I have finally reached what is probably the most famous recipe in Philippine Welser’s collection:
227 To make cabbage sprouts (kepflettln kel)
Parboil (brys) the cabbage in a pot or a pan. Add a little lye to the water, that way it turns nicely green. Pour it onto a colander and drain the water off it, but do not press it out or you will crush the little heads (kepfla). Then you put the little heads into a pot and add good meat broth that is fat. Pour on good hot fat (schmaltz) and add pepper. Set it on the coals and let it steam, and when you serve it, put fat (faystin) on it.
This is frequently cited as the first evidence of what we call Brussels sprouts today, small, compact sprouts of the cabbage plant. The manner of preparing them has not changed very much, though we may prefer them with a little less added fat these days, and the resulting dish is quite attractive. I have made it with modern sprouts for feasts and it was always popular.
By way of modernisation, I recommend using baking soda in place of lye. Adding a little to the initial cooking water helps preserve the colour. The sprouts must be handled with care as they are drained and transferred to a second pot – a slotted spoon works well – and they should be cooked gently, with a small amount of broth. Adding hot fat is not necessary in my opinion, but it adds a measure of maillard flavours in contact with the dry sprouts, so if you are aiming for authenticity, you should drizzle on some directly from a hot pan. Cooking the sprouts in a closed pot – the definition of steaming (dempfen) in the sixteenth century – infuses them with the flavbour of the broth and pepper. A little butter melted over them as they are served makes a good addition, though if you already added extra fat during cooking, it may be too much of a good thing. The original intent, going by the word faystin, may be fat rendered in cooking meat that would be collected for use in a well-run kitchen.
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).