Today, another recipe from the collection of Philippine Welser:
165 If you want to make a Bohemian pea Mus
Take shelled peas and good meat broth and put both into a pot. Close it well with a cloth so the steam stays in it and thus let it steam (dampfen) until they turn soft. Then grind them well in a grinding mill (reybstain) until they are neat and smooth. Then pass them through a colander or sieve. Take it and prepare it with good meat broth, but do not make it too thin because it becomes thinner as it boils. Boil it well, and then take fresh bacon and boil that. When it is boiled, cut it into small cubes, but do not cut it through (schneyt in nit nach) so it all stays together. Lay it in hot fat and turn it over rightaway, and take it out quickly. Then lay it in the middle of the bowl in which you serve the peas.
There are several recipes for mashed peas identified as Bohemian. A recipe in the Buoch von guoter Spise (not involving actual peas) is identified as both Bohemian and infidel peas. It is not clear what, if anything, made these dishes specifically Bohemian, but it may have been the very fine consistency of the mash.
In this recipe, the peas are ground in a mill and then diluted with meat broth, which would have consisted a smooth and almost liquid dish. This is nonetheless not really very exciting. The interesting part of this recipe is the trimmings: a chequerboard piece of bacon. A solid piece most likely of pork belly, parboiled, cut in a chequerboard pattern, and quickly flash-fried to crisp the outside must have been visually arresting at the centre of a bowl of mashed peas. I don’t know whether it can be made tender enough to detach individual squares and eat them, but it would be a very interesting and fun effect.
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).