It’s too hot to concentrate properly on blessings today, so just a short recipe from Philippine Welser: A basic white Mus served chilled.
154 If you want to make a Mus for one table
Take the whites of 12 eggs and beat them well (so they become) like water. Then beat in cream and boil it together for twice as long as hard-boiled eggs take. Also boil a little sugar with it, and when it has boiled, pass it through a sieve so it becomes nicely smooth. Put it into a bowl and set it in a cellar on the ground until you want to eat it.
This is quite similar to the cold mus we had a week ago – so similar one wonders why it merited a separate recipe, really. It is interesting for mainly two reasons. First, the step of passing the finished dish through a sieve to make it smooth. This makes sense, especially if the egg curdled during cooking as it easily will. I would not be surprised if this was a good deal more commonly done with egg-based Mus dishes than the recipes record. The second is that we are getting a hint at portion sizes. Twelve egg whites make a dish for ‘one table’, that is, the entire company dining. We do not know how large that group was, but all illustrations and descriptions suggest a ‘table’ was a practical size for keeping company, anything between six and ten people. This is a dainty dish, not something to gorge on.
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).