Another short recipe from Philippine Welser’s collection tonight.
234 How to make good salted (diges) meat that turns red
Item whoever wants to make salted (diges) meat so it turns nicely red and tastes good, whether it is ox tongues or other meat, should take the meat or the tongue as it comes from the butchering (i.e. fresh). Salt it cleanly and thus leave it to stand in the salt for 3 days. Then take out the meat or tongues and wash off the blood with the salt water it has lain in. Lay the meat into a clean vessel. Then take the liquid, put it into a cauldron or pan, and put that over a fire to let it boil a little. When it begins to boil, scum it cleanly until it no longer develops foam. Then take it off the fire and let it cool. Then put the meat back into a clean container and pour the broth that has cooled again over it. It must not be warm, or the meat will spoil. Then let it lie 10 or 14 days in the brine. Take it out and hang it in the smoke as you know. That way it will turn nicely red and last long. Smoke it with juniper twigs (wech hallter bortzen).
There is a fair amount of material on preserving meat which was an important part of feeding large and wealthy households. This recipe is not unique, but interesting in the way it emphasises the desired redness. That has not changed, and today German meat processors add potentially harmful nitrites to ham to give it that colour. Notably, this recipe does not suggest saltpetre, which we find in other early modern contexts, but relies on the salting and smoking process itself.
It makes sense to look at this recipe in the context of later ones. De Rontzier described drying salted meats while Johannes Coler wrote at length on various methods of salting meat and ensuring its quality. The recipe from the Philippine Welser collection envisions a wet-salting process followed by smoking, and it again goes for the most luxurious cuts imaginable – tongues. Of course, Sabina Welser’s manuscript has a similar recipe for salt-preserving beef tongues, so this is not out of the ordinary for the context, but we should remember that in a normal household, one ox tongue represented a considerable expense.
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).