Just a brief recipe today, but potentially delicious:
47 Of crawfish tails
Take crawfish and boil them, and shell the tails. When they are boiled, lay them in a pot and put in vinegar and spices.
This is quite brief, but I suspect it describes a way of preserving cooked crawfish for later eating. The tails are the largest and most iconic, recognisable parts, and the rest – claws and legs – could be turned into other dishes. It reminds me of a similar approach taken to fish in the 1485 Kuchenmaistrey, the first printed cookbook in German:
1.viii Item if you would keep fish so that they stay fresh for long. Lay them in a wooden vat or earthen pot and pour good vinegar on them and put parsley into it and bury it in a pit of fresh earth. And when you take out the fish and vinegar, always pour on fresh vinegar again. And close it with a good cover again. That way, they will stay fresh for long and do not turn stinking.
I cannot exclude the possibility that the crawfish are simply served with vinegar as a condiment, but it doesn’t seem convincing to me. A pot (ein rend) is not a serving dish, and vinegar is sometimes referred to as available at the table for diners to add to their food, so adding it to cooked crawfish seems superfluous. A ready pot of crawfish in a richly spiced vinegar pickle, on the other hand, would be just the thing to demonstrate understated wealth. Just a quick bite, no need to bother the cook… No spices are named, but I can imagine a pungent combination of ginger, cloves, pepper and mace might work well. This sounds worth trying out.
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.