It’s been a long day, so I’ll only be able to post a short recipe today. Once again, from the collection of Philippine Welser:
221 Lamb meat in a soup
Let the meat boil. Take 3 spoonfuls of the broth and 1 spoonful of vinegar, put that broth into a pan and let it cool. Beat 20 eggs into it, season it with saffron, pepper, and ginger, pass it through a cloth, then set it over coals and stir it until it develops foam. Put the meat into a bowl and pour the soup over it.
This is a plain, straightforward recipe, though still a luxurious one. Using plenty of eggs and costly lamb distinguishes it more than the spices by the 1550s. My reading is as bite-sized meat chunks served in a spicy sauce, though of course we are told nowhere how the meat is cut. It could be entire legs sliced at the table. The sauce is simple – broth and vinegar, thickened with eggs and seasoned with sharp spices. It sounds quite attractive served with a good bread.
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).