After devoting so much time to my ahistorical hamburger soteltie, I am finally back to properly old stuff. A raisin tart recipe:
38 If you want to make a raisin tart
Take a bottom like for another tart and strew it with raisins, on the bare crust and so that it is well covered in one place as much as in another. Then sprinkle it with cinnamon and sugar and make a thin, cut cover to go on top. When it is half baked, pour in a malfasyer (Malvasier, malmsey wine) or a ronfal (Reinfal, Ribolla gialla wine) into it and brush it with egg, and let it bake fully.
I must admit I am not sure how this one works in a purely technical sense. Dry raisins baked in a pastry crust, even with the addition of wine halfway through, sound unappealing to me. I would expect some kind of softening, maybe a parboiling, like we see in the recipe for fig tart. Maybe we are talking about softer raisins than we tend to get today – I will have to try the recipe with some Persian or Uzbek ones. Still, I do not hold out high hopes for this one.
Philippine Welser (1527-1580), a member of the prominent and extremely wealthy Welser banking family of Augsburg, was a famous beauty of her day. Scandalously, she secretly married Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg in 1557 and followed him first to Bohemia, then to Tyrol. A number of manuscripts are associated with her, most famously a collection of medicinal recipes and one of mainly culinary ones. The recipe collection, addressed as her Kochbuch in German, was most likely produced around 1550 when she was a young woman in Augsburg. It may have been made at the request of her mother and was written by an experienced scribe. Some later additions, though, are in Philippine Welser’s own hand, suggesting she used it.
The manuscript is currently held in the library of Ambras Castle near Innsbruck as PA 1473 and was edited by Gerold Hayer as Das Kochbuch der Philippine Welser (Innsbruck 1983).