Following an empty page, a second collection of recipes in a different hand begins. Interestingly, it repeats many recipes from the first collection in different versions. What the explanation behind this may be – a collection dictated by the same person at different times, two related documents brought together, a partial copy intended for another recipient and never delivered? – is anyone’s guess.
1 A sauce of tart cherries
If you would make a good sauce of tart cherries, put the cherries into a pot, set it on the embers and let them boil. Cool them, pass them through a cloth, put them into a pot again, set it on the embers again and let them boil well. Stir it until it grows thick and add honey and grated bread and cloves and good spices enough. Put it into a small cask and it stays good for a year etc.
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.