Another Blanc Manger

This is the final recipe from Philippine Welser’s collection. I must ask your patience – the full translation will go up sometime in December, I hope.

246 To make a white mues or bla manschy

First take rice and wash it cleanly, and then pick it over. When it has been washed and picked clean, put it into a vessel or on a boards and lean it towards the fire. When it is quite dry, you must pound it well in a mortar and strain it through a sieve or a cloth so it becomes like (as fine as) flour. Secondly, cut out the breast of a hen or of

To make a Manschy Plamby First take rice, have it washed and picked cleanly. When it is washed and picked, put it into a vessel or on a board and lean it towards the fire. When it is well dried, you must pound it well in a mortar and strain it through a sieve or cloth so it becomes like (as fine as) flour. Secondly take (struck out: the meat of the breast of a capon) the breast cut out of a capon and put it into a pot or cauldron. Set it by the fire and let it boil until it is cooked, but not too much. Then take out the breast and let it cool. Then pull it apart like silk and then wrap it in a napkin (saruet) so it does not become hard or pointy. Third, take a handful of the rice flour, put it into a clean tinned vessel, be that a tinned bowl (peckh) or pan, and pour on good cream. Stir the flour nicely so that it turns very thin and set it over a coal fire in a tinned cooking vessel. Always keep stirring it so it doesn’t burn or turn lumpy. This way, it quickly becomes thick and you must add a little more cream and stir it again. And when it boils up again, you throw in the torn-up breast and pour on a little rosewater. When it is about to become thick again, take fine, pounded sugar and also add it so it becomes nicely sweet. It must also be salted and fresh butter added, as much as a hen’s egg. Then take it off the fire and serve it. The mues must be quite thick when you put in the sugar because when the sugar is added, it immediately becomes thin. It must also not boil for long after the sugar is added because it will turn black after that point. But if you want to make it with fish, take a pike and let it boil like you usually boil one, except you must not add any vinegar. Then take out the pike and remove the bones from it or pick them out. Chop the pike and treat it as is described for the chicken breast. Or (you can) also pick a stockfish apart in this way and boil it, and when it is well boiled, take it out and pick it apart into the mues when it is made, as it is described with the other (ingredients). And when you serve it with fish, set neat piles all around them in the bowl with a spoon.

This recipe ends the collection, and it is decidedly odd. Not only is it almost identical to an earlier one (#237), it begins with a first paragraph that breaks off midsentence and then starts again, like some podcasts when you try to skip an ad break. This is not likely to be an oversight – corrections are made in the text elsewhere in the manuscript, and anyway, the text contains no error. Nor is this a case of someone returning to his notes and absentmindedly rewriting the same thing. This book was written by a scribe. Paper and column inches cost money. It is hard to say what happened here, but it must have been something significant at the time.

Another thing it does is add to our already broad collection of German names for blanc manger. After blamenser/blamensir and pulverisei, we had Philippine Welser’s collection refer to it as sugar mus and plamauschy. The slightly less garbled blamanschy we find in the title of the recipe is clearly derived from the French name of the dish, but interestingly, the second beginning calls it manschy plamby, a far-fetched derivation of its Italian name we find more faithfully reproduced by Rumpolt as Manscho Blancko. Consistency in naming continues to underwhelm.

In terms of content, there is little new here except the information that a fish blanc manger would be served as an accompaniment to cooked fish, arranged artfully in the serving bowl. It must have been reasonably thick to allow this, and modern cooks might well consider piping it.

Thus ends my work on Philippine Welser’s recipe book, a fascinating resource.

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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