I’ve been kept busy by life, but it’s all good. Today, there is time for a short recipe from the collection of Philippine Welser:
155 If you want to make sugar Mus
Take rice flour and milk and put that into a brass pan. Stir the flour and milk together. Take the meat of capons and also grind it into that, and sugar and rosewater. You can serve it cold or warm.
156 To make a sugar Mus
Prepare an egg milk (hard custard) and soak two slices of semel bread in creamy milk. When it has softened, pass it through a cloth together with the eggs and add half a pound of sugar. Make it with cream so it has its proper thickness and set it in the cellar. That is well done.
The first recipe is interesting not so much because of what it tells us as because of what it lascks. Again, we have a recipe for what is clearly blancmanger that is called something else. I wrote about this earlier when discussing the parallel recipes from the Buoch von guoter Spise that uses the term blamensir and the Mondseer Kochbuch, which calls it pulverisei. A similar issue showed up with a recipe of uncertain reading in the same sources. Again, here is a German language source, this one over 100 years later, that records a blancmanger but calls it something very different. The name had not dropped from use – Marx Rumpolt uses the Italian Manscho Blancko in 1581 – but here, it is clearly not familiar. What is more, the name of ‘sugar mus’ the dish is given is quite generic, and a folloowing recipe names a completely different preparation the same. I begin to get the feeling that neither names nor specific preparations were very soundly established in German kitchens. As with the infamous heidnische Kuchen, we are walking on shifting sands here.
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).