Cream Soup

The recipe collection of Philippine Welser has a number of soup recipes. Since I am likely to be quite busy in the lead-up to Halloween, I will be posting them this week:

L0029211 A woman milking a cow, woodcut, 1547 Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org A woman milking a cow. Coloured Woodcut 1491 Ortus sanitatis Arnaldus de Villanova, Published: 1491 Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

218 Hereafter follow soups, and first, how to make cream soup

Take cream and boil it like a milk soup. Beat 3 or 4 egg yolks well, and when the soup is boiling and you are about to serve it, pour in the yolks. Let it boil no more, just stir it. Cut a semel loaf into cubes and fry it in fat. Serve the soup over that and salt it lightly.

This is a simple recipe, but soups are meant to be simple dishes. The basic principle is a hot liquid – often just broth from a cauldron used for most cooking – that is spooned over bread to soften it. Of course in the Welser household, even a simple dish is elevated by pricey ingredients and great care. This one uses cream instead of the plain milk that would be more common, is thickened with egg yolks, not whole eggs, and served over the finest white bread – semel – fried in fat rather than dry, hard bread. However, the basic principle is universal; This is how soup is made. It is very rich, but no doubt would be welcome after a day of travel on horseback or working in the garden. Sixteenth-century life was more strenuous than ours even for the wealthy.

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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