Cheese ‘knitwork’ from Cod Pal Germ 551, section 2

This is another recipe that duplicates section one, and I still can’t really figure it out. It does remind me I should play around with cheese more, though. Just doing what it suggests might clear things up.

12 A dish of a knitwork (gestrickte) of cheese you find here

If you would make a knitwork of cheese, take a brittle/dry (murben) cheese and white wheat bread and grate that together. And take (?lacuna) cheese than flour, lay it on a board and roll it out with eggs so that it does not become too thick (?starck). Make cylinders (czollen – usually means logs) that are not too large. Cut them up small, take a mortar, put fat into it, set it by the fire and let it get hot. Lay the pieces (czollen) into it. Take eggs, as many as you wish and sugar and raisins and season it well. Then no longer move it about it the mortar and (see) that it does not become too cold and do not oversalt it.

The parallel in section one is practically identical, but interestingly it uses quite different spellings:

22 How to make a string/knitwork (gestrick) of cheese

Take brittle (murben) cheese and white wheat bread and grate that together. And take more cheese than bread. And lay it on a board. And knead it with eggs so that it does not become too thick (stark). And make cylinders (zoel – usually means a log or stump) that are not too large. And cut them not too small. Take a mortar and put fat into it and set it by the fire. And let it get hot and lay the logs into that. And take eggs as much as you wish and sugar and raisins and season it well. And then draw it out no thinner that yarn. And take it off the fire, and watch that it does not grow too cold or it spoils.

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.

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