Boiling Fritters in Cgm 384 II

These recipes belong in a tradition of first making fritters, then cooking them to a mush. It is an odd idea to us, but seems to have been quite popular back then:

36 Spoon Dish (Muoß)

Fried (Gebrauten) muoß: Take only eggs and an equal quantity of fat, salt it, and do not make the fat too hot. Put it into a pan and fry (braut) it with that. And prepare a stiff (kecken) dough of egg and roll it out (will in) into thin sheets. Fry it in fat and then chop it quite small, and prepare it with eggs and milk.

37 Spoon dish of fritters (Muoß von gebachem)

Take fried strubeten (Strauben, a kind of pulled fritter) and chop them small. Boil them in thick milk and beat two eggs into it and colour it. And when you wish to serve it, strew spices on it, that way it becomes very good.

38 Chop Struben (Strauben) very well and add milk and eggs and make a muoß. If you wish, spice it and colour it.

The first recipe is a little confusing. First, we are making something like scrambled eggs, then thin fritters from a rolled-out dough, something that is elsewhere known as Heidnische Kuchen. Then, I assume, both is cooked with eggs and milk into a muoß (Mus), a blanket term that covers just about any thick, spoonable food. An intermediate step in which the scrambled egg is wrapped in the fritter dough may have been left out – such preparations were common – or not. It is perfectly possible to mix cooked egg and chopped crisp fritters in one dish.

Fritters before cooking (these are with cheese)

The second and third entries are basically the same recipe. Strauben are long fritters of dough, often leavened and enriched with all kinds of ingredients, though in this case a plain leavened dough is most likely. The result would be something like a bread pudding, though richer and with more complex Maillard flavours. It is reminiscent of similar recipes in the Inntalkochbuch, where the fritter is boiled in wine, the earlier pancakes in pepper sauce, and of course Kol Ris going back to the Guoter Spise tradition.

Kol Ris

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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