Twice-Baked Gingerbread

I will have to reduce the frequency of my posting for the foreseeable future because there is a book manuscript that finally needs finishing and I have far too little time in my workdays now. I will continue working on finishing the Philippine Welser collection, though. Here is a recipe for gingerbread:

239 How to bake gingerbread (Lezelten)

Item take wheat flour and honey that is quite hot and make a dough. Have the dough kneaded well so you can barely stick in your finger, and then make flat loaves (fladen) half a finger thick. Put them into an oven (read ofen, an oven, for haffen, a pot) and bake (Prats) them afterwards. When they are nicely brown, take them out of the oven (Ofen) again and let them cool so they turn hard. Then have the flat loaves pounded with a clean pestle into small pieces on a nicely clean tablecloth. Then put them into a mortar (stampff) so they are nicely broken up (pfeitt). Then take honey again and let it heat up well so it is quite hot. Pour that in (with the crumbs) and add anise and pepper (each) half a vierdung, cinnamon bark one and a half lott, the same amount of cloves, nutmeg one lott, ginger three or four. But if you would have more of the dough, you must have more spices. You may try the dough and if it seems it is not spiced enough, you can easily remedy that. And do not let the dough be dusted with flour too much nor kneaded to strongly, and shape gingerbread cakes (lezellten) from it. Do not make them too thin. Then put them into the oven and bake (prat) them, and see the oven is not too hot. You must have proper diligence so they do not burn, and take them out when they turn brown.

We have several surviving recipes for lebkuchen, the highly spiced sweetened confections that were used widely as ingredients in sauces and other cooking. This one is not the most detailed, but it is interesting because it involves a double baking process. The Kuenstlichs und Fuertrefflichs Kochbuch refers to twice-baked gingerbread in one recipe, and this may be what is meant by that.

The recipe provides exact quantities for spices: a vierdung (quarter of a pound – about 120 grammes) of anise and pepper, one lott (about 15 grammes) of cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, and three to four times that amount of ginger. The proportions are reasonably exact, but its usefulness is curtailed by failing to tell us the quantity of flour and honey this is supposed to be mixed with. This, obviously, was something any decent householder would know. What is interesting is that the dough is made not directly from flour, but from already baked, dried, and ground-up cakes mixed with more honey yet. The result was likely intensely sweet and very expensive. As an aside, it is also one of the few recipes in the collection to instruct the reader to have something done rather than do it – surely a more realistic perspective on domestic work for the owner.

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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