Another recipe from the experiments we had last Friday. This one is definitely in no way peasant food, but it was occasioned by availability. I had the giblets and neck of a duck in the freezer, and we were making yeast dough anyway. Thus, the 1490 Kuchenmaistrey:
3. xiiii. Item you may fill krapfen with the filling you fill into inverted eggs (gestürtzt ayer) or into apples or chickens. But if you wish to fill them with meat, all manner of meat or fish filling must be well and properly boiled beforehand. Be it gamebirds (walt vogel) or spleen, lungs, liver, or such small things, add other ingredients wisely and chop it and pound it well in a mortar with whatever you add; of eggs, of pears, or of parsley and other fragrant herbs of which you only take a small amount each for the filling, solely for the savour (des geschmacks wegen). Or you may be counseled (to make) a smal filling (? od[e] man mag sein geraten zu kleiner füll). For without that, if you make fillings for roast chickens or pigeons whatever meat there be, you must have the good herbs with that and juniper berries pounded with caraway and fennelseed and mixed with the filling. Knead it well with raw eggs, fill it in and fry it well.
This really isn’t a recipe so much as a list of notes on a type of dish, but it gives us an idea of how to go about it: Basically anything can go into meat krapfen, which are a kind of dough pockets enclosing any kind of filling. However, meat must be cooked beforehand, bound with raw egg, and seasoned strongly. All of that makes sense. Raw meat in a dough wrapping will not cook fully before the outside starts to burn, so doing that would be a bad idea. The filling will tend to fall apart when you bite into it, so binding it is advisable. And a leavened dough wrapper requires a strongly flavoured filling.
This is really not much of an experiment, more a matter of getting practice. After all, there isn’t much that can go wrong here. I boiled the duck pieces in lightly salted water, chopped the meat, mixed it with egg and spices, wrapped it in leavened dough and fried it. Unless you badly misjudge the temperature or cooking time, you are guaranteed to end up with an easy, universally palatable dish. We eventually baked some of them to save on cooking time, but they are really much better from the pan.