I had the opportunity to spend the weekend with friends, playing with their outdoor cooking gear and trying out medieval German recipes. Not all of them worked out, but I learned a lot from each. Here is the first:
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.
Obviously, to produce the sauce, we first had to make the gingerbread. Luckily, the same source provided instructions:
4 Make good gingerbread 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.
We reduced the quantities, using only about 300g of honey (a full Maß would have been 4-5 times that) with commensurately smaller quantities of spices (15g of powdered ginger, 30g of chopped dried ginger, 10g of cloves, 10g of nutmeg, 3g of pepper, and 15g of cinnamon). These are guesstimates based on the Nuremberg Lot. The honey mixture required about 1 1/2 cups of rye flour to become stiff enough to shape into small cakes.
To try different consistencies, we baked half the dough as it was, then added an egg and an additional 3/4 cups of rye flour to the other half. Both were baked at 175°C and both turned out satisfactory. Obviously, the result was very spicy and initially rock hard. The cookies softened considerably the next morning, when we soaked and mashed them into a sauce that was sweet-spicy and went very well with roast beef.
