We are back to individual recipes. Another one from the Dorotheenkloster MS:
37 A dish of (nut and almond) kernels (kernen müs)
Take 1/2 pound (talentum) of almonds and make milk of it, pass it through nicely and do not make too much. Take a pound (libra) of nuts and shell them nicely. Boil them and (pound them?) as small as groats. Add them to the milk, let it boil up once, and sweeten it with sugar. Do not oversalt that, and serve it.
This is an interesting recipe and potentially quite nice, though it is sure to be very rich, much richer than parallels in other sources. It is just almond milk combined with pounded and boiled walnuts and sugar. When the word ‘nut’ is used without a qualifier, it usually means walnuts which would give this a deep and slightly bitter flavour. They also soften when cooked more than hazelnuts, so they would produce an actual porridgelike consistency. Small portions will go a long way.
I have no idea what, if any, difference the author intends between talentum and libra. A libra is simply the Latin word for a pound (that is where we get lb.) while a talentum originally referred to a much larger weight used mainly to measure metals. Clearly that cannot be meant here, and we have parallels of other recipes in this section of the text that use the German word for pound where these have talentum or libra. Possibly there is a distinction between different standard pounds – most towns had their own – but more likely, the terms are used interchangeably.
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.