Back after the holidays, here is another recipe from the Dorotheenkloster MS, a complicated kind of roast pastry.
27 A strange kind of roast
Take roasted pears, raw sour crabapples, and boiled streaky (underwachsen) pork, pepper, saffron, and anise. Fry all of it and soften it with raw eggs, and distribute the seasoned filling (condiment) equally all over it (the unmentioned sheet of dough). Roll up the sheet and coat it in egg batter, fry it in fat until it is hard, pass a skewer through it, roast it, and drizzle it with egg and with fat. When it foams, it is cooked fully. Then serve it. You can lard it like a venison roast of roe deer. You can warm it by the fire. This is called a pear roast.
This recipe is strange, but not very. The Middle High German word fremd covered both the senses of “weird” and “not from here”, so it is not entirely clear which one is meant, but recipes for similar dishes are not uncommon. This one is treated with rather unnecessary elaboration, though.
Basically, a mixture of roasted pears, raw sour apples, and boiled pork is reduced to a spicy paste, bound with egg, and spread on sheets, probably of dough. It is not clear what these are – the word used is ambiguous and can refer to all kinds of flat things, from the leaves of plants to sheets of paper. Here, it most likely means a pancake, though it could possibly be simply fried egg or, for that matter, just pasta dough. Its existence is taken for granted as the recipe simply launches into instructions what to do with the filling – a twist that threw off the editor Aichholzer who interprets the word condiment as a sauce here. That is highly unlikely. Next, the dough sheet is rolled up, coated in batter, fried, skewered, and roasted until the interior is fully cooked. The coating with an egg wash and the optional addition of lardons did nothing for consistency or flavour, but emphasised the role of this dish as a roast, the centrepiece of a meal. It actually sounds like it could be quite attractive, despite the many cooking steps ensuring no vitamin survived the process.
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.