Ginger sauce from Cgm 349

My apologies for missing two days. I had the opportunity to go to the Landesmuseum in Stuttgart, and other things sort of fell away. Here is a ginger sauce for roast capon:

Item a ginger sauce (to serve) under roast capons

Item, take a good wine and the crumb of a bread roll (semell), put it on the fire and let it boil. When it has boiled, pass it through a sieve as thickly (strongly? auf das dykist) as possible and then let it reduce by half. Then spice it with ginger and a little pepper, also a little saffron and honey, so that it becomes very sweet and also becomes very r?k (?). Then pour it onto a serving dish and place the roast capons on it.

Bread-thickened sauces like that are commonplace in German medieval cuisine. This one is interesting for the serving instructions – the meat is placed on the sauce, not the sauce poured over the meat. That means it is potentially quite thick, which a 50% reduction of a thickened base could easily become.

The mystery word r?k looks like an adjective, and may turn out a dialectal variant of resch/rösch which in this context would be roughly ‘spicy’.

Cgm 349b is a manuscript in the collection of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München containing a collection of astronomical-astrological and medical texts. It is written on paper and dated on internal evidence to the second half of the fifteenth century. On the last page, a short recipe collection is appended. These recipes were first published and translated into modern German by Trude Ehlert in Ehlert, T. (ed & trsl): Münchner Kochbuchhandschriften aus dem 15. Jahrhundert, Tupperware Deutschland, Frankfurt 1999 on pp. 99-110. I am translating them as I go along. So far, they do not look very unusual.

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Your email address will not be published.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 *