Roasting a Fish

These are remarkably detailed and enticing instructions for roasting fish from Philippine Welser’s recipe book:

204 If you wish to prepare a good roast fish

Take the fish, open it, and salt it. Then pour good vinegar on it and let it lie in it for half an hour. Then take marjoram, rosemary, sage, or what good herbs you have together and also take three walnuts and a little juniper berries. Pound all of this together in a mortar. Also take pepper and ginger powder and stir it all together, and fill the fish with it. Then stick it on a wooden spit and lay it on a griddle. Let it roast at a low temperature (kiel bachen). Meanwhile, put vinegar in a small pan, add oil or butter, a little juniper berries, pepper, and saffron, let it boil together, and brush the fish with this as often as you turn it over until it is roasted.

I am quite fond of this recipe and actually redacted a modernised version of it for my Landsknecht Cookbook. It is the best acount I know of how skilled cooks would prepare roast fish, which would most likely simply be recorded as such in any account, but actually take a fair bit of skill and ingredients.

The filling of ground walnuts and spices is reminiscent of the roast eel in the same collection as well as earlier accounts of walnut-based stuffings for roast meat while the basting recalls the roast pike also found in the same source. The combination makes the recipe distinct, though. A savoury and very rich filling of herbs, spices, and walnuts and a generous baste of vinegar and butter on a slowly roasted fish is certainly promising. I have tried this with trout and feel sure it would be even better with larger freshwater fish.

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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