No, I have no idea what that actually means, either. A recipe from the Mondseer Kochbuch:
146 To prepare Kugel pip
Item peel sour apples, slice them thin, and cook them in fat until they are soft. Pour off the fat and break apart the apples thoroughly. Mix in ginger, eggs, and spices (kraut) and fry it in fat. Prepare a sheet of eggs, pour the apples out on the sheet fold it over the apples. Let it fry in a small amount of fat (in klainem smaltz) until it is red at the bottom. Brush it with (fat and serve it in?) a bowl and serve it. This is called a kugelpipp. You can also fill krapfen with the same apples.
The dish looks fairly straightforward, a folded pancake with an apple filling that is fried. We’ve seen similar things elsewhere. Unlike with other examples, the apple filling is not sweet. Apples fried in fat and spiced will only be as sweet as the original fruit, and many old varieties are quite tart. But again, savoury apple dishes were not uncommon. The idea that fruit equals sweet is a modern affectation.
We are left guessing about a few points. The “sheet of eggs” could be an egg-based pancake batter or just eggs. Both interpretations are plausible. We also do not know how it was folded. Simply folding it in half would work if the filling is sticky enough, though I like to imagine something like a galette Bretonne. But on the whole, it is fairly straightforward. I imagine it will be quite rich.
The name, though, is quite puzzling. Aichholzer renders it as Gugelhupf in her modern German translation, but it is hard to see the justification for that. Gugelhupf is a cake and always seems to have been one. Neither is it easy to see where the connection with either a Gugel (a hood) or a Kugel (a sphere) would come in. I cannot explain it. Notably, though, the parallel recipe in Meister Hans (mistakenly combining two into one) uses an entirely different, but equally confusing designation: Gabel supp (fork soup)
Recipe #85 Ain gabel supp mach
Prepare a fork soup
Item peel sour apples, slice them thinly, boil them in water and pour off the water. Add eggs, flour, and seasonings (gekräutt) to the apples and prepare a dough. Make fritters (krapffn). Peel sour apples and slice them thinly. (Cook them) in fat, let the apples fall apart entirely, add ginger and fry it in fat. Prepare a pancake (plat) of eggs and pour the apples on it while it is in the pan. Let it fry in a little fat until it turns red (browns) at the bottom. Brush it with eggs. Set it in a bowl and serve it. This is called a fork soup (gabel suppn) and you can also fill fritters (krappfen) with the same apples.
I guess it is one more illustration of the general aversion to nondescriptive names German recipe writers seem to have had.
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