Another recipe from Philippine Welser’s collection, straightforward, delicious, intensely meaty, and immediately familiar:
226 If you want to make a filled breast
Take the breast of a calf and grasp under it (i.e. make a hollow). Take veal and chop it, and with it fat of an ox and all manner of good herbs. When they are chopped, take 4 eggs and mace and a little saffron. Stir it together and put it into the breast. Lay it into good meat broth and let it boil in a tart pan or in an earthenware pan. You have them (tart pans) made with lids, they are better than earthenware ones. Therefore, this is a good dish.
Not every historical recipe needs to be complex, odd, or confusing. This one is completely in line with every modern expectation and will produce an absolutely delicious result to feed a small crowd.You take a breast of veal, fill it with a forcemeat of veal, fat, herbs, and eggs seasoned with salt and mace and coloured with saffron. The latter is perhaps the one thing we would omit. The meat is then slowly cooked in meat broth with heat from above and below. If this is done right, not too fast, and not using too much liquid, the resulting meat is tender and intensely flavourful. If you are not feeding a small crowd, you can also use the same filling to roll up in veal cutlets to make Rouladen.
Tart pans, originally designed as miniature baking ovens, were used for all kinds of culinary applications. They are in every respect the ancestor of the Dutch oven, though they were typically made of pottery or sheet metal, not cast iron. Their lids were shaped to hold coals to provide top heat, and a good cook could regulate this very precisely. Very few kitchens had ovens in the sixteenth century, and even where one was at hand, heating it was a lenghthy and expensive undertaking. Any small baked goods such as cakes, tarts, biscuits, or pastries would be made in a tart pan unless the oven was in use anyway.
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).