Yes, it is yet another pike recipe from Philippine Welser’s collection, but the technique is interestingly different.
185 A small pike roasted over coals (kol hechtlin)
Open up the pike in the back, spread it out and take out the innards except for the liver. Leave that lying on top. Salt and spice it well and lay it on a griddle (struck out: and drizzle) or into fat. If you lay it on a griddle, drizzle it with this sauce: Take hot fat and vinegar and spices, and lay a bundle of rosemary or of sage into it. Brush the fish with this often, that way it will be good. When you serve the fish, pour the remaining sauce over it and serve it hot.
This is an interesting approach to roasting fish, and brushing it with a mixture of vinegar and fat should keep it moist and tender. Using bundles of herbs to brush it will add to the falvour if the spicing is done carefully, as is most likely intended. I don’t think I can replicate this fuilly because all the fish I can buy are already opened along the belly, but the technique sounds like it should work on halved fish laid skin-down just as well as on spatchcocked ones.
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).