I know I am late in posting more of the Benedictiones, but there is too much going on at the moment. Here is a brief and simple recipe from Philippine Welser’s collection, though:
123 If you want to fry krapfen of cheese
Take 2 eggs so you make 15 krapfen of this. Take a little milk and soak saffron in it, and then mix the milk and eggs together and make a dough of this. Roll it out thin for krapfen and do not salt it. Then take eight eggs and salt them slightly, and grate cheese and bread into it, about two parts cheese to one part bread, and stir that into the 8 eggs. Put it into the rolled-out dough and cut them apart with a sharp iron. Fry it in fat and always stir them around so they do not burn, and fry them slowly.
There is not a lot of novel information here, but the quantities give us a guide to the size of a krapfen. These were typically fried dumplings (though we have recipes where they are baked or boiled) that featured a filling wrapped in dough (though some recipes called krapfen do not have a wrapping). With eight eggs used to make the filling for fifteen krapfen, these are quite substantial pieces, not so much ravioli-sized as almost hand pies. Frying something that big would require attention to prevent it from burning on the outside while the center was still raw.
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).