Carp in a yellow bread sauce

More from Philippine Welser’s recipe collection:

Carp from the Felix Platter collection, courtesy of wikimedia commons

195 Carp in a yellow sauce

Take a carp, scale it, and make pieces of it. Boil them in good white wine, and when it is skimmed and properly salted, crumble in rye bread (the crumbs being) the size of rice. Colour it yellow, add sugar, ginger, and pepper until you think it is right, and let it boil well. When you serve it, sprinkle (or stick?) it with cinnamon and cloves.

As a recipe, this is not unusual. Fish cooked in wine and served in a bread-thickened sauce with plenty of expensive spices is fairly standard. One interesting point, though, is the observation that the bread is to be crumbled “the size of rice”. I assume that describes the individual crumbs being the size of rice grains (most likely round grain rice, at that time), not resemble rice flour or cooked rice. That suggests that, though made of rye, the bread used is neither coarse nor heavy.

An open question is how to read the instruction to se (literally to sow, usually meaning to sprinkle) cloves and cinnamon on the fish before serving. I could imagine this meaning a sprinkling of powdered spices, but both cloves and cinnamon are well suited to sticking them into the pieces. That may actually be what is meant 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).

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