Almond cheese is faux cheese produced with almond milk using a variety of thickening processes. There are many surviving recipes. The Dorotheenkloster proposes a kind of jelly. It is a nearly identical parallel of a recipe in the Innsbruck MS.
33 Again a different dish
If you want to have an almond cheese, you must have isinglass and you must have 2 pounds (talenta) of almonds for one dish. This is how you make the almond cheese: Grind (the almonds) nicely and pass them through a white cloth. And (take) one lot of isinglass and boil it in water. And you must pass the isinglass through (a cloth) together with the almonds with the boiled water. The milk should not boil. Sweeten it with sugar, one quarter pound (firdung) and add it to the cheese. Take a glazed bowl and pour the milk into it, then it will become firm. Let it stand for a while so it turns into a cheese. Add sweet almond milk to it. And you can cut (the cheese) into four parts so the milk passes inbetween. Stick it with almonds and serve it.
There are a few differences, but basically this is the same recipe as in the Innsbruck MS. The proportion of almonds to sugar is slightly higher – 2 talenta versus 1 1/2 pounds – but otherwise it is identical in all important points. Almond milk is made from a significant quantity of almonds – even assuming a low weight for the ever variable pound, we are not getting below 600-700 grammes. This is then mixed with gelatin cooked from maybe 12-15 grammes of isinglass and sweetened with about 120 grammes of sugar. The resulting jelly will be familiar to all modern diners, though to our tastes it would probably seem bland. Cutting it into quarters and serving it in a platter of (almond) milk completes the illusion of eating green cheese, and the decorative almonds stuck in add to its visual appeal.
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.