Chicken and Veal Mus Dishes

Among the many dishes in the class of Mus in the Dorotheenkloster MS, there are two very meaty ones:

61 Another kind of gmüs that is black

Take a calf’s blood. If you cannot get that, take chicken blood of young hens and boil it in wine. Take boil chicken and chop it, and (take) half a semel loaf. Lay that into the boiling blood and let it boil up. And once it boils, season it with honey so that it is neither too sweet nor too sour. Sprinkle it with pounded cloves and ginger and sugar, and serve it.

62 Yet another gemüs

Take one pound (libra) of almonds and pound them small. Take a boiled hen and pound that small, and take roasting-grade (pretiges) veal and chop it with the hen and boil that in the milk (from the almonds). And the milk (must be put) altogether with everything into the pot. Let it boil properly. Do not oversalt it.

These recipes may not invite recreation, but they are an important reminder that no matter how familiar may dishes in the Mus or Gemüs category seem to us, this was not a class of porridges, breakfasts, or sweet dishes. They were part of the dining table and heavily spiced, rich meat preparations belonged to the class just as much as ephemeral jellies and light porridges. If we would rather not cook chicken or veal in almond milk (though we happily do it in cream to produce Frikassee) or eat our black pudding with a spoon, these are our sensibilities, not those of the time.

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.

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