Just a quick recipe today; My son went to bed late and I long to join a most excellent conversation later. From the collection of Philippine Welser:
141 If you want to cook a chicken or other meat in a white sauce
Take a chicken and cut it into 4 parts, put it into a pot, and add good meat broth. Also add 2 parsley roots, a little mace, also a little ginger powder, and an onion. Set it by the fire and skim it cleanly. When it has boiled down to about half, take the crumb of a semel loaf you have previously soaked in fresh water and add as much of it as you want to thicken the broth by. You can also add a little wine, that way the broth will be stronger and better. When you wish to serve it, add fresh butter to it and only let it stand for an hour, and serve it.
It may not be exactly Hühnerfrikassee, but still … close. This is a remarkably modern and appealing recipe, quite plain, but refined. Parsley root goes well with mace and ginger (and salt, it probably does not need saying), and cooking the chicken in meat broth prevents the flavour from leaching from the meat. Using fine bread – semel was the finest grade of wheat bread commercially produced – as a thickening agent is common in the medieval corpus, and it works well if you stir and mash it conscientiously or use a stick blender.The original sauce would most likely have been passed though a sieve though the instructions are not recorded.
Note that if you are using modern breeds of meat chicken, you can considerably reduce the cooking time and omit the butter. A soup chicken would be the best bird if you are looking to approximate the original.
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).