Another Roasted Milk Recipe

This one is from Cgm 384 II

46 Roasted milk

Roasted (Brauten) milk: Take eggs and milk in equal amounts, beat it together and add salt and saffron, as much as it needs. Put it into a pot and hang the pot in a cauldron full of water so that the water cannot get into the pot, and let it boil well until it solidifies (gestekin), and serve it as a spoon dish of eggs (ayer muoß). But if you wish to roast it, lay (zuh) it on a clean cloth until it is drained well. Then also place the cloth over it and weigh it down with a board with stones on it. Thus it becomes as solid (keck) as a cheese. Then slice it with a thread (czerschnid es mit ainem faden) and lay it on a griddle like an udder, and strew it with spices or with sugar. You may also pour hot fat on it, and you may also serve it in a pepper sauce or in a bruoge (a type of sauce) if you wish.

Roast milk recipes, usually actually egg custards, are quite common in the German corpus. This one has a close parallel in the Rheinfränkisches Kochbuch (again), but there are similar recipes elsewhere. The comparison between the first two gives us a few more details and, to my mind most interestingly, evidence that soft dishes were sliced using thread. Given the thickness of most surviving knife blades, that probably worked better and would also be applicable to many fake cheese dishes, either custards or jellies. Other than that, there is very little new here.

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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