A Pancake Dish from Cgm 384 II

An interesting recipe.

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13 A Pepper Sauce Dish

Fry a pancake/sheet (plat) in a pan and cut it into cubes (wuirfellt). And prepare a black pepper sauce of bread, flour, and fish broth, and let the fried (das gebachen) boil up in it. Fry a little cubed (wuirflott) white bread in oil or in fat and strew it on that.

This stands in need of some interpreting. The word plat simply means a sheet or leaf and is also used for paper. I assume that it refers to a pancake here, as it frequently does, but it can also mean a kind of flatbread or a sheet of pastry dough. A thick pancake could be cut into squares and served in a sauce with cubed bread croutons. It is also remarkably close to a savoury version of col ris, a recipe with an illustrious ancestry in the Buoch von Guoter Spise. The fact that the pepper sauce is made with fish broth suggests it is a Lenten dish, intended as a substitute for meat. This is a tradition which will later give rise to the great and rich tradition of Mehlspeisen as main courses.

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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