Mashed Beans

Apologies for the few and brief posts, I am working on a project I hope to finish this week. Today, two recipes for beans from the Dorotheenkloster MS.

69 Mashed beans (prein von pon)

Take the beans and make them pretty (shell them) with lye. Set them to cook in a pot and let them boil dry so they do not become soft. Take a clean scheffel (a small wooden vessel) and rub them just when you are about to serve them, that way they stay white. Make milk with this of whatever kind you can get, but it must be sweet. Add that and serve it.

70 Mashed beans (pon müs)

Take the remaining mashed beans. Take pea broth and put the beans into it. Add oil and make it thick. Serve it hot. That is a mues. Do not oversalt it.

Beans (Vicia faba, not the new World phaseolus beans we enjoy today) must have been far more common than surviving recipe books suggest. Plain boiled or roasted to crisp snacks, ground into flour or mashed into puree, they were eaten by everybody. Served according to these recipes, they would be fit for a lordly table, but they were still humble beans and would never play a starring role.

We clearly see the artistry at work here. Even though the dish is humble, it is prepared with care and attention to detail. The right consistency, the proper colour, the right presentation matters. In the first recipe, the beans are served as a white mash either mixed with or – I think more likely – served along with a plant milk. The phrase “of whatever kind you can get” suggests that nut, almond, or seed milk would be fine. The dish is fit for fast days, so dairy would be inappropriate. The second dish is a Mus, a spoonable dish served warm. Again, the use of pea broth and oil instead of meat broth and butter tells us is it a fast day food.

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 *