It has been a very busy day, and all I have is a very basic recipe tonight. From the collection of Philippine Welser:
228 To boil a good capon
Take the capon and boil it in water together with meat, so the broth will be all the better. Boil it as you usually do, and when the capon is halfway boiled, take it out and cut it to pieces. Take three toasted slices of bread and a good handful of parsley, and take the same broth (mentioned before) and put them in. Let it boil well together with the capon, and when it is well boiled, take the broth with the bread slices and the parsley and pass it through a cloth. Then add saffron and pour it over the boiled capon. Also add spices if you want to.
While this is the most luxurious way possible to do it, the basic recipe is quotidian: Boil chicken, add seasoning, thicken broth into a sauce with bread. This was how such dishes were prepared in thousands of households throughout the land.
A capon, obviously, is not just any bird. It is rich and tender, comparable to a modern broiling chicken, raised for meat. Adding further meat and colouring the broth with saffron added to the luxury appeal. But even with just a hen and a bit of pepper, this was a feast day dish.
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).