Roast Udder in Sauce from Cgm 384 II

After several recipes for roasted hard egg custard referring to its similarity to udder, here is an actual udder recipe:

L0029211 A woman milking a cow, woodcut, 1547 Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org A woman milking a cow. Coloured Woodcut 1491 Ortus sanitatis Arnaldus de Villanova, Published: 1491 Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

52 A ladies’ dish (frowen essen)

If you would make a ladies’ dish, boil the udder of a cow so that it does not have too much broth, and then take half the aforesaid broth. And take two slices of white bread and toast them on a griddle, and brush them with three egg yolks (and pass them) through a cloth with the broth. Cut the udder into slices and roast (röst) it on a griddle, and then cut it small into the broth in which it has been boiled. Put it into a small serving dish (schuisselin) and add ginger and saffron, and warm it until it achieves the proper thinness, then it is proper.

The recipe itself is not terribly original. Parboiling meat, then roasting it, and then serving it in a bread-thickened spicy sauce is standard for the German corpus of recipes. Brushing bread with egg yolk before soaking and mashing it is interesting, but I am not sure what, if anything, it does. What set this apart most likely would have been the consistency of the meat. I have never had udder, but I am told it is soft, almost gelatinous, with a very mild flavour. If I can find some, I will certainly try this out.

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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