.
As every year, the gathering involved games and decorations, gifts and stories, but I was busy in the kitchen and will focus on the food here. It was a challenge and a delight, and illustrates nicely what historic food as inspiration can result in.
The journey, as most such real-life tours, begins in Paris. Rich young Englishmen stopped to buy clothes and accessories, study dance and fencing, and try to be admitted to court or at least invited by one of the great aristocratic families. We opted for a potage of pumpkin after a recipe in La Varenne’s Cuisinier Francois. Though dating to 1651, the book remained influential for a long time, and its recipes are repeated in many later cookbooks. The recipe we chose exemplifies his style: rich, but simple, with a focus on the quality of individual ingredients. Pumpkin is boiled in milk with onions and nutmeg, then pureed and served over toasted sops. There was little to add to the recipe except for decoration, and it started the meal in a very satisfying manner.
The second stop was Geneva. This was where you prepared for the ordeal of the Alpine passes, but the city also held special appeal to many English travellers as the home of John Calvin. Many attended schools here, studying some theology, but also fencing and horsemanship. It was where the German world intersected with the French, and the dish we chose is a cheese tart from the recipebook of Maria Schellhammer Die wohl-unterwiesene Köchin. In it, modern French influences are combined with traditional dishes whose origins trace right back to the 1400s, both treated with an attention to detail that tells of intimate familiarity with the inner workings of a large kitchen.
The tart was based on a flaky butter shortcrust which had become the standard base for pies and tarts by 1700. The filling is simply cheese curds, grated hard cheese, egg, saffron, mace, and nutmeg. Here, the choice of cheese makes all the difference, and the pecorino we went with made for a savory, deep umami richness. It was complemented well by a spicy plum sauce – Early Modern Germany way renowned for fruit-based sauces – and pickled black walnuts.
The third course saw us safely across the Alps to our first stop in the peninsula: Bologna. Today, the sausage named after it has become an object of ridicule, a synonym for the unserious: baloney. In 1700, though, it was a culinary novelty celebrated and copied across Europe. The recipe is first documented in 17th-century regulations, and the original is still truly delicious.
Here, we deviated from history in a more material way. Proper Bolognese mortadella is a cooked and cured sausage, aged in cold smoke and served in slices. We served it fresh from the cauldron, in the way that would have been familiar to contemporaries as saucisses à la francaise. The unmistakable mix of spices and rich, sweet wine that makes historic mortadella still was a winning formula. The sausages were served with bread, an agliata sauce, and fresh figs.
After a pause for games and tart lemonade to cleanse the palate, the main courses began with the passage to Rome. A rich beef roast, served with marrow toast, cardoons, and a sweet-spicy sauce royale as described in the Scalco Moderno by Latini was the centrepiece of or feast. There was little finicky artistry to it, just the skill or or gracious host with a barbecue grill that came very close to approximating a spit-roasting. A bed of fennel and a garnish of grapes added complementing flavors and amplified the richness of it all. Rome, of course, was the heart of the global Catholic church, a concentration of wealth unrivalled in Italy and to English visitors in equal parts fascinating and frightening.
The next course was to take us to the southernmost extent of our tour, Naples, but logistics compelled us to swap it out with the Venetian spread of tuna in an oregano crust, saffron rice, and mushrooms. Again, this is based on Latini. but only loosely, and mainly depended on the quality of the fish and the residual heat of the barbecue grill. It was excellent, but at this point most of us were quite full.
With this finished, we proceeded to what was to have been the previous course – Naples. Many travellers reported on the local specialties – pasta, seafood frittura, and pizza, lemonades and ices – but few dared sample them and most recoiled in philistine disgust. In honour of this sentiment, we created this course as an in-joke, combining from the pages of Latini’s Scalco Moderno (written in Naples): fried chicken pieces in a cinnamon-flavored breading, maccheroni cooked in milk with a rich sprinkling of parmeggiano cheese, and his famous “Spanish” sauce of cooked, reduced tomatoes. Yes, that is chicken nuggets with ketchup and mac and cheese.
At this point, mundane reality in the shape of building work around Amsterdam railway station forced us to curtail the proceedings. Some guests had to leave early, and instead of a planned three separate dessert courses (Vienna, Dresden, and the happy return to Britain), we served it all in one grand dessert buffet. There was ‘snake’, a coiled cake filled with a paste of dried fruit and almonds, again from Schellhammer’s cookbook. These kinds of cakes were popular all over Europe if we can trust our cookbooks. We accompanied it with a custard of lemons topped with pineapple pieces which would have represented an incredible indulgence at the time.
The following course, now served simultaneously, was hohlhippen sugar wafers, with ices. Ice was a fashionable novelty in the eighteenth century, and we cold rely on many sources to gather a selection, though we mainly depended on the Art de bien faire les glaces d’office, an extensive 1768 treatise. In the end, everyone was able to enjoy plum, lemon, and pineapple sorbets, red wine ice, and peach and vanilla ice cream. Finally, cheese and crackers ended the meal in modern, but very pleasant style.
