Pike with Parsley Roots

I apologise for the long time I left you without recipes, I was quite miserably sick for the last week or so. Today, I feel well enough to give you another recipe from Philippine Welser’s collection:

174 If you want to cook pike in a sauce with parsley

Take a handful of parsley roots and the herb, but if you have enough of the roots, you need not use the herb. Boil that in a pot with water or wine, about 3 seytla (a Seidel is somewhere between 0.35 and 0.7 litres), depending on how large the pike is. Then take the pike and scale it well, cut it into pieces, wash them well, put them in a bowl and salt them. Let them lie in it (the salt) for half an hour, then take the broth with roots and all and pour it on the fish. Boil it well, and when it is half boiled, try it for salt. It must be salted lightly (len gesaltzen). Then take a good pierce of butter and cut it into (the cooking liquid), and add as much pepper as for a dish of crawfish, but do not make it too hot (resch). Put it back over the fire and let it boil fully. See that there is not much broth in it. Then toast slices of semel bread and serve the fish on them. If you have too much broth, do not pour it all over the dish, only enough to moisten the bread slices.

This is not a very exciting recipe, but potentially quite an attractive one. Of course it is a high-status dish – fresh fish were not cheap, and pike among the most costly. But it is neither overly complex nor overloaded with luxury ingredients.

In principle, it is a simple dish. A broth is prepared with parsley roots, lightly salted fish cooked in it and further seasoned with pepper and enriched with butter. The fish, once fully cooked, is served on toasted slices of fine, white bread with its cooking liquid. It is entirely credible that there are steps left out that would be obvious to the writer; perhaps the sauce was slightly thickened or other spices added to the parsley at the beginning. But the basic approach is clear.

What is striking about it and sets it apart from much of the other material in this collection is the care with which the unknown author approaches the dish: Care not to oversalt, not to overcook the fish, not to use too much pepper, not to end up with too much liquid. It is, in a way, a very modern instruction and suggests that these things, though often unmentioned, were very much part of a culinary education and familiar to a competent cook.

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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