Another Liver Sauce from Cgm 384 II

The chapter starts bumpy:

Not looking like this, but I love the image courtesy of wikimedia commons

8 Liver

Take the liver of a sheep or calf and boil it, and pound it very small with an equal quantity of bread (als vil brottes). And pour wine or vinegar or both into it and pass it through and spice and colour it and let it boil up and serve birds in it. But if you would like to make it very sweet, add good honey to it as you please. You may serve partridges and domestic chickens in it roasted, and a pressed head (gebresseten kopff), a roast deer liver, or other things.

It is not easy to see how this recipe is materially different from #5 in the same collection. It mentions the option of adding honey and gives us an incomplete list of foods that can be served with it, though. That much is informative. The gebresseden kopff mentioned here is, of course, head cheese, the slowly boiled meat from a pig’s head pressed into a solid mass. This seems to have been a popular dish in fifteenth-century Germany. It was even faked for Lent.

Bound together with medicinal, veterinary, and magical texts, the culinary recipes of Munich Cgm 384 were partly published in 1865 as “Ein alemannisches Büchlein von guter Speise“. The manuscript dates to the second half of the fifteenth century. My translation follows the edition by Trude Ehlert in Münchner Kochbuchhandschriften aus dem 15. Jahrhundert, Tupperware Deutschland, Frankfurt 1999, which includes the first section of recipes not published earlier.

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