One of the more attractive medicinal wines
5. xvii. If you would make a wine of brambles, take one Maß of thick honey (honig saym) and five Maß of bramble berries, mix it and stir it together well. Then add six times as much wine, set it by the fire and let it boil well. Skim it and take it off. Strain it through a cloth and let it stand.
Then, return it to the fire and let it boil. Skim it and pour it into a small, clean cask. Let it stand. And when you wish to drink of it, try it to see if it is too strong for you. Mix two glasses full of wine with one glass of this and you will have a good drink that helps well against natural heat and keeps it within its natural limits.
The final chapter of the kuchenmaistrey is dedicated to medicinal recipes. This one actally sounds attractive and, with the addition of honey and berry juice likely reulting in a second round of fermentation, will probably pack quite a punch.
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 (mastery of the kitchen) was the earliest printed cookbook in German (and only missed being the earliest printed cookbook in any language by a few years). The book 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.