I hope to be able to write some more about specific recipes, but for today, this must be all. My newly broken laptop and an expanding work schedule fore me to limit my posts in the immediate future, which I greatly regret.
B35 If you want to make fish roasted in a pot (fisch in hafen braten), take onions and cut them separately, and also boil the fish separately, season them well and with good vinegar, and pour them out on a serving bowl. Pick out the bones, and boil them up in the onion (sauce). That way, you have good hafen braten of fish.
This is another one of those recipes that is moderately interesting on its own, but more so in combination with others. Specifically, I am interested in the word hafen braten, literally a pot roast (though it probably does not mean what we call that today). The word is fairly rare in High German, but it is the exact equivalent of the Low German grapdenbraden which is one of those foods that shows up in hundreds of records, but is defined nowhere. I suspect that the South German recipes hold clues to this, though I cold, of course, be completely wrong.
It occurs in another recipe in connection with meat, but unfortunately there it serves as a reference for the size of pieces. Here, though the recipe is for fish, we get a clearer idea of what a hafen braden is: pieces of meat (in this case exceptionally fish) cooked in a sauce, in one pot. I can imagine grapen braden working much the same way.
The sauce in this case is made with onions, and while the description of what to do with them is extremely cursory, we can refer to other recipes from later sources how such onion sauces were made. The onions would be chopped finely, sautéed, then cooked in liquid until they were soft. The resulting sauce can be made more homogenous by passing it through a sieve, but I am not sure that was desired. It is certainly not necessary.
Onion sauces are often mentioned with fish, but they were not limited to it. Rather, one of my favourite Latin recipes from the early fourteenth century combines such a sauce – with a very specific spice mix – with meat, specifically rabbit, kid, or lamb. This is not what I envision grapen braden was – the process is too involved and the ingredients too luxurious for something this ubiquitous – but it probably resembled it to a degree. Onion sauces are very tolerant of long cooking times and wold easily serve for tougher cuts that needed slow cooking. They would work as well in a thick metalgrapen as in a ceramic cookpot more commonly used in the kitchens of South Germany.
The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.
The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.
No, really. It’s in Solothurn S 392. Medieval German cuisine is basically immersing protein-rich objects in hot fat.
A woman milking a cow, woodcut, 1491
B32 Fried milk
Item heat milk and beat eggs thoroughly in a bowl. Pour them into the hot milk and it will turn into a curd (schotten). Pour it out on a sieve and when it is cold, cut it as large as you please. Make a batter with eggs, coat the milk in the batter, and fry it in fat. That way you have good fried milk.
There isn’t much to this recipe except the idea of adding beaten egg to hot milk rather than heating milk and egg beaten together. Depending on how hot the milk really is, this may lead to the egg hardening quickly, separating out a good part of the liquid which would then be discarded. I may need to try this at different temperatures to see how it pans out.
Either way, the resulting solid, basically a custard, is drained and sliced. This is a very common process for making what isusuallycalledroastmilk – a hard custard, sometimes pressed overnight to give it solidity, roasted over the coals. Notably, the Solothurn manuscript includes a recipe by that name as number B31, but it is for something different – a confection very much like Baumkuchen. Here, the custard is not roasted but battered and fried. This step surely comes a surprise to exactly nobody.
That is not to say this can’t be good. It probably is delicious if properly made, though hard on the digestion. I would serve it with a sweet spice mixture like trysanet, though a fruity sauce should also work well. Nothing about the recipe dictates that it must be sweet, either, but I cannot quite envision it working with meat or fish.
As a linguistic aside: The word used in B31 for roasting – gebratten – would in modern German suggest pan-frying and is usually translated as ‘fried’. The word used in this recipe – gebachen – today usually refers to oven baking and is rendered as ‘baked’, though it is still also used for fried dough called Schmalzgebäck. There is a logic to this: The words do not describe a process, but a result. Braten produces moist, juicy food, whether it comes from a pan or a spit or grill, while backen makes dry, crisp foods, whether they emerge from the oven or from hot fat. Middle German culinary terminology is trying to cover a lot of ground with very limited vocabulary, so this must have made sense at the time, but it is a pitfall awaiting inexperienced translators.
The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.
The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.
The spring of 1920 was a rough time for Germany. On 13 March, the night had dipped below freezing and a thin drizzle made being outside a deeply unpleasant experience. And to top it all off, armed soldiers had shown up at major intersections, stopping people on their way to work and cordoning off government buildings. It looked as though the country was about to get its fourth (or fifth) new government in two years, and the grim men with swastikas crudely painted on their helmets did not inspire much confidence. Soon enough, they were moving through the streets handing out leaflets to inform the Berliners of the change in management: Their elected government had fled town. A provisional administration under a senior official named Wolfgang Kapp was taking charge. General von Lüttwitz’ troops were enforcing the law in the capital. Stay quiet, and you, law-abiding citizen, need fear nothing.
The people of Berlin were having none of it.
