No soup today, I had the chance to get into the longer recipes toward the end of Philippine Welser’s collection and this one looked interesting:
237 To make a white mus or blancmanger (Plamauschy)
First, rice is taken and washed and picked over cleanly. When it is washed and picked, it is put into a vessel, or you may put it on a board as well, and then set by the fire so it becomes quite dry. When it is dry, it is put into a mortar and pounded well, and then sifted through a sieve or cloth so it becomes like flour.
Second, the breast of a chicken or capon is cut out. It is set in a cauldron ore pot and let boil until it is boiled fully, but not too much. Then the breast is taken out and allowed to cool. Then it is beaten (read klopfen for topfen) small (so it becomes soft) like silk. Then it is wrapped in a napkin so it does not become pointy (spissig) or hard.
Third, the flour of rice is taken, a handful, and put into a clean, tinned vessel. It doesn’t matter if it is a deep, wide pot (Peckhen) or a pan. Good cream is poured on, or the flour stirred into it beforehand, so it becomes thin. Then the same is set over glowing coals in the tinned vessel and stirred quite well so it does not burn or turn lumpy (knollet), It quickly turns nicely thick. Then, you must again pour in cream and stir it again and when it boils up, put in the plucked breast and pour in a little rosewater. When it turns nicely thick again, add nicely grated sugar so it turns properly sweet. You must also salt it lightly and add a piece of fresh butter the size of an egg. It is then taken off the fire and served.
When you put the sugar into the dish (Mueß), it must be quite thick beforehand because it becomes thin from that point onwards. It also must not boil after the sugar goes in, otherwise it will soon turn black.
238 To make it with fish
Take a pike and let it boil until it is done like you would otherwise do with a pike. Then take out the pike, pick out the bones, and chop it, and then do with it as is written of the chicken breast. Or take a piece of stockfish and boil it well and pick out the white (parts) and put those into the dish if it is made as it is described in the other (recipe).
Towards the end of Philippine Welser’s collection, we encounter a series of recipes that are written in a different format and provide much more detail than the majority. Their style reminds me of Anna Wecker. This is one such example, a fairly straighforward recipe for medieval-style blancmanger. It is fairly standard, except in insisting to use cream in place of almond milk, but the level of detail is very unusual. We are even reminded to wrap the pounded meat in a napkin and treated to observations about how the sauce base behaves during the cooking process. Quantities are not given systematically, but often enough to make this reconstructible with some confidence. It’s still going to be quite dull, though, but with blancmanger, that is the goal.
Incidentally, the spelling of the name suggests that wherever the cook who committed it to paper had learned their trade, it wasn’t France.
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).