Clove sauce for fish from the Cgm 349

Carp seems to have been very popular. It still is, in the Czech Republic. Maybe the recipes really are Bohemian.

Making a clove sauce for baked/fried pike or carp, or other kinds (of fish)

Item, take Italian raisins, gingerbread (leczelten) and a toasted slice of a bread roll or three, put it in a mortar and pound it so that it becomes small (ground up finely). Then place it on the fire in wine so that it boils well. Then pass it through a sieve as finely/gently as possible (aufs lyndist) and put it back on the fire. Spice it with cloves, cinnamon and pepper and a little saffron, and also add a few whole raisins to the sauce as well as honey and a little vinegar. When you want to serve it, taste the sauce well to ensure that it is right in all things. Then put the baked/fried fish in it and serve them forth.

Another day, another Bohemian sauce… Again we put the food on the sauce rather than the sauce on the food. It is unfortunately not possible to say certainly whether the fish is meant to be oven-baked or deep-fried since the word pachen could refer to both.

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 few sauce recipes are appended. They are claimed to be of Bohemian or Hungarian origin. 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.

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