Right-wing Freikorps troops distributing leaflets, image courtesy of wikimedia commons
At the end of a disastrous war, Germany’s people had rid themselves of an emperor, several kings, and the ossified oligarchy that had gone with them. The democracy that was created in the chaotic days of 1919 in Weimar was a compromise that satisfied few. Conservatives hated a system that gave women the vote and everybody freedom of speech while many Socialist revolutionaries felt its protections of private property left the most oppressive aspects of the old order untouched. Few expected it to last long in times of unrest, with Eastern Europe descending into war and the ink on the Treaty of Versailles barely dry. Few people can have been surprised by the coup when it came.
The people of Berlin making their feelings about the coup known. Image courtesy of wikimedia commons
The thing was, these people promising to put things to right were the very same people who had been running things for decades and all but destroyed the country in the process. Life might not have been easy for farm labourers and factory workers before, but their policies had inflicted famine on them while it immiserated the middle class, evaporated savings, and destroyed the stock market, not to mention losing a world war. You can see the impact in every aspect of life, from clothes to furniture, wages, architecture, and cookbooks. In the days of bourgeois complacency before 1914, cookbooks were elaborate, their recipes laden with meat, dairy, eggs, sugar, and spices. They rarely stooped to the food of the poor, and if they did, as the legendary Henriette Davidis in her Pracktisches Kochbuch in 1847, they served it in a rich, flavourful variant. Potato pancakes, a staple of northern Germany, become a genuine treat at her hands:
87 Good Potato Pancakes with Yeast
Ten to twelve raw, grated potatoes are soaked in water for one hour, then pressed out through a cloth. 1/4 Maß of milk is heated with a four-Pfennig-breadroll and 3 onions, and both are stirred into the milk. Then the potatoes are added along with 4 eggs, 2 spoonfuls of yeast, and the required salt. Everything is stirred thoroughly and left to rise. The batter must not be too thin because otherwise the watery parts descend (i.e. separate out), and you must not leave it to rise longer than until you have twice the volume that yo prepared. Yo then begin frying at a fire that is neither too strong nor too weak, because the pancakes dry out too much in the latter case. They are turned twice, and the pan is covered the first time.
88 Fine Potato Pancakes
You grate raw, peeled potatoes, leave them in cold water for 1/2 to 1 hour, then lay them on a cloth to drain, press out the water thoroughly, and add a good amount of eggs whose whites are first beaten to a froth, as much milk as necessary, sour cream, and salt. Stir everything together well and fry small pancakes in butter or lard. They must be served very hot.
Note: The potato flour that collects in the water is not added since it makes the pancakes dense. It is very good for other uses.
89 Potato Pancakes (Reibekuchen)
Large, well-flavoured potatoes are peeled, washed very clean, and grated raw on a metal grater. You add to the grated potatoes 2-3 eggs and 1-2 stirring spoons of thick sour cream for each pancake as well as the necessary salt, and quickly fry large or small pancakes in butter or bacon fat. Serve them for tea as hot as possible.
90 A different way
The grated potatoes are watered well and pressed out through a cloth so the flour is removed. Meanwhile, some white bread is cooked with milk, the pressed-out potatoes mixed with it, and salt and eggs added, also some sour cream if desired which makes the pancakes fluffier and more delicious. The batter must not be stirred too sticky, it must easily drop off the spoon.
It is a long way from here to the received wisdom of Dr. Oetker’s Schulkochbuch’s masterful 1927 edition schooling the future housewives of Germany in the art of frugal, but tasty cookery:
Potato Pancakes (aka Reibekuchen, Puffer)
For 2 1/4 – 2 1/2 kg of potatoes, you reckon 2 tablespoons of salt, 3 eggs, and barely 1/2 l of canola oil (Rüböl) or fat (coconut fat).
The potatoes are grated, mixed with the salt, and fried in the hot fat by spoonfuls. You must never fry the pancakes in too much fat (zu fett backen) or turn them over before they are brown on the bottom side, otherwise they will go soft again.
Anyone adding flour, bread soaked in milk, or grated rusk to the dough must also add eggs or Dr. Oetker’s Backin baking powder or the pancakes will become too hard. The best pancakes are made with only the addition of eggs and 1/2 sachet of Dr Oetker’s Backin. For a midday meal, you must add 3-4 eggs or the dish is not nourishing enough. Grated onions or finely cut chives can be stirred into the batter as desired.
Additions: Bean salad, boiled fruit, green lettuce salad.
Gone are the yeast, cream, fine flour, and milk, the butter or bacon fat, and the artistry of integrating beaten egg whites into a heavy potato batter. Even the eggs are casually omitted in the instructions like a pleasant, but nonessential decorative feature, required only if the dish is to make an entire meal. Davidis served her much richer ones for tea.
The thing is, this was not a polite fiction of wealth that had disappeared under the piercing eye of modernity. Middle-class people could remember when eating like this had been normal, and even workers had enjoyed these things occasionally. Both books aimed at much the same market: the instruction of bourgeois girls in cookery. It was the circumstances that had changed. The people who had to shoulder this austerity for emperor and fatherland were not asked, and they were not happy.
