Fish Galantine

I am headed for a medieval feast with my lady this weekend, so you will have to make do with this recipe over the next few days. It is nice and long, though, from the collection of Philippine Welser:

213 Hereafter follow of several galantines

If you want to make fish in galantine, for two dishes:

One half pound of almonds, a fierdung of raisins, one half pound of sugar, one lott of saffron, 2 laydt of cinnamon, one laydt of isinglass

If you want to have it good, do not add grains of paradise. First, scatter cinnamon, raisins, and mace over the bowl, (but) not too much. When you want to lay in the fish, you should lay in a finger’s length of cinnamon (first). With the abovementioned ingredients, I had fish as follows:

5 pounds of carps, 3 pounds of pike, 3 mas of rain fal (Ribolla gialla wine), If you do not have rain fal, you use another kind of strong and good wine, 2 mas of Italian wine (welschwein), 1 mas of old wine

You boil the scales and the isinglass in this. Then you take the Italian and the ronfal (Ribolla gialla) wine and put it over the fire. When it boils, pour it over the fish and when the fish is scummed, add half the abovementioned saffron. When the fish is boiled, lay them on a cloth and strain the cooking liquid through a cloth. Spoon off the fat cleanly and press out the scales and isinglass that were boiled through a cloth into a separate dish. Also separated out the fat cleanly and put it into the remaining broth together with the saffron and other spices, except for the ginger. Add the ginger last so it does not become too spicy and the cinnamon dominates the taste (fir schlagen). If you want it to be brighter (layder), add elecampagne (alet). If it does not readily gel, add peas and let them boil with the fish. If you want to put an entire pike’s head into the bowl, have it cut off entirely and two finger’s (worth of fish) should stay attached to it. Before you pour the galantine, you should break the head off from the backbone and set it in the middle. Spread it out (i.e. the gills) with two skewers of wood so it does not fall over. Then take the stomach and roll it well on bran and beat it well (struck through: auf den grind) with a wooden bat before so it becomes thin and spreads out. Then wash it cleanly and turn it inside out, and take flesh of the pike and the greens of the parsley, chop it small and together, and when it is chopped small, stir in a little fine white flour (semel mel) and raisins. Spice it with pepper, then fill the stomach, but do not fill it very full because it becomes shorter and tighter when it boils, and if you fill it too full, it will burst open. When you want to boil the sausage, set it by the fire in water beforehand, and when it begins to boil, prick it with a needle, otherwise it will break open. Only when it is half boiled do you put in the pike, and when the fish is scummed, lay the sausage in with the pike and boil it well because it must boil long.

215 Another galantine (sultz) to make for one and a half dishes

Take one half pound of almonds, a fierdung of raisins, and a fierdung of sugar, 1 laydt of saffron, 1 laidt of ginger, 1 laidt of cinnamon, 1 layt of isinglass, Take 5 pounds of carp for this, and 3 pounds of pike, 2 mas of ron fal (Ribolla gialla wine), 2 mas of Italian wine, 1 mas of old wine, 1 spoonful of saffron, ginger and cinnamon.

Also let this (the spices) boil with the fish.

These are very detailed instructions by any standard, and the format of providing ingredient lists with quantities is highly unusual in sixteenth-century culinary recipes (though common in medicinal ones). It is also interesting in using the first person and may very well be an ego-document of the book’s owner, a recipe not just for but by Philippine Welser.

The dish is a fairly common one: cooked fish served in a translucent jelly. Here, of course, the most expensive wines, large quantities of spices, and the finest fish are used, but the principle is the same we can still find as Hering in Gelee in any North German supermarket. It is problematic that the recipe uses lot and laidt side by side; these are dialectal variants of the same word, but in the same text, they may refer to different units, possibly trade versus apothecary weight. Usually, a Lot is 1/32 of a pound, roughly 15 grammes.

Beyond that, the dish is artful and complicated, and we can reconstruct it fairly well from the detailed instructions for degreasing and clearing the broth, dissolving the gelatin, and displaying the head. It would not look very enticing to modern eaters, though. Complex jellies were highly esteemed at the time.

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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