I am not really sure what to make of this recipe, but I suspect it’s meant to mimic meat fladen
45 Of dishes in Lent
Take almonds, chop them small, and colour half of them with saffron. Lay them aside in a bowl. Take well-picked raisins and boil them so they become round and also lay them aside in the bowl. Along with these, take all kinds of fish roe except the roe of barbels and pound it in a mortar with a little white flour so it becomes like a straubem (a kind of pulled fritter) batter. Colour it and pour it on the fladen (a pizza-like flatbread dish) and bake that in an oven.
As we have seen happen before, this recipe is again repeated almost verbatim in Meister Hans:
Recipe #113 Ainen fladen jn der vasten mach also
A fladen in Lent make thus
Item a fladen in Lent. Take almonds and chop them small and place them in bowl, and colour half of them with saffron. And take well selected raisins and boil them up as they should be and lay them out in the bowl separately. And take all manner of fish roe, except barbel roe, and pound that in a mortar with a little flour so that it turns out like a strauben batter (a type of leavened fritter). Colour that and pour it on the fladen and bake it in an oven.
Fladen are mentioned frequently in surviving sources and we have some recipes for what they probably looked like. The most famous ones are the parallel, but not identical sets of recipes in the Mondseer Kochbuch and the Buoch von guoter Spise. It is probably not safe to assume that all of them looked like that – variation was likely considerable since a fladen could be anything flat that was baked, and some recipes are almost unintelligible.
Here, though, I suspect the intent is to mimic the kind of fladen described in the Mondseer Kochbuch. In place of the minced meat topping, we have mortared fish roe and the rather mysterious boiled raisins and party coloured almonds are added as a topping. The base would simply be the standard kind of dough used to make meat fladen, but since we do not really know what that was, we can use our imagination.
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.