At the beginning of the coup, the military, protectors of lawful authority, predictably chickened out of their role. “Troops do not shoot troops.” General von Seeckt, the commander of the post-war Reichswehr, supposedly informed the ministers calling on him. The police were little better. But there were powers in Germany that did not wear uniforms, and the conspirators had badly underestimated them.
Handbill of 13 March 1920 calling for a general strike, image courtesy of wikimedia commons
The governing Social Democrat and Zentrum (Catholic) parties, churches and labour unions may have had no armed forces, but they had an extremely high degree of organisation and discipline. Government ministers loyal to the republic called for a general strike. Handbills were printed and distributed, committee meetings called, and the next day, hundreds of thousands of people did not show up for work. Protesters crowded the streets of every city in the country while union representatives explained to deeply disappointed factory owners that no work would be done until the lawful government was restored. Even senior civil servants, sensing which way the wind was blowing, openly declared they wold not take orders from unlawful authority. Two days in, the association of civil servants joined the strike while the finance ministry refused to pay the troops. Things were not going well.
The other thing that the putschists had forgotten was that while unions and Social Democrats had no military wing, the Communist party absolutely did. A majority of workers had been content with a compromise liberal democracy with the prospect of real change for the better, but they were not going to sign up to another round of authoritarian Obrigkeitsstaat. Especially not once the army started shooting at strikers. If that was the choice, red revolution began to look a lot more appealing. Within a week, armed workers’ councils had taken effective control of the Ruhr area. At that point, the military leaders of the coup had abandoned their cause and confused negotiations were under way to end the fighting with a minimum of embarrassment. A new government was formed and new elections called. The workers had won.
Of course this would not be Weimar if they did these things thoroughly. A blanket amnesty covered most collaborators, and senior leaders escaped to Bavaria, where a complicit state government protected them from prosecution. But for now, democracy had prevailed, and it went on to build a country the world would marvel at.
Solothurn S 392 holds a few more gems, including this one with a name that suggests something entirely different:
B31 Roast milk
Make roast milk this way: Take a little flour and stir it well with good milk. Then beat eggs into it and a little fat. Drip it onto a hot spit. That way, you make good roast milk. As you drip the milk on the spit, turn the spit round. You can also add good spices.
Method of producing modern Baumkuchen, courtesy of wikimedia commons
For all its brevity, this is nothing short of fascinating. There are recipes called roast milk in other collections, and they are invariably for a hardcustardroasted on a grilleover the coals. It was probably originally meant to mimic the consistency of roast udder and later, there are recipes for replicating it using almond milk for Lent, but it is a rather unexciting dish.
This recipe, though, is something entirely different. A batter of milk., flour, and eggs with a little butter is slowly drizzled on a hot, rotating spit to build up layer after layer, making a pastry. It really looks a lot like Baumkuchen, or at least an ancestor. The recipe does not mention whipping the egg whites to leaven the batter, so it is likely heavier and denser, but the layering of brown ‘tree rings’ and the complex Maillard flavours probably still come through. It certainly looks like something worth trying out. I’ll give it a go next time I have an open fire setup handy.
The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.
The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.
Just a short recipe from Solothurn S 392 tonight, another familiar dish:
B36 Item if you want to make good fish in aspic (sultz fisch), mix water and wine together and wash the fish with that. Take their innards (ingereusch) out of the fish and clean it with water. Also, take the scales separately in a cloth and boil that with the fish in the wine and water. Add the innards, and when they are cooked, drain them, put the fish into a serving bowl and let them cool. Then add good vinegar to the cooking liquid and let the broth and everything in it boil well. Season the broth and then strain it (sy den herab). Also let it cool and then pour it over the fish, that ways it will doubtlessly gel. This way, you have good fish in aspic. Do not cover them or they will go rotten (werdent fall) .
B37 But if you want to have the fish aspic transparent, all pure and clear, let them boil very well, and they drop down (? gefallen sich, i.e. let the broth drain), then strain it off and boil it up well and add spices, then pour the broth over the fish and it becomes transparent.
There are many recipes for jellies in the German medieval corpus, usually known as a galrei or sultz. In the way of German culinary terminology, both words can also refer to a thickened spicy sauce, probably because both the sauce and the jelly serve the same purpose: keeping cooked meat or fish fresh by excluding air. Here, the sultz is clearly a jelly.
There is little surprising about the instructions. Boiling specifically the scales and the swim bladder of a fish would dissolve the collagen that caused the broth to congeal as it cooled, creating the solid jelly the cooks aimed for. In a world without refrigeration and standardised ingredients, this did not always work, so the assurance that “it will doubtlessly gel this way” offers important reassurance. Many recipe collections offer nostrums to ensure that jellies congealed, some useful, others dubious. By the sixteenth century, adding isinglass, i.e. the dried swim bladder of sturgeons, to the mix. This provided large amounts of extra collagen.
One aspect of this recipe is new, though: The second part. First, we learn how to make fish jelly, then we get instructions how to make it transparent in a separate entry. It looks like an option, not a regular feature, and very likely initially it was. We are used to the idea of transparent jellies, filtered extensively, and the effect clearly was familiar to cooks early on, but apparently it was not universal. Here, the simple expedient of allowing the impurities to settle and pouring off the clear broth at the top is enough to classify the result as ‘transparent’.
