Today’s recipe from the Dorotheenkloster is one that occurs in several other sources. I will largely be repeating what I wrote about it when discussing its other iterations:
11 A roast dish of a bung (afterdarm)
Take the bung (i.e. the rectum, affterdorm) of a calf and clean it. Chop the lungs together with bacon, spice and colour it, and fill it into the bung. Cut sausages (into it?) if you like. Then roast it and serve it dry (i.e. without sauce)
This recipe recurs many times, including in the Munich manuscript Cgm 384, Meister Hans and the Rheinfränkisches Kochbuch, and I already experimented with recreating a version of it. The wording is very similar, though in this instance we are instructed to colour the filling – most likely with saffron – and get the rather enigmatic advice that we can cut sausages if we like – that may well be garbled or an inclusion from a different recipe.
From a technical perspective, this dish makes eminent sense. When slaughtering a calf, neither the lungs nor the rectum are good candidates for preservation. This way, they can be turned into a dish that is solid and roastable and can be sliced at the table, which qualifies it as a main course, a status often indicated by the term braten. Once prepared – most likely boiled in the same cauldron that was used to cook other sausages and organ meats – a lung sausage like this would last for a few days or even weeks if properly smoked, but it was not something you could lay in as supplies. Depending on the occasion, it could be served as part of the Schlachtfest, given to servants while the quality enjoyed fresh muscle meat, or kept to enjoy next week when the last of the very fresh veal was gone.
By way of information: the rectum is the fat-lined part of the gut that directly precedes the anus. It is known to butchers as Fettdarm or Afterdarm and used in a number of traditional preparations. Klobwurst and some varieties of liver sausage are still cooked and smoked in the rectum. It is no more or less unhygienic or icky than any other part of the intestine and perfectly edible, though not a pleasure to chew. However, it is not easy to source. Few traditional butchers part with it, and most meat processors do not save it separately. I recommend substituting large intestine if you cannot get it.
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.