I am still pressed for time, so no big writeup today. But I found this in the Innsbruck MS and it ties right back into another rabbit hole I fell down a while ago:
42 If you would make a good dish, take the antler of a young deer and singe it clean. Boil it and pound it. Take the antler and wine and honey and gingerbread (lezelten) and boil it together. There shall only be the blood of the antler (used in the dish), and this is good.
I looked at similar recipes for cooking antler at the velvet stage in an earlier post, and this one really does not add anything. If anything, it is much simpler. Unlike the one from the Inntalkochbuch, the Innsbruck MS reduces the entire antler to mush whereas there, stripos of cartilage remain whole. Otherwise, they are clearly related:
<<37>> Von einem hirschen gehörn
For a deer’s antlers
At the time it is fuzzy and soft, take it and clean it thoroughly and singe it over a fire, then cut the upper part into slices, as many as you can get out of it. Take honey and boil it by the fire. Dry leczelten (a kind of gingerbread) by the fire. Take the bone (the hard part of the antler) and chop it, then grind it in a mortar. Then take the honey, wine, gingerbread, and the blood from the antler and pass it through a clean cloth. Boil the antler in this.
For more on the practicalities and symbolism of eating antler, see my earlier post. It is interesting how widespread this practice seems to have been. We find it from Königsberg all the way to the Austrian Alps.
The Innsbrucker Rezeptbuch is a manuscript recipe collection from a South German/Austrian context. It dates to the mid-fifteenth century and survives as part of a set of medical and culinary texts bound together. The editor Doris Aichholzer published it together with two related manuscripts and drew attention to the less elaborate, more practical recipes. The manuscript is of unknown provenance, but has been owned by the Habsburg emperors since at least the early sixteenth century. It is now held at the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. An edition, German translation and commentary can be found in Doris Aichholzer: Wildu machen ayn guet essen… Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher, Peter Lang Verlag Berne et al. 1999