Faux Meat of Eggs

Another two recipes from Philippine Welser’s collection, suitable for fast days after the 1490 exemption that permitted eggs during Lent.

230 If you want to make a roast of eggs

Take eggs, as much as you wish, beat them well, spice them, and add parsley and sage. Take a small bag, the size that a roast is supposed to be, pour in the eggs, and suspend the bag in hot water until it becomes thick (firms up). Then turn it out, stick it on a small spit so it does not break up, and lard it with boiled egg whites (so it looks) like any other roast. Pour hot fat on it.

231 To make venison out of eggs

Take 4 eggs and a little milk, and make a batter as thick as a batter for small fritters (kyechlin dayg). Spice it well and make it yellow. Then pour it into a bag and lift it into boiling water. Let it boil until it hardens, then take it out and cut it into slices one finger long. Then lay them in hot fat and let them fry until they are done. Then prepare a black pepper sauce (to serve) over them, and chop the whites of eggs as lardons to go with it.

As with many other Lenten recipes, the point here is to replicate the appearance of forbidden foods, not their flavour. That said, these do not sound bad taken simply on their own merits. They might even be considered as vegetarian options for modern medieval feasts.

The first is a solid loaf of eggs, seasoned with herbs (and presumably salt) and drizzled with hot fat as it is spit-roasted. Strips of hard-boiled egg white are used to imitate larding. It would likely go well with many of the sauces typically served with roasts, but getting it to stay on the spit must have been quite a challenge.

The second recipe calls for a batter as through for fritters, presumably involving flour, spiced and coloured with saffron. It is treated as the eggs abvove, but then sliced and served in a ‘black’ pepper sauce as was commonly done with venison. This is not a new recipe; we have a fairly exact parallel in the fifteenth-century Cod Pal Germ 551 collection. Here, pieces of egg white are chopped for lardons, but otherwise the technique is identical.

A black pepper sauce, by the way, is not made with black pepper, at least not exclusively. The word Pfeffer was a term for sauces in which spices provided the dominant flavour (as opposed to fruit-based, herb-based, garlic, or gingergbread sauces). A ‘black’ pepper sauce was named for its dark colour which was often achieved by binding it with blood, but in this case must have been provided by other means – possibly dark toasted bread. Venison was often served in blood-based sauces.

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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