Another fake venison recipe from Philippine Welser’s collection:
232 If you want to make venison of beef
Take beef and chop it small. Take wine, and catch the blood of a calf, and add it. Then set it over coals and stir it until it is about to boil. Then pour that on the meat so it takes on the colour of venison. Chop it into that, and add grated bread, and spice it well. Shape balls the size of a fist and boil them in meat broth. Cut them as you do venison, prepare a pepper sauce to go over them, spice it well, and lay the venison into it. Do not oversalt it.
This recipe is obviously not fit for Lent, but can still provide the illusion of a high-class dish from a much cheaper and more ubiquitous meat. Interestingly, there are parallels in several earlier sources including the Innsbruck MS (#98 and 99) and the Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch (#91), but none that mention the use of blood. I have not tried the method, nor do we have any idea of the proportions, but given how thoroughly blood darkens sauces, I assume it will turn the meatballs quite dark as well.
As an aside, all these recipes suggest that often when our sources mention wildbret, they refer less to a type of meat than a certain preparation, sliced into bite-sized pieces and served in a spicy sauce. that is not a bad way of serving the fiddly bits.
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).