This helps explain why German uses identical words for what we feel are two different dishes, though: They were not that different. A bread sauce galrei was still made on the basis of broth which could congeal, and a meat broth galrei cold still contain enough of what we wold call impurities to make it opaque and viscous. It probably took a significant amount of time for the two to develop separate identities.
The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.
The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.
Along with the roasted eggs we looked at already, there is another recipe for re-filled eggshells in the Solothurn S 392 manuscript, and it has a very familiar name:
B39Item if you want to make kross ayer, boil eggs hard and chop them small. Grate a little semel bread and gingerbread (lebzelten) and break eggs into it. Stir all of it together, spice it well, and put it into broken eggshells that are parted in the middle. Fill the shells full and glue them together with the thing (the filling) you are using. Fry them in fat and then remove the eggshells. Serve them dry or in a sauce (brüy), as you please.
Once again, Krosseier. There are a lot of recipes surviving for these, too, and the name still puzzles me. I suspect it is related to the word Gekröse, innards, for the irregular shape of the filling. That wold be supported by the spelling kraus that occurs in one source. It is certainly not related to the modern word kross (crunchy or crisp) and though that spelling also shows up in one case, it is unlikely the name is a misunderstanding of groß (large).
For once, the difference between Krosseier and roasted eggs is actually explained in a contemporary source. As already mentioned in the post about roasted eggs, the Innsbruck MS, makes the distinction explicit:
54a If you would make kraus eyer, boil the eggs so that they remain soft at the yolk (totterweich) and make two holes into the ends and take out the yolk. Chop parsley into it and season it, and see that the white stays in the shell. Cook the yolks in a pan and in fat so that they do not turn too hard, and then fill them back into the eggs. Then let them boil in meat broth or in water and then serve them in a good sauce (prülein) if you shell them, or in a ziseindel sauce, or fry them in fat.
55 If you would make filled roasted eggs, also prepare them in this way (des sins), and then you roast them on a skewer with their shells, and also chop the white etc.
Thus Krosseier are shelled and served in a sauce as a dish while roasted eggs are served in their shell like boiled eggs are. It would be wonderfully easy if everybody could abide by this logical terminology, but that is not how food names work. Even here, krosseier are optionally not shelled. Still, this pattern broadly holds up across many sources.
The spelling variation that identifies them as groß (large) occurs in the fifteenth-century Königsberg MS:
32 If you wish to make large eggs (groß Eyer = kroßeyer) Boil the egg yolks soft, cut a hole at the tip of each egg in the shape of a slice and pour out the yolk. Chop parsley, mix it with the yolks, throw it in fat and do not cook it too hard. Fill this back into the shells and boil them well, then shell them and make a good sauce (to serve with it).
Otherwise, this is the standard procedure: Remove the yolks from soft-boiled eggs, cook them outside the shell, make a filling, return it to the shell, and cook it until it solidifies. The eggs are then shelled and served in a sauce. A slightly longer, but otherwise very similar recipe also shows up (twice!) in Heidelberg Cod Pal Germ 551:
59 A dish of krosz eyern (filled eggs) If you would make krosz eyer, boil the eggs so that the yolks become soft (the editor emended ‘not’, I believe that is a misinterpretation). Then make two slice-shaped (scheublets) holes (i.e. slice off the top and bottom), stab in and take out the yolk in such a way that the white stays in the shell. Chop parsley and grind the yolks with it. Then take some fat into a pan and stir it together over the fire until it has had enough and is neither too thin nor too thick. Then fill it back into the shells and boil them in meat broth. Peel them cleanly and put them in a good broth/sauce and do not oversalt them.
Meanwhile, the Southwest German recipe collection Munich Cgm 384 has two Krosseier recipes that describe what is called roasted eggs elsewhere:
67 Fritters of kroßayer To make kroß ayer, break open eggs at the broad end and beat them very well. Add pepper and saffron and chopped parsley and sage. Cook (röschs) them in a baking dish (juochen pfannen, parallel has kuochen pfannen). Thrust them (on a skewer and lay them?) on a griddle and roast them.
68 kroß ayer For kroß ayer, break them open at the tip and leave the shells whole. Take only egg yolks and beat them well in a bowl and season and salt and colour them, and add chopped parsley and sage or braunwurtzen (Ehlert reads Galium odoratum, may also be Scrophularia nodosa) or other things to it, whatever you wish. Fry (röst) it and chop it small and put it back into the shells. Stick them in skewers and roast (brauts) them on a griddle.
In one case, the eggs are clearly soft-boiled beforehand, in the other they may not be, but the process is analogues and the result is eggs in their shell, skewered (at least it looks like that step was omitted in #67) and roasted on a griddle.
