A Decorative Egg Dish

A recipe from the Dorotheenkloster MS again. This dish plays with the colour contrast of egg white and yolk.

58 A gmüß (spoonable dish) of eggs

Take 32 eggs and boil them hard. Take the whites of them, chop them small, and pound them cleanly (small? – read klain for rain). Take a little fine wheat flour (semelmel) with it. You must pass this through a cloth and add sugar and a little salt. You must pound the yolks separately. Add a little flour to them and saffron and add saffron and sugar. And you must strain (pass) it through a cloth. You must have a container (tegel) for each preparation (mues) and each one must have three holes. (Put) the white into one container separately and the yolk into one separately. Now you must have a “small rake” (rechel) for each container so that you can rub it through. You must press it so that the worms (expressed through the holes) become as long as your serving dish is wide. Now move once away from you and once towards you, and (lift the container) up. Now take the white container and move it crosswise across them for the (entire) length. And now the one with the yellow in it, move it across and back, and then take the white again, and after the white, the yellow, as long as you have of each.

In terms of taste, this does not sound terribly appealing. It’s mashed hard-boiled eggs with a little flour and sugar. You can probably taste the saffron in this dish since there is so little else to flavour it. Visually, though, it must have been quite striking. Strands of bright white and golden yellow crossing each other in a serving bowl, forming a net or knitwork too pretty to eat.

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.

This entry was posted in Uncategorised and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *