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.
Here is another recipe from the Solothurn S 392 manuscript with parallels in several other sources that are not otherwise closely related:
B23 Krapfen (filled fritters) in Lent
Take nuts and figs and pound them small together, spice it, and colour it well with saffron. Lay it in a pan, add butter (ancken), and wrap it (read bewindts for erwels) in a leavened (erhebten) dough in the manner of krapfen, and fry it in butter or oil. Serve it cold.
The recipe is both promising and interesting: Figs and nuts, probably walnuts, pounded into a paste, spiced, and possibly fried, then wrapped in a leavened dough to make fritters. We rarely have any information on the dough fritters are made with. Here, while we do not know what kind of leavening was used, we can speculate about yeast or sourdough cultures. I come down on the side of yeast.
Further, there are several parallel instances of this recipe. The first is again in the Meister Hans collection of 1460:
Recipe #114 von krappfen fuell
Of filling for fried pastries
Item pound nut kernels and figs together in a mortar and season it well and colour it and place it in a pan. Pour oil with it and boil it up and put it into the pastries (krapffen). Make a dough of white leaven (vrhab) and fry it in oil and serve it cold.
This version contains the key information that the filling is actually fried, not just mixed with the butter or oil. The change from oil to butter may reflect an actual shift in custom as dairy products were exempted from Lenten prohibitions for the Holy Roman Empire in the late 15th century. Butter would certainly improve the taste compared to the oil that would have been available north of the Alps at the time.
There are two more parallels, though. One comes from the Rheinfränkisches Kochbuch dated to the 1440s:
1 If you would make small fritters (kreppelin) in Lent, take nuts and figs and pound them small with each other and season it according to your will and heat it in oil and fry them (wrapped) in a leavened (erhabendem) dough in the way of kreppelin (modern German Krapfen) in a pan and serve them cold at the table, those are well-tasting fritters.
The other is from the Munich-held Cgm 384, another early recipe collection from the Western parts of South Germany:
64 Fritters (krapfen) in Lent Make fritters in Lent thus: Take green nuts and figs and pound them together, and season that and lay them in a pan in oil or fat so that it boils up. Afterwards, wrap them in leavened (erhabem) dough in the way of krapfen and fry them. Serve them cold or in a pepper sauce.
Here, interestingly, the instruction is to use oil or fat and the fritters are served either cold – the universal instruction elsewhere – or in a pfeffer sauce, that is, warm. Also, the nuts are described as ‘green’, which may just mean they are previously unprocessed, but could also refer to unripe nuts which, presumably, would have been leached and pickled before. Otherwise, they are fairly inedible. Certainly, it is an interesting exercise in tracing the descent of recipes as pieces of literature – texts with a specific wording rather than just technical data – and how they change over time.
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.
I did not get to do much writing today, but I spent some time in the kitchen. Among other things, I tried out the recipe for spinach pancake casserole from the Blaues Kochbuch I posted in the Feeding the Revolution series on 13 August:
371. Spinach Casserole (Spinatauflauf)
750g spinach
1 tbsp butter, some onions, chives, salt, 1 tbsp flour
3-4 pancakes
1/4 litre sour milk or cream, 1 entire egg, 1 tbsp grated cheese, salt
Wilt the spinach in an open pot without water, but do not boil it. Pass it through (a grinder or foodmill – durchdrehen) and sautée it in the butter with onions and flour. Season to taste with salt and chives. + Prepare pancakes from the stated ingredients. You may stack them in the casserole layered with spinach or or you can roll them up, spread thickly with spinach, cut them in slices, and arrange them in the dish. + Pour the sour cream beaten with egg, cheese, and salt over it, sprinkle it with grated bread and cheese, and dab it with butter. This casserole can also be prepared from leftover spinach combined with other leftovers.
Setting: Place on a grille at middle level
Bake: 1.2kW oven, 25-30 min. 3/3, 10 min 0/0; 1.4-12.5 kW oven: 20-25 min 3/3, 15 min 0/0
To be observed: If the spinach is too thin, stir in some grated bread
The pancakes required are described in another chapter:
Sift the flour into a bowl with the baking powder, beat the eggs with the milk, water, and salt, and gradually stir the liquid into the flour, ideally with a whisk, to produce a smooth batter. Preheat the pan at setting 3, then fry thin pancakes at setting 2, the final one with no further electricity + These can be rolled up filled with jam, meat, or vegetables. This batter will yield five.
