Meat in Aspic from Cgm 384 II

Now here is a recipe that is clearly an aspic and neither called a galray nor a sultz.

50 A dish (essen)

If you would prepare a courtly dish for which one uses all manner of meat, be it wild or domesticated, boiled or roasted, take four calves’ feet or more and boil them until the bone falls off them in a broth. Then take as much vinegar as there is of the broth and pound the feet in a mortar once the bones separate from the meat. Then pass it through a cloth all together while it is hot, and then add a good spoonful of honey and also other spices. Then pour it over roasted meat, but if it is boiled, fry/roast (röst) it and then pour it over. Thus it will gel (gestaut es).

It is interesting that this recipe describes the process in quite some detail, but does not offer a name for the preparation. It’s a ‘dish’ (essen refers to a dish or course, not to food in general). It is also still quite different from later aspics, with the broth deliberately fortified with mashed meat rather than clarified. This is not likely to be transparent, but it will very probably be quite meaty. It probably has more in common with Ashkenasi petcha or jellied meat than with modern German Aspik.

Modern Swedish jellied veal, courtesy of wikimedia commons

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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