At least I think that’s what it is. Anyway, in the middle of the Dorotheenkloster MS, we encounter a sentence that clearly belongs at the beginning of a collection. This is followed by a number of recipes for what we would call puddings and jellies. This is the first:
Here begins a record (geticht) of many kinds of dishes. You will find written down hereafter how to prepare them in a courtly fashion (hofleich).
32 Of all kinds of Mus dishes (gemuesen)
If you want to make an almond mues, take half a pound (talentum) of almonds and starch (umerdum) with it. If you do not have that, take semmel bread for it. Put that in water and press it out thoroughly. Pass it through a cloth with the milk, that way it turns out nicely small. If you want it sweet, add sugar. This is called almond mues.
This is recipe is neither very surprising nor terribly attractive, but its use of starch is interesting. It is called a Mus, a word that can describe any food thin enough to be eaten with a spoon, but not liquid. The basic flavour profile is “white”, that is, as neutral and mild as possible. It is very much a courtly dish, using expensive ingredients to produce a decorative effect.
I cannot be completely sure, but looking at parallel recipes in the section I assume the half pound of almonds mentioned at the beginning is used to make almond milk. That would be the ‘milk’ mentioned later. The dish is made with starch, presumably cooked and allowed to set. This is much like what English calls a (corn-)starch pudding and in German is simply known as Pudding. The word for starch, umerdum, is of course related to amydon. It’s an unusual term, but so is the use of talentum for a unit of weight, presumably a pound.
There are a large number of recipes for similar almond milk dishes thickened in a variety of ways. This one fits the pattern well. The texture would have been unusual and attractive compared to dishes thickened with flour or bread, but that did not set it apart enough to consider it special. It is basically another Mandelmus.
That is all for today. I am trying out the seasoning from this source’s fish in pastry and will report back one of these days.
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.