It is actually very good, though very fiddly. I started with some changes: frozen spinach, because it was there, and milk curdled with lemon juice because there was no way of getting proper Sauermilch. The spinach was thus already wilted and chopped, so I sautéed chopped onion in butter, dusted it with flour, and added the spinach to the pot. The flour bound the liquid very well, and there was no need to drain the filling. A little salt and some chopped chives went well, though I really thing it needs nutmeg and pepper.
The pancakes also followed the recipe, made with a large amount of watered-down milk and just one egg. The batter is quite thin and can be spread out in the pan by tilting it, and it cooks quickly. Detaching it can be a problem. I simply used more oil, but that is, of course, not something you would do easily in the lean years of the 1930s. Cooking them slowly did not help, but they detached better when the pan was quite hot.
The process of filling was gratifyingly easy, with the spinach holding together well, and I opted to slice the rolled-up pancakes into sections about a thumb’s width in length and arranged them in a shallow casserole dish standing on end. That was a challenge, and it is important to make sure beforehand you have enough (I ran out). As long as you can lean the pieces against each other, they stay upright nicely, though. Tilting the dish at the beginning helps with that. Still, next time, a layered casserole will probably do.
For the sauce, I beat the curdled milk with an egg and some grated Emmental cheese, and I could not resist adding pepper at least. It needed it. Then I sprinkled dry grated bread and more Emmental cheese over the top, dabbed on some butter, and baked the whole at 200°C for 30 minutes.
It turned out pretty well. A crunchy top with a soft, creamy interior, the consistency felt a little like lasagna. The vertical pancake rolls were not really visible, though I guess they would be if they were longer and more tightly arranged. I doubt it made a difference to the flavour, though. I enjoyed it, so did my mother. It still needs more spices, though, and you want something fresh with it. I opted for tomatoes.
Over the coming weeks, I plan to work out modern redactions (and adaptations) of the recipes I used in Feeding the Revolution so the whole series can be turned into a book. I half dread the idea of learning how to layout and self-publish, but it needs doing.
Today, I want to look at two Lenten recipes from the Solothurn S 392 manuscript and their surprising parallels.
A fisherman, 1552. From the Hausbuch der Mendelschen Zwölfbrüderstiftung, courtesy of wikimedia commons
B22 A chopped dish (gehäckt) in Lent
Take blanched almonds chopped small, over half (of the dish), and take small raisins (winber) and chop them, and arrange the thirds in a bowl.
(…)
B24 Fladen in Lent
Take all kinds of fish roe except barbel roe and pound it small with a little white flour so it becomes like a strauben batter. Colour it and pour it onto the fladen bases, and bake it in an oven.
At first sight, these are just fairly straightforward recipes for Lent, when meat was forbidden. B22 is a little confusing in the way it describes fractions, but the intent is fairly clear. Interestingly, these recipes occur in earlier manuscripts not just once, but twice: The Meister Hans recipe collection internally dated to 1460 has:
Recipe #113 Ainen fladen jn der vasten mach also A fladen in Lent make thus Item a fladen in Lent. Take almonds and chop them small and place them in bowl, and colour half of them with saffron. And take well selected raisins and boil them up as they should be and lay them out in the bowl separately. And take all manner of fish roe, except barbel roe, and pound that in a mortar with a little flour so that it turns out like a strauben batter (a type of leavened fritter). Colour that and pour it on the fladen and bake it in an oven.
This recipe combines the two, which in Solothurn S 392 are separated by another recipe for fritter fillings that we will look at in turn because it is also interesting. Now, the even earlier Dorotheenkloster recipe collection from Vienna has a very close parallel to that in Meister Hans:
45 Of dishes in Lent
Take almonds, chop them small, and colour half of them with saffron. Lay them aside in a bowl. Take well-picked raisins and boil them so they become round and also lay them aside in the bowl. Along with these, take all kinds of fish roe except the roe of barbels and pound it in a mortar with a little white flour so it becomes like a straubem (a kind of pulled fritter) batter. Colour it and pour it on the fladen (a pizza-like flatbread dish) and bake that in an oven.
The title makes more sense here, and the recipes are separated by a half sentence that suggests the two dishes are supposed to be served alongside each other.
