Apologies for the growing silences, it has been a few long days. Here are another couple of similar recipes from the Mondseer Kochbuch, these are for boiling pancakes in milk:
59 To prepare a spoon dish (muos) of roast pears
Prepare thin pancakes (fladen) of eggs. Take the sheets and cut them small, and throw them into sweet milk. Take semeln bread and cut it into that in cubes, and mix it with egg yolks. Boil it well and put fat on it, and do not oversalt it.
60 To prepare a spoon dish (muos) of eggs
Take eggs and beat them thin with semel flour and fry thin pancakes (kuochen), thrown into milk and heated well until it boils. Mix it again with egg yolks and add a little fat, and serve it.
61 To prepare a spoon dish (muoß) of (pan?)cakes (kuochen)
Take (pan?)cakes (kuochen) prepared from eggs and cut them into cubes, and put them into milk. Take apples and cut them into it in cubes. Stir it well with egg yolks and boil it well and serve it.
Again, these recipes are almost identical to a set in the Buoch von Guoter Spise (#65-67). Here, the dish is given a distinctive name: col ris. We find similar preparations under the name kolreys in Cod Pal Germ 551. Here, it is clear the name relates to rice, but of course the dish does not include or mimic rice, so the origin of this may be a folk etymology we can no longer reconstruct. Meanwhile, this recipe collection classes the recipes as spoon dishes (muos) of pears (which does not include any), eggs, and apples. The tradition of naming recipes almost randomly continues to apply.
The preparation itself is easy and tasty, a good low-threshold dish for newcomers to medieval cuisine. Pancakes as well as fritters were also cooked in savoury sauces, but sweet tends to work better in modern culinary grammar. I have yet to try the version with apples, but I am sure it will work well.
The Mondseer Kochbuch is a recipe collection bound with a set of manuscript texts on grammar, dietetics, wine, and theology. There is a note inside that part of the book was completed in 1439 and, in a different place, that it was gifted to the abbot of the monastery at Mondsee (Austria). It is not certain whether the manuscript already included the recipes at that point, but it is likely. The entire codex was bound in leather in the second half of the fifteenth century, so at this point the recipe collection must have been part of it. The book was held at the monastery until it passed into the Vienna court library, now the national library of Austria, where it is now Cod 4995.
The collection shows clear parallels with the Buoch von guoter Spise. Many of its recipes are complex and call for expensive ingredients, and some give unusually precise quantities and measurements. It is edited in Doris Aichholzer’s “Wildu machen ayn guet essen…” Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Edition, Übersetzung, Quellenkommentar, Peter Lang, Berne et al. 1999