Today, it’s another short recipe from the collection of Philippine Welser:
240 How to make good tarts in several ways
To make white tarts
Firstly, you must take a Seutel (liquid measure and drinking vessel), as the Seutln are customary in this country) of the whites of eggs, one Seutel of sugar, half a Libertzen (pound) of good almonds that are most carefully and finely pounded, and also a Seutel of good milk. Pass the prepared ingredients through a sieve all together with the milk. Then make a dough of flour, sugar, and rosewater. Grease the pan with fat beforehand to prevent it burning. Make the dough as thin as paper, lay it over the pan, and place the tart or rather the abovementioned ingredients on it. Put an edge (Reuffelin) on it above all sprinkle rosewater on the tart. Beaten egg white is spread on it with a small feather, and finally sugar is sprinkled on, never stint the latter. Cover the pan and the tart diligently with a covering (überleg) and set coals above it as is needed. That way, the rosewater, egg white, and sugar will harden and draw together like a crust and the tart will be as good as marzipan.
Whiteness was a desired quality in fashionable foods, so this tart is particularly distinguished by that and, secondarily, by being sweet. Beyond that, I am not entirely clear on how it is supposed to work, but it sounds as though a custard based on egg whites is overlaid with a kind of meringue topping. For greater certainty, I would need to experiment with the recipe practically.
Among the things I do not know is the quantity of a Seutel. The seidel is usually a drinking vessel, so we are not looking at very large containers, but beyond that it is a matter of guessing at this point. A second point of uncertainty is whether the almonds are supposed to be passed through the cloth – remain in the liquid as a fine powder – or strained out, leaving only the oil and flavour. The resulting mixes could be very different.
There are, however, some very interesting points made here. A tart base made as thin ‘as paper’ (which even using sixteenth-century linen paper as a basis of comparison would be quite thin), a separate decorative edge added afterwards, and of course the topping. Adding sugar, rosewater, and beaten egg white separately rather than combined looks odd to modern eyes, but it just could work. We know similar techniques used with marzipans and almond tarts.
Clearly, the point to this recipe is a display of wealth – almonds, sugar, and a large number of eggs – and skill – the precise temperature control that would be needed for the tart to come out credibly ‘white’ from a baking dish. It isn’t likely to have a very exciting taste, but will surely be sweet, soft, and rich, much as the owner of the book was expected to be.
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).