Sauce for salmon from some handwritten notes

literally. Someone scribbled recipes into a book on good writing.

Vber eyn salm eynen peffer machen

To make a pepper sauce (to go) over a salmon

Item take wine and water and white bread and butter and cook that together, and then pass it through a cloth. Then take enough (genuer) pepper, sugar, saffron and raisins and let this boil all mixed together. Put the salmon into a serving bowl and pour the abovementioned sauce over it.

This is a fairly typical pfeffer style sauce – bread-thickened and spicy. There is the open question of whether genuer is an ingredient or a dialect version of genug – enough. It looks like the latter here, but it shows up in other recipes where it seems to be an ingredient. It is poured over the fish – that seems to be an important distinction in sixteenth-century cuisine as other recipes instruct us to serve meat or fish on a sauce.

In the late 16th century, someone jotted down a set of cooking recipes in a copy of L. Frucks ‘Teutsch Formular vnnd Rhetoric’ of 1579. They were published in H. Müller: Kochrezepte aus dem 16. Jahrhundert. In: Rheinisch-westfälische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 14 (1967) 83-86 and are available online thanks to Thomas Gloning‘s inestimable website. Judging by the dialect, the writer is from the greater Cologne area, likely near the border with the Netherlands. The recipes are fairly standard for their time, but interesting in details such as cooking and serving instructions.

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