A fish recipe with an interesting twist, from the Dorotheenkloster MS:
12 Of a filled pike
Take a pike large enough to serve for one dish (ain essen), cut off its head and (cut it open) down the back. Take a shingle (ain schindel) and cut it as long as the pike. Remove its skin entirely, and do not damage the skin. When the pike is freed (from its skin), see the fins and the tail stay attached to the skin. Loosen it with a knife around the back and the tail, that way the fish comes loose. Take it out. Then take the fish and remove its bones, and leave the skin alone. Chop the fish and mix it with other fish when you fill it again. You must season it with spices, that way it becomes good and well-tasting. You must (also) have hyssop, pellitory, and southernwood, and in addition sage and parsley. Chop that into the fish and fill it into the skin again. This is called a May pike (mayen hecht). If it is not a fast day, break eggs into it, but if it is a fast day, chop an apple into it. Attach the head again and close it up with string, that way the pike becomes whole. Also fill the ‘ear cheeks’ (örwenglein, the gills) with the same filling (as the skin). The gills must be washed nicely, and you put filling into them and into the head and the mouth. Lay it on a griddle and roast it cleanly, and do not burn it or it will stick.
Recipes for gefilte fish style dishes are not uncommon in medieval recipe sources and I even tried one once, but this one is unusual through its seasonal association with May. That, too, is something we find very frequently, often with dishes involving dairy or eggs and coloured with fresh green herbs. We know Gespot in May, May dish, numerous May mus, many forms of May cake and now – May pike. I talked about this at a symposium sponsored by the Instytut Polski in Düsseldorf a while ago, so finding this recipe now feels belated. Today, of course, the seasonal flavour associated with the month of May is herbal – woodruff-flavoured Maibowle. Early recipes for this feature other herbs, including the southernwood and pellitory found here. Maybe there is more of a continuation here than it seems at first sight.
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.