An Odd Roast from the Inntalkochbuch

The title notwithstanding, this is clearly nothing like roasted butter. I suppose it may be designed to mimic the appearance of such a dish. And it is certainly odd.

<<49>> Ein gepratner putter

Roasted butter

Take (recipe, Lat. ‘receive’) a small white bread loaf (ein semleins prot) and mix it with 12 eggs, stick that on a spit and sprinkle it with flour. Place something (a dripping pan) under it until it is properly heated, and sprinkle it with flour whenever you turn it. Serve it in the best sauce (or: when it is at its juiciest? im pessten safft).

Quite unusually, this recipe actually begins with the Latin recipe (take!) rather than one of the more common conventional phrases such as “item”, “if you would prepare” or “to make”. The content that follows is odd and interesting. Mixing bread and egg is common in the German corpus, but sticking it on a spit is. I do not really understand what the purpose of dusting it with flour is, but am intrigued enough to consider trying it out at some point.

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.

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