Confusion of this kind is unfortunately unsurprising. Broadly, our fifteenth-century sources follow the distinction made in the Innsbruck MS though. That makes a late occurrence in the recipe book of Philippine Welser all the more dispiriting if you are invested in consistency:
137 If you want to make kres ayr Take eggs, open them at the bottom end and pour out the yolk and the white. Prepare them like scrambled eggs and then beat in fresh eggs so they turn nicely soft. Add wine, ginger, saffron, and good herbs and then return the filling to the eggshells. Stick 4 or 5 eggs on a skewer and use sage leaves for the holes so nothing runs out. Lay them on a griddle and let them roast.
138 If you want to roast kros ayr a different way Open the eggs at the tip and take out the yolk and white. Beat them well together, and chop parsley and sage into it. Spice it as you please and return it to the shells. Close the hole with dough and let them roast slowly. Stir them about occasionally so they do not burn.
Useful though some of the pointers to technique are – closing the holes with dough or sage leaves makes sense – these are clearly roasted eggs, skewered and served in the shell. The word continued to be familiar as Anna Wecker describes a soft porridge-like dish of bread and egg yolk fried “like Kroßeyer” in 1598. Sadly, any battle for consistent distinction was clearly lost by the 1550s, if not significantly earlier. It’s eggs filled back into the shells. Anything else is up to individual interpretation, it seems.
When I looked at the filled egg recipe in Solothurn S 392 on Sunday, I wrote that there are numerous parallels. Today; I want to start looking at them. The Solothurn recipe that started me on this reads:
B40 Item if you want to make filled eggs, break them open at the top and bottom ends and empty them. Boil that which comes from the eggs and chop it small. Spice it well and break other eggs into it, and also add raisins (mertrüberl) or other good lattwerien. Take a little fat, and fill it back into the shells. Stick them on a skewer and roast them on a grille or otherwise. That way, you have good filled roasted eggs on a skewer.
There are a number of parallels, more or less distant in time and location. Close in date, but at the other end of Germany, there is the Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch. It comes from a monastic background, which makes it no surprise it includes a Lenten version:
33 Item if you would make filled eggs, broiled on the griddle, take raw eggs. Break open the eggs on one end, as narrowly as you can. Take and stir (scramble) the raw eggs with butter. Take pepper and saffron, parsley, sage. Add that. Fill the filling back into the shells. Stick them on herring skewers and broil them on a griddle in their measure. And serve them.
46 Item if you would make eggs in Lent that you may stick on a spit, you must have eggshells that are collected at what time you may. Take pike roe that is ground in a mill. Take parsley, pepper and saffron, figs or raisins. Make a filling from it. Stir it with oil in a flat dish. Fill it into the eggshells then. Stick them on spits. Let them roast in their measure. And serve them.
This is a very similar dish, basically the same technique, though the main flavour profile here is herbal: parsley and sage, along with pepper and saffron, the latter most likely to intensify the colour. Only the Lenten version, which uses fish roe in place of eggs, includes raisins or dried figs. Using fish roe in place of eggs is a commonkitchentrick in German recipe collections.
Dating (probably) to 1460, the so-called Meister Hans collection offers a variety of recipes. In keeping with its largely random internal order, they are distributed throughout the manuscript and often repeat instructions, though they all differ in detail:
Recipe #86 Of filled eggs that are roasted Item take eggs and crack them open at both ends. Blow into them so the yolk comes out. Chop sage and mix it with the yolks and fill them again. Throw the eggs into hot water and peel them and roast them and drizzle them with egg and with herbs and saffron, and serve them.
Recipe #87 Again of roasted eggs Item grate fine white bread and fry it strongly in butter and mix eggs with that and dry sage and pepper. Fill the eggshells with it and roast them on a skewer and serve them.
(…)
Recipe #94 Again of roasted eggs Item chop eggs and nut kernels and (mix) soft eggs with it. Chop it small and put it into the eggshells and roast them and serve them.
(…)
Recipe #115 Of roasted eggs, do it thus Item crack open the eggs at the thick end and beat them well, and add saffron, pepper and chopped parsley or sage. Fry this in a pan and chop it small. Fill it back into the eggshells and stick them on a skewer, lay them on a griddle and roast them nicely.
(…)
Recipe #280 Or roasted eggs Item make roasted eggs thus. Let them boil up once and crack them open on both ends, and blow into one end so that it goes out at the other end. Add spices to it and put it back into the shells and stick it on a skewer and roast them until they have enough.
Recipe #115 comes closest to what the Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch and Solothurn S 392 envision. Recipes #87 and #94 add grated bread or nuts, probably meant as a bulking ingredient though perhaps also for taste. Sage features in #8, #87 and #115 while ##280 only adds unspecified spice and #94 leaves this step out entirely.
There are also some deviations in technique: Recipe #288 has the eggs soft.boiled first so that only the still liquid yolk is cooked, seasoned, and returned to a shell still lined with the already cooked egg white. This would create the illusion of a spiced yolk inside a regular hard-boiled egg. Meanwhile, recipe #86 has the entire egg so treated, but once the shells are refilled, the content is first boiled to solidify it, then skewered with the shell removed and drizzled with raw egg – endored – while roasting. Though both recipes use the name ‘roasted eggs’, we will see in an upcoming post that these techniques are more typically associated with another related family of recipes, krosseier.
