More sausage recipes from de Rontzier. We are going for domestic animals now.
Of beef sausages
1 You make sausages that are useful for boiling or roasting of beef that has been roasted dry on a griddle until it is brown and chopped together with butter, whole pepper, ground wild cumin (Haberkoehm) and salt etc.
2 Tender roasting-grade beef (Rinder Moerbraten) chopped with bacon, parsley, pepper, ginger, salt and saffron is filled into guts that have briefly lain in wine vinegar mixed with saffron and been washed again. You roast the sausages and make a sauce of onions cut small, dripping, wine vinegar, and pepper that is served over the sausages.
3 You make sausages for roasting of tender, roasting-grade beef (Rindermoerbraten) with bacon, ground ginger, nutmeg, salt and sugar chopped together. You prepare a sauce to go over them with dripping and sugar.
Mutton sausages
1 You chop mutton small with bacon, large raisins, pepper, ginger, and a properly large amount (zimblich vielem) of salt, wrap it in a mutton caul (Hamelßnetz), roast it, and prepare a pepper sauce (Pfefferbrueh) to serve over it.
2 You chop mutton with marjoram, salt, and pepper, make sausages of this and roast them quickly (hastigen) etc.
3 You chop mutton with onions, parsley, pepper, ginger and lemons, wrap it in a mutton caul (Hamelnetz), boil them in broth, season them with lemons, grated bread, and whole mace, and serve them.
These recipes are mostly not very different from the ones we’ve encountered already. There are the sweet sausages again, the roasted minced meat wrapped in caul, and the sweet and spiocy sauces. The first recipe in the beef section is unusual; It instructs us to make a sausage of previously cooked meat. That is not technically implausible, but I wonder what the point was. The addition of butter makes sense with beef, which is often lean, and consistent with the idea that roasting flavours are supposed to be accentuated, but it makes it hard to see how this sausage would be cooked without leaking. It may be intended to serve cold.
The final recipe in the mutton section also sounds interesting. I suspect the grated bread mentioned towards the end is meant as a crust in a final roasting stage that goes unmentioned. Mutton meatloaf with mace and lemon sounds like a good idea to me.
Franz de Rontzier, head cook to the bishop of Halberstadt and duke of Braunschweig, published his encyclopaedic Kunstbuch von mancherley Essen in 1598. He clearly looks to Marx Rumpolt’s New Kochbuch as the new gold standard, but fails to match it in engaging style or depth. He is thus overshadowed by the twin peaks of Marx Rumpolt and Anna Wecker. What makes his work interesting is the way in which he systematically lists versions of a class of dishes, illustrating the breadth or a court cook’s repertoire. He is also more modernly fashionable than Rumpolt. Looking to France rather than Italy and Spain for inspiration, and some of the dishes he first describes may be genuine innovations.