Ragged Mus, a Milk Pasta

Today, it’s another short recipe from the collection of Philippine Welser, but a very interesting one:

162 If you want to make a ragged Mus (hader muß)

Take an egg or 2 for 8 portions (barschonen). Prepare a fine dough like a (omission), roll it out make it into nicely thick sheets. Then sprinkle flour on it and coat it well. Fold it six or eight times, depending on how large it is, and cut off thin strips (lit. small feathers, federla). Fry the same crispy and when they are fried, put it into boiling milk at once. Stir it so it does not burn and add sugar. You can also scrape nutmeg into it.

This recipe straddles the boundary between two kinds of dishes we find elsewhere: the genre of milk pasta often called a ‘shaggy’ Mus, and that of fritters cooked in sauce. These dishes seem to have been quite popular, and it is easy to see why.

The name is imaginative and evocative; hader are rags, torn pieces of cloth, and the unevenly ragged, stringy appearance that this dish would have matches this very well. A similar dish found in several fifteenth-century sources was known as zottet mus, a shaggy dish. The version from the Innsbruck MS reads:

25 If you would make a shaggy Mus (zottet müez), make sheets of dough that are thin, and then cut them so they are as small as small rings. Fry them in fat so they are not very brown and then cook them in good milk. Serve it and add fat etc.

The version from the Dorotheenkloster MS, which I adapted for a redaction in my Landsknecht Cookbook, omits the frying:

Take good white flour and make a dough with egg white. Have boiling milk ready in a pan and pull the dough into little pieces, throwing them in as the milk boils. It is to be salted beforehand. Also add fat. See that it stays worm-shaped. Do not oversalt it. Serve it.

The shape seems to have been very variable, with the pasta being chopped in Balthasar Staindl and cut in the Oeconomia. What was aimed for was an uneven appearance, a kind of heap or tangle of the pasta in the milk. I assume that the aim was to cook the noodles fairly dry, mushy, but cohesive, with most of the liquid absorbed. That is how I like it best, at least.

All of these ‘shaggy’ dishes make excellent breakfast food by modern sensibilities, though there is no reason not to serve them as a side or dessert with a hearty winter meal. The tradition had a long life, and Milchnudeln survive as a childhood treat especially in the east of Germany. It is intuitive to us to serve them sweetened, but do try them plain, with salt. You will be surprised at how well that works.

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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