No, not shoes. The flatfish.
I apologise for the long hiatus, I was away from home for a long weekend and had the opportunity to cook with a good friend before – the report will follow. But today, we retuirn to Philippine Welser’s recipe collection:
207 If you want to make dried flatfisch (bladeysla)
Take dried flatfish and wash them quite clean in hot water several times. The put them into a pot and add water, but I think meat broth would be better. Add good butter and let it boil. Season it with ginger. If you want, colour it yellow and set it on a small fire. Let it slowly fry (bregla) and serve it with the broth.
208 To make dried flatfish (bladeysla) in a sauce
Take dried flatfish and wash them clean with a small brush. Boil them in water fopr a good while, then take them off the fire and pull off the upper skin. Cut 4 pieces from each, or just 2. Pout a good amount of butter into the pan with them and let them slowly fry (bregla) together. Then pour in pea broth and let it boil well. When you serve it, pour hot butter over it and serve it on slices of white bread.
We know from other sources that dried flatfish – Platteisen – were not highly regarded, but widely eaten during Lent. Comparted to Rumpolt’s inventive treatment, the recipes in Philippine Welser’s collection are fairly basic and suggest this was not a much loved ingredient. The first is reminiscent of the way Meister Eberhard treats stockfish.
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).