A Black Tart

Today, I can continue the colour tart sequence from Philippine Welser’s recipe collection:

242 To make a black tart

You must take eight, ten, twelve, or up to fourteen good pears according to whether they are large or small and roast them well on the embers so they are darkened (uberprennt). And so you do not roast them too strongly this way and burn them, it is necessary to thrust them into the glowing embers so they turn nicely soft. Similarly you must take good quinces that are entirely like the pears in their appearance ad roast them first over the embers and then in the embers to make them nicely soft. Quinces take much roasting because they are harder than pears. Once both quinces and pears are roasted so that they are fully soft, discard their outer skins and their cores and everything else that does not serve our purpose. Then take a seutel of milk, but it must not be full, barely half full, because the pears and quinces for this (recipe) are juicy in themselves. (Also take) nine eggs with their whites and yolks as they are, and also a seutel of sugar, rather more than less, you must never stint on this. Also diligently pound half a pound of almonds and have a good and proper care that no bad (henndige) one is among them. Pass all of this through a sieve with the milk, then add cinnamon, cloves, pepper, ginger, and equally nutmeg, added according to occasion and need. It is (further) made as described above with a dough so thin it looks like paper, and also a topping made of rosewater, egg whites, and sugar on top, this tart will be good.

This is clearly based on the same principle as the white tart, with the primary appeal being colour variation. I cannot envision the result being black unless you burned the pears and quinces quite badly, which you are expressly told not to do. I would expect it to come out a greenish brown, but still a clear contrast to the white of egg whites, almonds, rice, and milk. In terms of flavour, it will probably be closer to what we expect of a pumpkin pie than any pear or quince tart we are familiar with. Of course, our pumpkin pie recipes are not a lot like those of the sixteenth century, including one in the same collection (#43). However, the technique of combining cooked fruit with eggs, milk, sugar, and spices to make a solid filling was widely applied to other ingredients, as it is here. If you try to reconstruct this, please remember that the pears used at the time would not have been dessert pears, but cooking pears which were both smaller and much harder and drier. Using modern pears will likely result in a soggy mess unless you reduce the proportion of milk.

One very interesting point here is the instruction to take a seutel of milk, but have it barely half full. This suggests that the seutel is indeed a convenient vessel, not a measure of capacity. This, in turn, locates these recipes in a specific place where these drinking vessels were on hand. It is likely that the long recipes towards the end of the book were added later, quite possibly in Tyrol, so it might be worth looking into common drinking vessels there.

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).

This entry was posted in Uncategorised and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *