Another contribution from Philippine Welser’s collection that I have no intention of replicating:
223 Small birds in a soup
Wash the birds cleanly and when they are boiled (washed?), fry them in fat. Drain off the fat cleanly and then take broth of good meat. Add raisins (wine?), ginger, and mace to it and let it boil together so it has a small amount of broth. It you want it to be a little sour, add vinegar.
224 Birds in a black sauce
Take the birds and scald them with with boiled water first. Then put them into a clean pot and add fat. Take a good amount of pepper and some sweet wine, and the same quantity of meat broth. Add this to the birds. If you do not have sweet wine, take a different kind and add more sugar. If you do this right, the broth will be black.
Small birds, without much regard for species, were a popular food in medieval and Renaissance Germany. They were not covered by hunting restrictions and could usually be bought in urban markets from hunters who caught them in nets, snares, or glue traps. Here are two ways they were cooked.
The two recipes are somewhat unclear and look quite similar at first glance. It is likely the first is garbled: The birds emerge boiled from washing. Either the wrong verb was used, or the text omits a parboiling step. They are then fried, the fat drained, and broth and spices added to boil them. The second open question is whether the raisins (weinber) mentioned here are not a misspelling for wine (wein). It would be more in keeping with contemporary practice, but both are possible. Raisins are certainly added to meat cooking sauces.
The second recipe is clearer: The birds are scalded and cooked in a mixture of wine, broth, and fat. I cannot see how the broth would turn black, though, unless the instructions omit an important step. Perhaps blood was added.
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).