Today, for the first time this week, I have the time for a short recipe. I apologise for the long dry spells. Holiday preparations and work are keeping me very busy these days.From the Dorotheenkloster MS, fish roast and – I think – fish sausage.
16 A different roast dish
Take a pike, remove the bones, take the fish (flesh) and chop it small. Spice it well. Take half the filling and fill the tail with it. Turn the inside of the tail out and roast it gently. Make the filling fat. Take half of it and grate a little bread into it, or (use) flour. Chop this together and push/press it into one mass, and make a roast with it. Stick it with cloves and serve it.
The beginning of the recipe is old hat – again, we skin, debone, and chop a fish. The final instruction to produce a roast stuck with cloves is basically a nod to the more detailed instructions in an earlier recipe. What is interesting is how the recipe envisions cooking the tail. It gets turned inside out – presumably after the scales and fins are removed – and filled with chopped, spiced fish, then roasted gently. To me, that sounds like a riff on some sausage-like dishes, maybe filled pigs’ or calves’ feet. Sadly, the recipe is short on details, but surely the intent was to imitate something. Fish sausages were a thing, after all.
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.