Stuffed Cabbage Head

Just a brief recipe from Philippine Welser’s collection today:

233 If you want to make white filled cabbage (gefiltz kraut)

Take the cabbage and hollow it out so it becomes entirely empty. Make a filling of veal, good fat from the kidneys, and all manner of good herbs. Break eggs into it and spice the filling with saffron, pepper, and mace. Fill the cabbage with that, and when it is filled, let it boil in water. Take it out and put it into good meat broth and let it boil in that. Add a little vinegar to it and serve it warm.

A filled cabbage head is found in a number of recipe sources from the sixteenth century, and I redacted a different one in my Landsknecht Cookbook. The recipes differ enough to consider them separate, but the principle is the same: Adding a protein-rich filling to a head of cabbage. Here, as in most cases, it is meat, though there are instances where eggs are used. Johannes Coler calls that a Gartenhun (garden chicken).

Obviously, I have tried various iterations of this and I found them all good, hearty wintertime dishes. Which causes me to pause at the mention of veal and good herbs, both quite definitely not wintertime ingredients. I do not think I would relish this version in May or June, but tastes were more robust in a more physically active world. Certainly, the combination in itself – minced meat, kidney fat, eggs, herbs, pepper, mace, and a rich broth with a dash of vinegar – is attractive and calls for potatoes which, of course, also would not have been available in the 1550s. Dare to serve it with pasta or dark, crusty sourdough bread. It is worth it.

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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