The older versions hold the key to the unclear fractions in the Solothurn MS: Half of the almonds are supposed to be coloured with saffron, making three thirds in the bowl: uncoloured almonds, coloured almonds, and raisins. The instruction to boil them has become chop in the later source, which may be down to a miscommunication or a deliberate change. Either way, almonds and raisins sound like a lovely snack, an ancestor of the popular Studentenfutter (students’ feed) mixes sold in Germany today.
The second recipe is for a kind of flat cake or tart with a savoury topping, a fladen. Most survivingrecipes for these use meat, and they cold get very elaborate, but for Lent, the recipe takes recourse to fish roe and turns it intro a very basic topping. There is another parallel in Balthasar Staindl’s print cookbook of 1547, but this is different enough to say it is very likely not part of the direct line of transmission. Other Lenten fladen combine fish with almond milk which makes a very different dish.
The close similarity of the wording between the recipes in all three sources suggest they are part of a direct line of transmission. The Dorotheenkloster and Meister Hans manuscripts both have the two recipes fused into one while the later Solothurn one lists them separately, and it is likely that they originally were separate. Certainly the title in the Meister Hans text does not fit both. I would therefore say it is very likely an earlier common source than Dorotheenkloster existed from which both the separate recipes in Solothurn S 392 and the combined ones originate. I do not think this Q to or synoptic cookbooks survives, but reconstructing it may make a fun project. It certainly puts another nail in the coffin of the idea that “Meister Hans” is an original text or a historical person.
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.
Another recipe from Solothurn S 392 that the writer says is Italian, in this case from Venice. Again, it’s death-bv-cheese.
B19 If you want to make a tartaren (tarten?) the Venetian way, take 20 eggs and beat them well. Then take good cheese and grate it well. If the cheese is salted, pour sweet milk over it (and let it steep) for 3 hours before you make the tartaren. But if the cheese is sweet, you must not pour the milk on before it is time. When it is time, add enough milk and put it with the eggs, and stir it well together. Take a pan and put in fat or olive oil (bomöl) and let it get hot. Pour out the fat or oil again and then pour in the milk and eggs with the cheese. Set the pan over a gentle fire. Prepare a lid that fits it and set it over it, then also place gentle embers on top. Let it bake the way you know well, and you can also add spices and saffron or raisins (oge secke) to this. When it is baked, lift it carefully onto a plate et caetera.
Again, this recipe is not complex or unusual. It is almost surprising the author bothered to record it in so much detail. Cheese, eggs and milk, possibly with spices and raisins, cooked in a hot pan with a lid heated by piling on coals looks a lot like whatwealreadyknow asMörserkuchen or often just Kuchen. The technique may have been relatively new at the time because it is described so often, but it is also fairly ubiquitous.
The reconstruction here depends mainly on the type and proportion of cheese we opt for. Clearly, this is not what we know as cheesecake today. It uses firm cheese that can be grated, not soft curds like quark or cream cheese. That still leaves a world of latitude, though, and what you get from using a recent paneer-style cheese or something like tvarog will be very different from what rich, firm cheeses like Gouda or a hard, dry Parmeggiano would produce. I would argue for a relatively recent white cheese being intended – if it is air-dried, it is used as is, but if it was brined, it needs soaking in milk first.
The next question is proportions. It is certainly a substantial dish starting with 20 eggs, but we cannot know if it is more of a cheesy omelet or a massive cheese patty with the eggs acting as glue. My guess is that it relies much more on the eggs and milk, producing a soft and possibly airy consistency with the fresh cheese adding richness and flavour. Both sweet spices and raisins look like they make a good fit here. The idea seems to be for the egg and cheese to form a crust on contact with the hot, greased pan so the cake can be removed in one piece after baking despite lacking a pastry case.
That leaves the question of the name. I am not well versed in Venetian cuisine, so there may well be a parallel I am unaware of, but I suspect it is simply a transmission error. A tarte or torta might become a tartara between one speaker and another. The word tartaren as it is, used with a masculine article, does not normally refer to food. Since the thirteenth century, it has referred to the Tatars, broadly the military of the various Mongol Khanates. Of course, Tatars were actually familiar both to Germans, whose trade connections reached deep into Easter Europe, and Venetians, who regularly sailed to the Crimea and Black Sea coast, but I cannot see any realistic way this actually is a Tatar dish. Neither does the name suggest origin, it basically just says “If you want to make a Tatar…”
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.
