Just another short recipe today. As you read through oner after the other, you convince yourself that people in medieval Germany were really like us in their tastes. And then, you come across something like this:
17 A roast calf’s head
Cut the lower jaw off a calf’s head. Then break open the cranium and sprinkle good spices on the brain, pour hot fat on it, and roast it on a griddle. That will be a good calf’s head.
The way this recipe not just acknowledges, but celebrates the violence of slaughtering is deeply disconcerting to most 21st-century readers, and I do not think the dish would find many takers were it legal to serve. Neither is this a singular occurrence. There is, in fact, a very close parallel in Munich Cgm 384:
53 A Calf’s Head
For a good calf’s head, cut off the lower neck, take the other part (i.e. the head) and boil it well. Break open the cranium (hiern schallen) and place good spices in it and good hot fat, and roast it on a griddle.
Here, it is made clear that the head was parboiled before roasting – a wise choice with the tough, sinewy meat rich in connective tissues.
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.