How to Make a Beef Roast

A short recipe from Philippine Welser’s collection that describes how to roast beef:

225 To make a loin roast (lem brotten)

Take one and remove the veins (eder jn wol). Take a mallet (schla kolben) and beat it very well, then marinate it in wine and add juniper berries and caraway (kunich). When you want to roast it, pass it through (i.e. wash it in) fresh water and roast it slowly.

There is nothing surprising or unusual about this recipe. This is how you roast beef. There was even a technical term for the low, slow cooking – kühl braten – so widespread that an Eulenspiegel tale (lxiiii in the 1515 Strasbourg edition) depends on wilfully misunderstanding it. What is unusual is that a recipe exists at all. Most recipe books assume people know how to spit-roast meat.

The technique is fairly straightforward. The Lendenbraten – a particularly coveted cut, roughly the short loin – is first carefully cleaned. The verb eder technically means removing veins, but here we can read it to include sinews. Next, the meat is thoroughly beaten and marinated in wine and spices. As an aside, kümich usually refers to caraway, but can also mean cumin, making the interpretation slightly iffy. Before roasting, the meat is washed, and though this is not described, it will likely have been larded or basted while cooking.

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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