Fake venison from the Königsberg MS

No parallel here, but there are recipes for ground meat used to imitate venison in several sources, including the Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch (#91) and Meister Hans (#72). Another recipe imitates the dish using eggs instead of meat.

[[7]] Willthu machenn gutt Wilpratt von Rindtfleisch:

If you want to make good venison of beef

Then chop it up small. Take the tail of a calf, put it in a pot, place that on the coals and stir it until boiling, then pour it over the meat. Thus it attains (vecht) the semblance of venison. Chop eggs and hard bread into it, season it well, and form it into balls alls die veist (the size of fists?). Boil them in meat broth and cut them up small like venison. Make a pepper sauce and serve the venison in it, and do not oversalt it.

The recipe itself is slightly odd: It sounds like meatballs, but the function of cooking the calf’s tail is puzzling. I suspect it may be intended to create a strong broth with a lot of gelatin to improve the taste and consistency. But it is really something I should try out. The intended end result is an imitation version of venison pieces served in pepper sauce, a dish that would later be named Wildpfeffer. These sauces are described frequently, often thickened either with grated bread or with blood, though the Kuchenmaistrey also has a roux thickening.

The Königsberg MS was preserved in the archive of the Teutonic Order in Königsberg (today Kaliningrad) in Baltic East Prussia, though its language suggests that it belongs to a Central or South German background. It is not associated with any name that I am aware of and is dated to the late 15th century purely on the scribal hand. The recipe types match South German sources of that time. It was published in Gollub (Hg.): Aus der Küche der deutschen Ordensritter. in: Prussia 31 (1935) pp. 118-124.

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