A Chard Tart in March

This is the penultimate recipe in the collection of Philippine Welser, a variation on a very common theme of ‘green tart‘ and a reminder that all food was seasonal:

245 To make a tart of greens (Kraut Turten) of very young and fresh chard

Take young and very fresh chard and cut up the same with a knife raw, as small as possible. Salt them as needed and then squeeze/crush (zertruckhen) and grind this kraut well with very clean hands. Thus the water is pressed out with your hands. Discard this water, then take fresh cheese (schotten) and likewise mix it with the abovementioned kraut. This will also call for a good soft Taig (this could mean the dough for the crust, but also mass for filling using egg), as fresh and gentle as can be found, that is used with it. In this manner, as described before, mix it, and you can also add sugar or other spices, or make such a tart without sugar or any spices, that is up to anyone’s choice and pleasure. And you must place fat in the pan underneath the dough as is needed and thus let it bake. That will be a good tart. These tarts are most fittingly and conveniently made in March.

Note that with any and every tart, the dough and the edge/top crust (renfftlin) must be made and set up as is sufficiently described for the first one, and neither sugar nor other spice (species) be stinted if the tart is supposed to be good.

This recipe is in no way unusual, but quite refined. The basic kraut tart was made with leafy greens, cheese, and eggs. Kraut, unless otherwise defined, usually means cabbage, but in the case of these tarts almost always means chard, spinach, parsley, or other kitchen herbs. In this case, it is very young chard leaves which, in March, would still be small and tender enough to process raw. Mixed with fresh cheese and whatever spices you wished, it would make a fine tart to celebrate the fact you had more than enough to eat in the hungry month of March.

The insistence on sugar and on a top covering that is described elsewhere as a kind of proto-meringue involving sugar, rosewater, and beaten egg white seem incongruous to moderns, but they are the signasture style of the later tart recipes in this collection. This could actually reflect a personal idiosyncrasy, the taste of Philippine Welser herself.

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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