Today’s recipe from the Dorotheenkloster MS has long antecedents and a close parallel.
14 Of a pike that is boiled in the middle and roasted at both ends
Now take a white cloth that is one hand wide or wider and moisten it with wine. Remove the liver and the stomach so that the stomach stays whole. Take a piece of the other pike and fill the stomach with it, and add some fat, that way it will turn out good. Let the liver and the stomach boil until they are done, and see the liver stays whole. Then fill them back into the pike. Take the cloth and moisten it with wine. It should be long enough to go around (the fish) twice. Wind it around the fish once. When you have wrapped it once, put salt on the cloth. Then wind the cloth over the salt, over the back and all around the pike. It should be salted all around on both sides between the cloth. Take string and wrap it all around repeatedly. The cloth must be fourfold. Now scale the fish on both ends. When you want to roast it, take a spit and thrust it through the cloth so the fish stays whole. Salt it like you do a roast fish and roast it like any other fish. Make a good strong fire underneath the cloth and a small fire under the ends. You must also have broth (to baste it) so it does not burn that way the pike boils itself in the middle. Take small pebbles that are hot and put them under the cloth, and pour the bot broth over the cloth. That way the broth drips down on the stones and the pike boils cleanly. Now roast it cleanly.
15 Make two kinds of sauce (salsen) and a broth (supplein) for the pike
For the tail, make a green sauce and pass it through with vinegar, that way it becomes sharp, and add spices. To the head, take a virding (quarter pound) of raisins and 1 virding of almonds that are pretty (i.e. blanched). Pound the raisins and almonds together. If you want to have a good sauce, pass it through with ravyol (Ribolla gialla wine) or runanier (Romania wine). Add good spices and sugar. That way you have a good sauce.
This recipe is almost verbatim the same as one in the Mondseer Kochbuch which I translated a while ago. Much of what I will say about it here repeats what I wrote there. As is often the case, the recipe is clearer in a few points and less clear in others, so the parallels can be used to interpret each other.
The underlying recipe here is for preparing a single large fish so that different sections are cooked in different styles, typically one roasted, one boiled or steamed, and one fried. We have numerous recipes for this from various sources and the process seems to go back to Abbasid Baghdad where it is recorded in the recipebook of ibn Sayyar al Warraq (chapter 33, recipe 5). Surviving German recipes often differ in detail, sometimes cutting apart the fish and reassembling it, but the most impressive display of skill lay in keeping it whole, as this iteration does. I experimented with the technique once and it works, but is poorly suited to a modern baking oven.
The instructions we are getting here mainly focus on preparing the middle part which is boiled (or rather steamed) under a wet cloth. Unlike the description in the parallel, this one makes it clear that the hot pebbles are placed on the fireplace bottom underneath the section wrapped in cloth, not physically under the cloth, so the effect would be adding to the moisture by producing steam. The salt between the cloth layers would dissolve in the basting liquid and permeate the fish. Interestingly, as in the preceding recipe, the stomach and liver are cooked separately and returned to the body cavity, presumably a conceit that diners expected.
The front and rear parts are not treated in any detail, but we learn in a different recipe that one section could be roasted dry, the other dusted with flour and basted with fat to approximate the effect of frying. All of it would make a showy dish served with various sauces to accompany each part. As in the parallel, the sauce for the tail is a ‘green’ sauce typically made of fresh herbs and vinegar or verjuice while the one for the head section is a sweet-spice raisin sauce thickened with almonds. This recipe is clear that the wine and sugar are to be used with the raisins and almonds, not, as the parallel states, with the herbs. There is no description for the supplein, a word that can refer to a soup, a cooking sauce, or a cooking liquid. I assume the broth used to baste the middle part is meant to be served with it in some way.
It probably does not need saying that between calling for fresh pike and the most expensive wines, expending a vast amount of skilled labour, and probably ruining a perfectly good length of linen, this recipe represents a level of luxury bordering on decadence.
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.