Deep fried cheese… because deep fried cheese.
<<5>> Zu chrumpen krapfen als ross eisen
For crooked fritters, bent like horseshoes
Grate good cheese and take half the amount of flour, break eggs into it enough for the dough to be soft enough to be rolled out, and add spices. Roll it out on a board so that it becomes like a sausage. Bend that and fry it in fat.
This is one of many recipes for cheese-based fritters from medieval Germany and my favourite crowd-pleasing recipe. It’s low threshold medieval cuisine, people can participate by shaping the fritters (children especially love bending them around their fingers) and the result tends to get eaten up fast. I usually serve them with a sweet fruit sauce, but they can stand on their own and are easy enough that you can cook them over a campfire.
The flavour depends very much on the kind of cheese you use. I prefer a soft, but flavourful kind such as Emmental or cheddar, but the recipe also works with something as mild as mozzarella or a hard cheese like pecorino. As regards the spices, pepper or nutmeg work well in my opinion. If you do not care about historical accuracy, chili is excellent in these.
The Inntalkochbuch is from a monastic library in Bavaria’s Inntal region (the Inn is a tributary of the Danube), dating to the late 15th/early 16th century. It is written in Upper German and strongly reflects local culinary traditions, though some of its recipes are commonplaces found elsewhere.