A fifteenth-century recipe collection also originating in the Southwest of Germany, Munich Cgm 384, elaborates on the process:
34 A Dish of Eggs (ayer essen) A dish of eggs: Take 20 eggs and boil them in water so that the yolk stays just liquid and the white is hard. Take them out and break them open at the tip, and pour out the yolk into a pan. Add fat or oil and stir it with one another over the fire until it turns firm (keck). Then take it out and lay it on a clean plate. Chop it small, and then take one spoon with ginger (ainen löffel mit ymbern) and one spoon with cinnamon and a little saffron, as much as a bean. And one spoon with grains of paradise (ain löffel fol bärißkörner) and sugar and a little salt, and mix it all together. Then take two raw eggs and break them into it, and mix it all together. Afterwards take the chopped (das gehacketes) and fill it into the first eggshells again in which the whites have remained. Have hot water ready beforehand, throw in the eggs and let them boil so that they turn out hard. Then peel them nicely and prepare a thin batter (taiglin) with eggs, saffron, and sugar, and coat the shelled eggs in it. Fry them in a pan, or stick them on a skewer and roast them on a griddle before you fry them. Let the yolk of an egg run over them and strew ginger on it. Serve this as a roast dish and prepare a thin pepper sauce (ain duinn pfefferlin) for them.
We rarely have descriptions this detailed. Annoyingly, though in keeping with the way German medieval sources tend to name recipes, the author will not commit to calling this either roasted eggs or Krosseier (it share features typical of both families), but simply calls it “an egg dish”.
An Austrian manuscript from the mid-fifteenth century, the Innsbruck MS, makes the distinction explicit, but still includes the initial soft-boiling as a stage of producing roasted eggs:
54a If you would make kraus eyer, boil the eggs so that they remain soft at the yolk (totterweich) and make two holes into the ends and take out the yolk. Chop parsley into it and season it, and see that the white stays in the shell. Cook the yolks in a pan and in fat so that they do not turn too hard, and then fill them back into the eggs. Then let them boil in meat broth or in water and then serve them in a good sauce (prülein) if you shell them, or in a ziseindel sauce, or fry them in fat.
55 If you would make filled roasted eggs, also prepare them in this way (des sins), and then you roast them on a skewer with their shells, and also chop the white etc.
This makes sense: Krosseier are shelled and served in a sauce as a dish while roasted eggs are served in their shell like boiled eggs are. It wold be wonderfully easy if everybody could abide by this logical terminology, but that is not how food names work. Even here, krosseier are optionally not shelled.
The ,Mondseer Kochbuch another manuscript dating to the first half of the fifteenth century from the monastic library of Mondsee in Austria, throws the classification sideways by coming up with an entirely different, and very ostentatious, way of serving what it calls ‘roasted eggs’:
95 Roasted eggs on a spit If you wish to prepare roasted eggs on a spit without shells, take eggs and lay them in boiling water in a pan. When you see them boiling up, take them off quickly. Break them open on both ends, but not wide, and pour out their yolks into a clean pan. Add a little bit of butter and do not forget the salt, and stir it well on the fire. Do not make it too thick. Fill it back into the shells and return them to hot water, and boil them until you think that they are hard. Then take them out, put them in cold water, and shell them cleanly. Carve a spit of wood that is thin enough and stick the eggs on it lengthwise. Lay it by the fire and roast them as long as you wish. Roast them so they turn brown and baste them with fat. Cut the spit apart when you wish to serve them (i.e. serve them sliced open lengthwise).
The same source also includes several recipes that parallel Meister Hans:
147 Filled eggs roasted on a spit Of filled eggs. Note: Take eggs and break them open at both ends. Blow into one end so the yolk goes out. Chop sage small and mix it with the yolk, and fill them back. Throw them (the filled eggs) into hot water and peel them and roast them. Brush them with eggs and spices and saffron, and serve them.
148 Eggs roasted on a spit Grate fine bread and fry it strongly in butter. Mix eggs with it, dried sage, and pepper. Fill the eggshells with this, roast them on a spit, and serve them.
149 Filled eggs Of filled eggs. Chop sage small, fry it in butter, mix in eggs, spices, saffron, and salt, and prepare a thick mass (habich mouß) of it. Put it back in the eggshells and lay them in boiling water.
153 Filled eggs with nut kernels Item filled eggs. Chop eggs and nut kernels together, and add soft eggs. Chop it small, fill it into the eggshells, roast them, and serve them.
The recipes differ in some details here – the sage specified as dried in #148 or fried first on its own in #149 – but in principle, these are the recipes we already know. The reference to a habich muoß, a stiff or thick filling, in #149 also provides a clue to a recipe name that Meister Hans, or his copyist, misunderstood.
Finally, another fifteenth-century manuscript, Heidelberg Cod Pal Germ 551 (held in Heidelberg, but probably produced in Nuremberg), includes a related recipe, but calls it by a different name. Eggs described as ‘filled’ are usually hard-boiled, with the yolk processed and returned to the white the way we do devilled eggs today. Here, though, the recipe begins in the familiar style of roasted eggs before going down an entirely different avenue. I suspect this is a copying error. We often find separate recipes merged into improbable chimeras like this.