Another recipe from Solothurn s 392 with Italian roots, this time stated overtly:
B18 If you want to make fritters (frytellen) in the Florentine way as fried cakes, take fresh käß or fresh ziger (two types of cheese). Then take a white cloth and set a vat under the the cloth, and stir the käß or ziger so the water comes out of it. Then take egg whites, as much as you think is enough, and mix it well together with your hands. Then take a pan with fat and let it get hot. Take a small spoon and take as much of the käß or ziger (as fits into the spoon), and lay it into the pan carefully. Let it cook well from both sides so they (change of number in the original) become crisp (röselecht). Lay them in a dish and sprinkle white sugar on it. That is how they are made, it is proven (ist bewert).
I am not sure that cheese is improved by frying, but medieval German opinion on that point was fairly clear. As recipes go, it is neither very luxurious nor very demanding to make, and there are some similar confections of greater complexity. But apparently either this was how people ate them in Florence, or the author thought it was.
An interesting aspect here is the parallelism of käß and ziger. In modern Swiss German, Käse is typically made from whole milk by rennet curdling while Ziger is made from whey using an acidic agent. If this is how those words are used here, that would mean something like ricotta. However,m there are many recipes in the German corpus that use ziger to refer to freshly made curds in general, so that interpretation is not certain.
In the end, drained curds – however they were produced – kneaded with egg whites and fried brown would make something rich, sweet, and satisfying in a funfair-treat kind of way. I would try it with ricotta and tvarog, just to see how different it comes out.
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.
A rare vegetable dish preserved in the Solothurn S 392 collection, and yes, that is Italian:
B16 Item if you want to cook good pumpkins (zucken, from zucco), take a pumpkin and enough onions and give it a good boiling. Then chop them very well, take good meat broth, and boil them well. Then grate cheese into it and break 3 or 4 eggs into it. Also add a little saffron, that is a good dish (minnister, from menestra).
The dish itself does not need much interpretation: You take pumpkin and onions, boil them soft, then chop them and turn them into a rich spoonable dish with broth, eggs, and cheese. Of course, the zucken here does not refer to the American curcubita plant we call pumpkins today, but to the Old-World lagenaria gourds that were called by that name then, and colloquially still often are. In practice, there is more variety within than between the two families, so using a curcubita pumpkin can work just fine.
What makes this recipe interesting is the clearly Italian roots. It uses two clearly Italian loan words – zucken for pumpkin and minnister for a dish. The recipe is also Italian in style, elevating a garden vegetable to main dish level by way of adding cheese and eggs. There are several recipes in the collection that clearly show their roots on the other side of the Alps, rubbing shoulders with others that are paralleled in earlier German manuscripts. This makes perfect sense for a Swiss recipe book, of course. However, the editor believes that S 392 was produced in the Upper Rhine valley, the same region that the Meister Hans collection comes from, so clearly someone there had taken an interest in Italian food. It is not inherently implausible, but I have not seen it this overtly before.
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.
As it had been a century before, rental housing in Berlin was a good investment in the 1970s. Wealthy people owned apartment houses, but left the management of the property to specialised firms that paid out the profits to their legal representatives. That was also how things worked in Tile-Wardenberg-Straße 28 until June of 1979, when the the tenants learned from an article in Der Spiegel who they were paying their several thousand Deutschmarks monthly. The substantial house in West Berlin was owned by Doctor Aribert Heim, and the name very much rang a bell.
Today, we are used to analysing the motivations of Nazis. Historians have moved past the stereotype of sadistic monsters to look at social pressures, ambition, and opportunism that led people to commit atrocities “just following orders”. Aribert Heim was different; He fulfilled every exploitation movie stereotype. As duty physician of Mauthausen concentration camp, his day job was to look after the health of the guards and inmates. The sadistic tortures he inflicted on hundreds of victims served no purpose other than his personal gratification. The lack of a paper trail allowed him to initially escape punishment and even return to medical practice, earning the money to invest in real estate, but eventually, an arrest warrant was issued and he fled West Germany for Egypt in 1962.
One factor that had enabled Heim to practice medicine unmolested for over a decade despite his crimes was a problem that frequently hinders efforts to prosecute government crimes: widely distributed complicity. Especially in West Germany, with greater institutional continuity from the Third Reich, courts, prosecutors, and law enforcement frequently dragged their feet over anything to do with the state’s crimes. Many people far beyond the actual camp guards and torturers had been involved in or profited from them to some degree, and even those that had not often felt loyalty to people and institutions that a prosecution would threaten. While a few heroic individuals like prosecutor Fritz Bauer pursued justice with some success, the usual response to any question about “the thousand years” tended to be deafening silence.
