Gingerbread sauce from Cod Pal Germ 551

3 A sauce of gingerbread (leczellten)

Take good gingerbread (leczelten), cut it into thin slices like pfeffer brot (a different kind of gingerbread) and boil it with wine. Pass it through a cloth like a pepper sauce and add cinnamon bark and ginger, as much as you will. Boil it in a pan, pour it into the sauce bowl, add sugar to it and then mix it.

This recipe is identical almost word for word with one from the first section:

5 A sauce of gingerbread (leczelten).

Take a good gingerbread (letzelten) and cut it into thin slices as (you would) a pfeffer brot (different type of gingerbread). And boil it with wine and pass it through a cloth like a pepper sauce. And take with it cinnamon bark and ginger, as much as you wish, and boil it in a pan. Pour it into the sauce bowl, put sugar with it, and serve it.

Secton one also has a recipe that gives us an idea of what kind of gingerbread is meant by ‘leczel(l)ten’. It’s what we would call ‘Lebkuchen’ today and is still known as ‘Lebzelten’ in some dialects.

4 Make good gingerbread (leckuchen) thus

Take a maß of honey. With that belongs four lot of cut ginger, two lot of pounded ginger, one and a half lot of cloves, one and a half lot of nutmeg, half a lot of pepper, two lot of cinnamon, and four lot of coriander for those who like it in there. This is healthy for the head. And with this belongs rye flour as is proper.

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.

This entry was posted in Uncategorised and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *