Fried Apple Slices

Two very similar recipes from Philippine Welser’s collection:

133 To fry risen (hoch) apples and sage leaves

Take good flour and put in cold water, stir it around a lot and then beat it well. Then beat eggs into it until it becomes slightly thinner than a streybla batter. The apples should be large and sliced as thinly as possible into rounds (jn die rundenn). They must fry quickly and always have hot fat poured on them if they are to rise.

134 More about frying risen apples

Take water so hot that you can barely suffer it on your finger and start the batter with it as though it was a schniten batter. Lay the eggs into hot water and prepare the batter no thinner than a children’s porridge is. Also heat wine and add it to this. Slice the apples as thinly as possible and fry them quickly, that way they will rise.

This is a party treat people still make in Germany, and with the right kind of apple, aromatic and intensely flavourful, it is wonderful to eat on a crisp early winter day. Again, the recipe is not complex or terribly unusual. We have a good deal of records for things being dipped in batter and fried. The mention of sage leaves in the title of recipe #133 (they do not show up again) recalls the more challenging filled fritters of the Kuchenmaistrey, but this seems to be a plain version.

The point to the recipe appears to be a specific kind of batter. In the first instance, it is made with cold water, in the second case with hot, and in both cases eggs are added. I intend to play around with these variations at some point this winter, to see what difference it might make.

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).

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