The collection of Philippine Welser continues with more very traditional recipes, including one for faux morels. Here, they are made with lung:
140 To make morels (merchenn) from a calf’s lung
Take a calf’s lung and boil it and chop it with an egg and grated bread, good spices, and salt. Prepare a piece of wood that is pointed at both ends and as large as a morel. Spread the filling all around the piece of wood and make it the same thickness all around so that it is thickest in the middle. Fry it in fat with the wood, cut it apart around the middle and pull it off the wood. This way, you have two (faux morel heads). You can also prepare a filling of eggs and fill these morels with it.
Morels were popular mushrooms. In many recipe books, they are the only kind of mushroom featured or the only one named. Typically, morel heads were cooked with a filling of eggs, often roasted on a skewer, though they could also just be battered and fried. There are also recipes for making fake versions, either from an egg batter or from chicken meat paste. This recipe uses a paste of cooked lung, egg, and grated bread instead. Shaping it into morels around a piece of wood and deep-frying them is an interesting technique and something I think I would like to try out one day. I wonder how easily they actually come off.
This recipe ends with the production of the faux morel heads. A serving suggestion is found in the Mondseer Kochbuch:
20 How to prepare a good fried muos
Take (meat) of the breast of a chicken and chop it small, and pound it in a mortar. Add a little flour or bread, pepper and ginger. Salt it in measure, according to the quantity. Stir this well together Cut to small wooden pieces (klupplein) the length of a finger, (shaped) like a spear shaft (eln schafft – probably read “rounded like a spear shaft”). Shape smooth ‘beaks’ (snebel) in your hands and mould them around the shaft (spis) like a morel. Pull them on the outside so they become uneven (kraus). Lay them in a pan and let them boil with the sticks (stecklen). As you take out one, put in another, and prepare as many as you wish. When they are done, take them out. Stir a chopped muos with butter and fill the morels with it. Stick them on a skewer for a while. Heat them and drizzle them with butter and serve them. You can also prepare morels of pike or of salmon or whatever you wish this way.
I can imagine such meaty (or fishy) morel heads, filled with a rich scrambled egg stuffing, lined up on a skewer, buttery and hot. It sounds like a perfect cold-weather treat, and indeed the faux recipe from Meister Eberhard is associated specifically with Christmas. By the time of Philippine Welser, this was most likely already a bit oldfashioned, but clearly still popular.
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)