It took the revolt of a younger generation to drag the horrors of Nazi Germany into public awareness. Through school curricula, media, books, and films, people increasingly learned the truth and with distance and greater affluence, found it easier to acknowledge the shame. By the late 1970s, there was widespread unease with the degree of impunity that Nazis had enjoyed.
The tenants who found out that their landlord was one of them were among this broadly unpolitical, but informed majority. Past the political earthquakes of the late 1960s, they lived in a country that was more liberal, more affluent, and more secure than ever. The revolution expected in 1968 had not materialised, but change had shaken up many aspects of life. Many past convictions were cast into doubt; not only the uncompromising hostility of the Cold War, but also belief in technological progress, industry, and traditional social roles. Both ecological awareness and a romantic neo-traditionalism were becoming mainstream, fuelled by growing consumer incomes that allowed people to live consciously and the visible downsides of industrial society. Many people dreamed of a more self-sufficient rural life, though in the urban island of West Berlin surrounded by fortified border walls, simply moving to the countryside was out of the question. Books about traditional cuisine cooked with fresh, natural ingredients, both local and international, enjoyed great popularity everywhere.
1970s neotraditional cuisine (own collection)
A legendary series of regional cookbooks produced by Verlag Wolfgang Hölker became emblematic of this fashion. Bound in colourful patterned linen and designed to look old-timey, with mock-handwritten notes and charming anecdotes, they introduced consumers to the lost art of local, seasonal cooking. Rote Grütze is a recipe several of them include, a refreshing summer dessert from Northern Germany consciously eschewing modern gelling agents. The most detailed one is from the 1975 volume on Hamburg’s cuisine:
Rote Grütze is like Hamburg Aalsuppe in that every inhabitant swears by their own specific way of preparing it; with cornstarch, sago, or semolina, with one or at most two kinds of fruit, with whole or pureed fruit, with red wine, vanilla, honey, replacing cream with vanilla sauce, or many other variations. Nonetheless, we will present only one recipe here that approximately matches Ms. Behnke’s Rote Grütze and thus counts as “tried and proven”. We will address other fruit dishes and sweet delights separately.
Boil the fruit briefly just covered with water and pass through a sieve. Measure the juice; Use 80g (8 level tablespoons) of cornstarch mixed with cold water to each litre, Bring the juice to a boil and sweeten it well. Stir in the cornstarch at reduced heat and return to a boil once more, stirring continually, until the liquid begins to develop bubbles and thicken. Transfer to a glass or porcelain bowl rinsed with cold water and chill. Invert onto a plate before serving.
As Rote Grütze is cooked throughout the summer, the fruit can be varied and e.g. cook an additional 250g pitted tart cherries whole with the juice.
Serve with ice-cold sweet cream, and coarse sugar for sprinkling.
This is exactly the kind of home-cooked, consciously traditional mock-simplicity educated urbanites in the late 1970s and 1980s went for. Appearances notwithstanding, this is not a simple dish. It requires a fairly large amount of easily bruised, expensive fruit, laborious juicing, and refrigeration. If you had all the equipment and the popular painted earthenware ‘peasant’ dishes to serve it on, it was a delight, but in truth, you could also buy it sterilised and vacuum-sealed in foil bags from your local supermarket. Who had that kind of time, after all? It was not just the demands of work and family; This was a time when activism increasingly came to be seen as a badge of good citizenship, something you not only were allowed to do, but ought to. When the tenants of Dr Heim learned of their landlord’s identity, they decided the situation called for some. They formally called on the authorities to stop the flow of money to a wanted criminal and seize his property.
The problem was that though all kinds of good laws for confiscation of assets and restitution existed, they were rarely enforced. Even when the Berlin authorities were finally willing to pursue this avenue, cooperation with the prosecutor’s office that actually handled the case file at the other end of the country proved challenging. This was often where such cases failed: responses slow-walked, objections raised on technicalities, communications lost. It took dedication to persevere. The tenants decided to help with that. They organised an association and refused to continue their rent payments. Instead, the money was deposited in an escrow account. After that, they raised awareness by writing articles for the local press, collecting signatures on the street, and giving interviews to the media. It was old-school civic engagement, but it worked. Keeping the case in the public eye embarrassed the authorities enough to make them do their jobs.
It took almost a decade, but eventually the house was confiscated and auctioned, with the funds going towards restitution for victims of the Nazi regime. Sadly, Aribert Heim did not contest the decision in person to avoid the arrest and trial for mass murder that would have followed. As far as we can reconstruct things, he died in Egypt in 1992 living under a false identity. It is little enough, but at least we know he was deprived of a substantial part of his income in his final years. These things matter.
Cases like this one are important to study if your country’s government should happen to engage in crimes on ba large scale. In these situations, no matter what the law says, you can rarely trust the authorities to take action on their own. Even once the criminals lose the protection they used to have, misplaced loyalty, shame, and fear of accountability in anyone complicit tend to gum up the wheels of justice very effectively. But shame can go both ways, and drawing attention to anyone obviously failing to do their duty can help bring perpetrators closer to justice, ideally before they disappear into well-funded exile.
Raisins were one of the more understated luxury items of medieval German cuisine. Most of them were imported, but the Solothurn S 392 recipe collection contains this fascinating recipe:
B14 Of ugesicke (uva sicca – raisins)
If you want to make ugesicke, take of the good, sweet, white grapes and let the grapes lie in the sun for 2 days. Turn them over often, and do that for 2 days in succession. Then, after the bread is taken out of the oven, take the grapes and lay them into the oven over small sticks so they do not touch the bottom. Let them lie in it overnight and turn them over once, and then no more.
This demonstrates the ingenuity and skill of medieval cooks as well as the reason why raisins were usually imported. Drying grapes at scale requires sustained dry, warm weather which north of the Alps was not something you could reliably expect. That is why raisins, along with dried figs and dates, were usually imported from the Mediterranean and some recipes even specify Italian (welsche) ones. However, unlike figs and dates, grapes grew in the warmer parts of Germany. The climate just was not conducive to drying them.
This recipe presents the solution: You begin by drying the grapes in the sun, then transfer them to a bread oven after baking. Bread was normally baked in thermal-mass ovens which were first heated by lighting a fire inside, them removing the cinders and baking the bread in the heat radiating from the oven’s walls and floor. Much of this heat remained after the bread was finished, and at this stage you could still bake pies or flat cakes, dry fruit and vegetables, or keep pots warm. The floor was still hottest, so sensitive things like grapes needed to be kept off it, but it was no longer so hot it could set alight branches, so they were used as a bottom layer. The instruction to turn them over exactly once suggests practical experience.
And then there is the title: ugesicke. Nothing at all suggests that this is raisins, which are typically called versions of Rosine, Weinbeere or Zibebe. Of course it makes sense as a creative rendering of uva sicca – dried grapes – but really only once you already know what it is. Without that, it is just another reminder to not trust German recipe names, ever, to usefully identify or describe what a dish actually is.
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.
In autumn of 1888, a clandestine operation took place in Vienna. The target was no military installation, research laboratory, or government office. It was a brickyard, and the man who penetrated its security perimeter in disguise was a physician and newspaper editor called Victor Adler. He had no rational reason to be here, risking prison for burglary and a beating by the guards. Adler was independently wealthy, with an established medical practice, and he owned his own newspaper. He went because he was angry – angry at the injustice, the exploitation and cruelty he saw every day. What he found inside the guarded compounds made him angrier still.
On 1 December 1888, he published the first of two articles describing what he had seen. Inside the factories, entire families of workers, men, women, and children, worked brutally long hours to make bricks. They lived on site, sleeping in barracks or huts, some in abandoned kilns, crowded onto makeshift cots or bedding down on heaps or foal or sand, covered with ragged blankets. Their pay was given in stamped tin tokens they could redeem for overpriced food and alcohol at the company store, and it was so paltry many walked for miles to a nearby cannery to beg ‘gulash broth’ (Gulaschsaft) left over after processing meat. Others walked over an hour to a soup kitchen where they received free portions at the end of a long workday. Adler described their plight in horrific detail.
The people he had met were known as Ziegelböhmen, migrant workers from Bohemia who came to Vienna in the hope of earning a living, but found themselves effectively imprisoned. Adler described them as “…the poorest slaves the sun shines upon.” Yet their labour built the greatest city of the German-speaking world: Vienna.
