Two Sausage Recipes from Cgm 384 II

Aside from the titles, they are pretty much exactly recipes #27 and #32:

55 To fill a gut

Take a hindmost gut (hindern darm i.e. a rectum) and fill it thus: Chop a lung and bacon and spices and fill it. Also take a brain, eggs, and bread, and season it and fill it. You may also mix in a little honey if you wish.

56 klob wurst

Take the liver of a goat (aines bockes leber) and chop it small while it is raw, together with eggs and white bread. Season it and colour it and wrap it in a caul, and fry it (röschs oder brauts). You may also chop bacon and parsley into it.

These are not unusual recipes – in fact, #55 has many parallels, one of which I have tried out myself. What is interesting is that they occur in the same recipe collection – and in the part by the same hand – in a wording so close that, if I had found them in different manuscripts, I would have concluded they were part of a transmission chain. That raises questions about the way these collections were produced initially; Clearly, this is not a systematic one-time project. Given that, I may have been too asty in my conclusion that Meister Hans, the putative author of a large recipe collection, is a fiction.

Another interesting observation is that while the recipes match very closely, the titles do not. There are several instances in the German corpus where a named dish familiar from other sources shows up wirth a wildly different recipe somewhere. I suppose this may mean the German tradition did not put as much emphasis on names. Many are descriptive and repetitive, and those that exist can sometimes be filled with very different meanings over time. Recipe #56 may be such a case: We do not know a lot about the klobwurst referenced in various medieval and early modern sources, but it gets its name from the klobdarm, the rectum, and presumably was cased in one. That is the case for recipe #55, but conspicuously not #56, which, like many liver sausages, is cased in a caul.

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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