Filled Crawfish Shells from Cgm 384 II

Yes, there is more to this source than sauces.

11 Filled Crawfish

Take large crawfish and take their shells off whole. Take out the innards (das ynder) and discard what is evil, and chop the rest on a clean board. Add fried eggs (gebachen ayer) and chop it all together, and season it and colour it and fill the crawfish shells with that. Thrust the shells over one another, lay them on a griddle, and roast them well.

This piece of culinary sleight-of-hand is also found in the Kuchenmaistrey, though there the filling is held together with raw egg. I tried out that recipe in April this year and found it both pleasant and visually interesting. Obviously, it is older than the printed book’s 1485 publication date.

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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