A Very Refined Green Tart

Another recipe from Philippine Welser’s collection, this one is for a green tart made with sage:

243 To make a green tart

First, you need just sage, or also chard, parsley, and other herbs, according to everyone’s pleasure and taste. Take them and pass their juice through a sieve with unstinting sugar, egg whites, and milk. Then make a dough (crust) and edge as described above, not sparing any expense, thus it will be a good tart. If the tart is made with sage alone, as is up to anyone’s pleasure and fancy, the almonds are not needed. But if other herbs are used along with or other than sage, you may use a little bit of almonds with it.

This is not like the ubiquitous green or herb tart we find in so many sources. Instead of mixing chopped greens with egg and dairy, here, a sweet custard is coloured using the juice of fresh herbs. There is, in fact, a very similar recipe earlier in the same manuscript:

50 If you want to make a sage tart

Take 2 bunches of sage and two bunches of parsley greens and pound them together in a mortar. Press the juice out thoroughly. Then take a pound of sugar, well pounded, and put it into a bowl. Take ginger to the value of one kraytzer and pepper to the same value, and a little salt, all pounded small. Further take eight eggs and a quarter (qwerttlich) milk, or a little more. Then take the above juice, mix it all together, coat the pan with butter and make the base as thin as possible. Have a care with the embers, you must often lift the lid and make sure that it doesn’t burn. It takes much effort. It is written that you should not use any base, but only flour strewn over the butter.

Both use the juice of herbs, mainly sage, to colour and flavour a custard, with today’s recipe further accentuating the colour by using eggt whites only rather than whole eggs. Both are very sweet, a combination that is unusual to modern diners and recalls, if anything, cough drops. Recipe #50 with its assertive ginger and pepper probably had the more complex flavour, though the freedom to combine herbs given in #243 could be used to get creative. Incidentally, the text in #50 indicates that the recipe was taken from a written source that we cannot identify with certainty. Clearly, this was popular, though I struggle to understand why.

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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