58 A dish of calves’ lungs
If you would make a good dish of calves’ lungs, chop the lungs small and add a little boiled bacon and two egg yolks to them. Add good (spice) powder and chop it all together very finely. Make small balls of it (the editor reads keinen Zeugell here, I suspect an error). Then make a good smerbenn (?) batter, dredge the balls in it and fry them in fat. Do not oversalt it.
‘keinen Zeugell’ may be related to ‘zagel’ – an idiomatic instruction to “make no tails” – but I rather suspect it is a simple error that was meant to read ‘kleinen’ something. Since the recipe later refers to balls (kugel), I assume that is what is means. What quality makes a batter ‘smerben’, though, I have no clue at this point. Could it be related to ‘mürbe’? A batter designed to cook a certain kind of fish?
I owe thanks to my friend Libby Cripps for pointing me to the as yet untranslated fifteenth-century culinary recipe collection that is bound with similar works on fabric dyes and on medicine in the Heidelberg Cod Pal Germ 551. It looks, at first glance, unexceptional, but I will try to keep up a flow of recipes and see whether it has anything of particular interest to offer.