It is too often forgotten that, for all of Berlin’s grandeur and Munich’s charm, there was no equal to the old imperial capital in culture, art, and architecture. People from all over Europe came to admire and study its buildings, visits its grand museums, its famous theatres, operas and concert halls, ride along its Ringstrasse boulevard, and walk its scenic parks. All this glory, still a tourist attraction of global reach, was built on the backs of thousands of starving, freezing labourers drawn from the Bohemian countryside.
A Czech servant girl, drawing by Archibald Hartrick 1892 courtesy of wikimedia commons
Aside from culture, style, and savoir-vivre, Vienna differed from Berlin or Dresden in that it was a genuinely multicultural city. Its people spoke mostly German, but also Hungarian, Italian, Croat, Czech, Polish, Ruthenian, Serbian, Romanian, Yiddish and Russian. Situated at this crossroads of cultures, the wealth of the city’s affluent classes fostered a unique culinary culture. Viennese food, but especially Viennese confectionery, is still world famous. Particularly Bohemians were known as skilful cooks, leading bourgeois families to hire Czech-speaking kitchen staff by preference, but the glory of it was no one nation’s. Ottoman and Italian, German, Central European and Balkan traditions today meet in every Kaffeehaus spread of cakes.
A modest, and genuinely Bohemian, part of this is Kolatschen. The word is borrowed from Czech where it means a leavened cake with a sweet topping, though in Vienna it came to mean something you bought individually from a baker, a kind of hand pie. By the time Katharina Prato writes down this exhaustive recipe in her Süddeutsche Küche, the meaning is clearly still very much in flux:
Kolatschen with a poppyseed or plum filling. You prepare a dough of 7 decilitres of milk, a thin starter of 2 decagrammes of yeast that are mixed with 2 decilitres of milk, a spoonful of sugar, and a little flour, 5 decagrammes of butter or beef fat, 2 egg yolks, a little salt, and the necessary amount of additional flour. After beating it, add two beaten egg whites. Spread the dough on a greased baking sheet to the thickness of a little finger, let it rise, then spread poppyseed or plum filling (pages 85 and 86) on it almost to the edge. Let the cake bake rather hot and cut it into small, square pieces.
Or: Distribute the dough on the sheet by spoonfuls, press a hollow into each piece and fill it with plum or poppyseed filling. Let the Kolatschen rise well, then brush their edges with butter, bake them. As they come out of the oven, brush them with butter and sprinkle them with grated gingerbread (Lebkuchen).
Or: Cut out the dough to round shapes with a large cookie cutter (Krapfenstecher). Put on them boiled prunes, chopped finely and mixed with sugar and cinnamon. Fold the dough over the filling on three sides, brush it with egg, sprinkle it with sugar, and bake it.
The last is the way Kolatschen are usually made in Austria today. The form is best suited for individual sale as a snack. In the Czech Republic, kolacz are more likely to be round and cut into individual slices to share. The basic principle is unaffected. The recipes for the filling are also varied:
Poppyseed filling No. I: Mix 4 decilitres of poppyseeds pounded fine or ground in a coffee mill with enough boiling cream to make a thick mash, then add 2 decilitres of honey, cinnamon, and lemon aroma.
No. II: Boil 14 decagrammes of sugar with one decilitre of water and add enough pounded poppyseed to make a thick mass. Then add cinnamon, lemon aroma, cloves, and a little cream.
No. III: Boil 2 decilitres of honey and mix in the pounded poppyseed and spices. Add a little wine as the filling is about to be spread.
No. IV: Stir 3 egg yolks with 10 decagrammes of butter and add 14 decagrammes of ground poppyseed, 5 decagrammes of clarified butter, 3 tablespoons of very good cream, 7 decagrammes of currants, cinnamon, vanilla, and the three egg whites beaten to a snow.
Plum filling No. I: Dried prunes are boiled, chopped finely, and simmered with sugar, cinnamon, lemon peel, allspice (Neugewürz), and the prune cooking liquid.
No. II: Powidl (plum puree) is cooked with water and wine so it spreads easily.
In the end, this is not so much a distinct recipe as a local expression of the global realisation that Leavened Dough With Sweet Fillings Tastes Good. Plum filling most likely became dominant because it was relatively cheap and familiar. Similar things had been cookedfor centuries. Still, we need to keep in mind that these were luxuries. Small indulgences certainly, but unlike today, when a doughnut or cookie is always at hand, even bourgeois families like that of Dr. Adler did not have treats like this daily. If you earned just enough to survive locked into one of those brickyards, you might see one for a high holiday.