45 A dish of filled eggs Take eight eggs, break them open at the tips, heat some fat in a pan and pour in the eggs. Fry them until it is enough inside and out. Throw in onto a work surface and chop good spices into it and slice it. Serve it and do not oversalt it.
This is interesting, but adds very little.
Taken together, this shows us that filling egg shells with cooked, seasoned egg was a piece of culinary playfulness very much in vogue in medieval Germany, at least as far as the recipe sources go. I doubt it was frequently done except on special occasions because it is a lot of work and quite challenging, but that is exactly why people did it. You wanted to show off. If you have the time to do it, or just want to try this one dish, it is certainly fun and memorable.
Here is another recipe from Solothurn S 392 that bears looking into:
B40 Item if you want to make filled eggs, break them open at the top and bottom ends and empty them. Boil that which comes from the eggs and chop it small. Spice it well and break other eggs into it, and also add raisins (mertrüberl) or other good lattwerien. Take a little fat, and fill it back into the shells. Stick them on a skewer and roast them on a grille or otherwise. That way, you have good filled roasted eggs on a skewer.
The idea of filling cooked eggs, seasoned and coloured, or other things into eggshells to astonish the diners seems to have pleased medieval recipe writers inordinately. We have a number of similar recipes surviving across many manuscripts, and I will take the opportunity to make a comparison soon. What sets this recipe apart, and I want to address today, is the ingredients that are added to the egg: raisins (mertrüberl) or other good lattwerien.
The word lattwerien is a variety of spelling Latwerge, a Middle High German word derived from the Latin electuarium. That term originally describes a way of administering medicine, in a sweetened paste that the patient can lick up. The English word electuary still means that, which is why it rarely gets used in daily conversation. Latwerge, though, came to enter the culinary lexicon. Probably the honey-sweetened, spicy pastes were served much like épices de chambre, as an aid to digestion and a coda to a rich, festive meal. Unlike many other medicines, they can be very pleasant. By the fifteenth century, recipes for electuaries are found in cookbooks with or without medicinal purposes described, and many involve fruit as the main ingredient.
By the sixteenth century, latwerge often describes what we would call a fruit preserve – fruit leather or jam, depending on how long it is cooked. These are also mentioned as ingredients in upscale recipes and, infamously, by Hieronymus Bock as a food liable to go mouldy in the pantry. I held an online class about this in the SCA in 2025 and collected some recipes in chronological order in a pdf that you can now find here.
The problem is that it is hard to see how this recipe refers to these. It says to use raisins or other good lattwerien, and raisins are clearly not jam. It could be an error in transmission, maybe originally reading “and”, but this phrase occurs in none of the many parallels. I believe it was added deliberately, something we see happen in a few recipes in Solothurn S 392. There are two other ways I think it could be explained:
The first is that latwerge was used in the same role as raisins. Since sealed glass jars had not been perfected yet, it was often cooked to a very stiff consistency, sometimes deliberately dried, and if the mixture had a high fruit content, it could become leathery. You could cut this into small pieces that would function a lot like raisins. The problem is that this explanation requires a lot of steps to go unsaid, and I have not found anything like it described anywhere.
The other explanation is linguistic: The word lattwerien might be used as a shorthand to refer to sweet, spicy, expensive ingredients here. The problem here is analogous; I have not found this usage anywhere else. I will have to look out for it, though. It looks like a good fit for the evidence.
The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.
The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.
Good news, everyone! I finished the translation of the recipes in Solothurn S 392 today. There are still some interesting ones to merit posts in their own right, but once I’ve got it cleaned u and edited, the whole text will go u as a pdf to download. Now I’m trying to decide which source to take on next. Meanwhile, here is a neat one:
B29 Item make filled roast capon this way: After you have plucked it, open it and take out the heart, lungs, liver, and stomach. Fill (read füll for fürb) its stomach well, put in juniper berries and a little ginger cut up small, sew it shut, and attach it inside the capon. Then take the heart, liver, and lung, cut it up, and cut up bacon in pieces as small as dice with it, and (add) garlic cloves, juniper berries, ginger, cloves, and other good spices if you want. Fill it with that and then sew it shut. Prepare it with as much salt as it needs and lard it with a larding needle on the outside. Then roast it. That way, you will have a good roast capon. You can also make filled chickens and other birds this way if you want.
This is the kind of recipes people expect when we say ‘medieval’: heavily spiced, disconcertingly bloody, and complicated. It seems to mostly function as a way of using the innards of the bird which, since people did not buy poultry frozen and pre-processed, would have been on hand. So you fill the stomach with spices, fix it to the inside of the capon’s body cavity, then stuff the other organ meats and bacon all around it, again mixed with a plethora of spices. The bird is spitted, larded, and roasted by the fire, the most prestigious way of cooking it. In the end, we are informed that chickens and other birds can also be prepared this way, and surely were more often than the truly pricey and exclusive capons.
The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.
The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.
The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.
