Another series of recipes from the Dorotheenkloster MS for which we have no fewer than two sets of parallels. They clearly belong together:
4 Of a white roast chicken
Strange (fremde) roast partridges also turn our good. A strange sauce to go with it. You do not find that here. Take the whites of eggs beat them well , and (take) a very small amount of flour with it. Pour that over them (the birds) and put them back by the fire until they are to be served. They should be filled beforehand with a white filling.
5 Of red chickens
Take eggs and saffron and flour, and do as is described before. Spice it well. Serve it. These should be filled beforehand with a red filling.
6 Of green chickens
Take parsley and grind it with saffron, eggs, and flour. Spice it well and pass it through a cloth, and do as you do with the preceding.
7 Of black chickens
Take gingerbread and toast it well, and put it in a mortar and pound it well. If you don’t have gingerbread, take fine white flour (semmel mel) and honey and heat (prenn) it in a pan until it turns black. Let it cool and pass it through a cloth with eggs, and pour it over the chickens. When they are roasted, you stick them with cloves: the black ones with gilded cloves, the red ones with silvered cloves, the green with silver and gold ones.
8 Of an old, larded chicken made in an uncommon (fremd) manner
You must have a special sauce with each roast chicken. A white sauce to old, filled chicken, a green sauce with white ones, serve a green sauce with red ones, and with the black ones a grey (read grabe for grobe) sauce.
Playing with colours was something medieval cooks loved to do to show off. This is an example of how far this could go, and how much effort could go into it. The recipes leave many gaps – what goes into a red or a white filling? What white or green sauce is called for? – but they give enough information to give us an idea of how impressive the result must have looked. A chicken, armoured in a crust of red and studded all over with silver cloves like the nails on brigantine armour, and served with a bright green sauce of herbs – I think it would still turn heads in any restaurant.
The Dorotheenkloster MS is a collection of 268 recipes that is currently held at the Austrian national library as Cod. 2897. It is bound together with other practical texts including a dietetic treatise by Albertus Magnus. The codex was rebound improperly in the 19th century which means the original order of pages is not certain, but the scripts used suggest that part of it dates to the late 14th century, the remainder to the early 15th century.
The Augustine Canons established the monastery of St Dorothea, the Dorotheenkloster, in Vienna in 1414 and we know the codex was held there until its dissolution in 1786, when it passed to the imperial library. Since part of the book appears to be older than 1414, it was probably purchased or brought there by a brother from elsewhere, not created in the monastery.
The text was edited and translated into modern German by Doris Aichholzer in „wildu machen ayn guet essen…“Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Erstedition Übersetzung, Kommentar, Peter Lang Verlag, Berne et al. 1999 on pp. 245-379.