Victor Adler’s daring infiltration had immediate legal consequences. He had made public that employers paid their workers in company scrip and confined them in their factories – both strictly illegal. The police thus arrested two workers who had assisted him, and Adler himself was sued and fined. Nothing was done to remedy the situation. Yet, though the factory owners might control the law courts, they had lost badly in the court of public opinion. Austria-Hungary was not a democracy, but it had a relatively free press. Public anger forced the authorities to stop the payment in scrip and tolerate the forming of a union that successfully went on strike in 1895. The employers could not defeat them by lockouts as outside supporters fed and sheltered the strikers, and after eight days, the brickworkers had won. Their immediate gains were small – a modest raise, guaranteed working hours – but their standing as parties in collective bargaining ensured the old abuses could not easily be reimposed.
Victor Adler continued to involve himself in labour organisations and Social Democratic politics, becoming a member of parliament and, at the end of his life, briefly a minister in the provisional government that ended the monarchy. He died in 1918, one day before the new Austrian Republic was proclaimed, but his work was continued.
Viktor-Adler-Hof built in 1924 as social housing, courtesy of wikimedia commons
In Vienna, the solid working class vote not least of the brickmakers, construction workers, and domestic servants, ensured a Socialist city council until it was ended by a fascist coup in 1934. This ‘Red Vienna’, faced with a crisis of underemployment, overcrowding, and the aftermath of a World War, undertook a daring experiment. They used the old imperial capital’s vast construction industry to build modern, no-frills social housing on a grand scale. The Ziegelböhmen who for generations had toiled to raise operas and palaces now made the material for a revolution in urban housing that was soon copied in cities across the German-speaking world. The strategy was fiscally and socially risky, but it paid enormous dividends. To this day, the city’s strong stock of public housing ensures that rents in Vienna remain far more affordable than in any other large German-speaking city, and its 1920s housing developments are now considered pioneering efforts in modern architecture. In 1924, one of them was named in honour of Victor Adler.
If you want to fill a chicken, take 3 eggs and boil them hard. Also take parsley and mirren (myrtleberries?) and pound the parsley and mirren and egg well together. Add butter, and also take small grapes that are called rossin (raisins), and fill the chicken. Let it roast, but also add salt to the filling et caetera.
Basically, this is a very familiar recipe. Filling roast chickens with boiled egg is sometimes referred to as ‘the German way’, as opposed to ‘the Italian way’ of using herbs, and it must have been much more widely known than the few recipes that survive suggest given it also shows up in literature. The basic procedure is clear: mash up boiled eggs, add herbs and salt, work in dried fruit, and fill it into the chicken. A similar set of instructions from the Kuchenmaistrey also includes mashed roast apples or pears and raw egg to hold it together, but it envisions filling a meat roast, mentioning poultry only as an afterthought.
This kind of filling would not require cooking, but could absorb meat juices and impart flavour to the bird. I am not convinced of its culinary merits, but it was practical and if you had to stretch your animal protein, it added to the portions as well. The one question that continues to vex me is the second seasoning ingredient mentioned here along with parsley.
The problem with mirren is not its obscurity; it is a common word in Middle High German. The problem is that it cannot possibly mean what it usually does. Mirren, familiar from devotional literature and sermons, is myrrh. Technically, myrrh is edible, but it is bitter and astringent and smells much better than it tastes. I used it in experiments with medieval dental hygiene remedies once and the experience of even a relatively small amount in my mouth is not something I wish to repeat. Admittedly, it is possible that people enjoyed this, of course, and even though this would be the only mention of it in a culinary context in German, the recipe may actually refer to myrrh. It is just extremely unlikely.
The most likely possibility in my opinion is that it means myrtleberry. The German words are close enough to make this confusion fairly common (having brides wear a wreath of myrrh in some poems), and unlike the bitter resin, myrtleberries actually have a history of culinary use. It is still a very uncommon condiment, 1500 is very early for it to show up, and I am not convinced it would work in this recipe. That is something I should try, though.
This leaves the question what else it could be, and at this point I am drawing a blank. It will need looking at herbals and dialect dictionaries to see what other explanations present themselves.
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.
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