A familiar standby of medieval cuisine – green with parsley this time.
3. xii. Whoever would bake good streüblein (pulled fritters) should take a handful of parsley and pound it with water and white breadcrumbs. Pass that through a cloth. Take eggs and flour. Make a good fritter batter (strauben teiglein), do not oversalt it. Then take the parsley that was passed through and tear it (zettel in) into the pan, not too thin and not too thick. And have a care that the pan is not too narrow.
Strauben were the most basic kind of fritter, so familiar that the batter is often used as a reference point for more complex preparations. In this recipe, the batter is dyed with parsley before being drawn out, torn to pieces, and fried.
I will continue posting recipes from the Nuremberg Kuchenmaistrey produced around 1490, but my mode will change. Instead of translating one daily and posting it here, I will try to use what time there is to translate as much as I can and post only some of them here. Once the entire text is done, I will try to get it published either as a book, or online.
The Kuchenmaistrey was the earliest printed cookbook in German (and only missed being the earliest printed cookbook in any language by a few years). The Kuchenmaistrey (mastery of the kitchen) gave rise to a vibrant culture of amended and expanded manuscript copies as well as reprints spanning almost a century. The recipes seem designed to appeal to a wealthy, literate and cosmopolitan clientele.