A short recipe from the Dorotheenkloster MS today, but an interesting and delicious one:
92 Of leeks
Take the white bulbs and (cut) them small. Lay them in cold water overnight. In the morning, take them and press them out, and cook them in boiling water by a good fire. When he has boiled them, pour off the water and pour in almond milk or poppyseed milk. If you wish, cut the fat of sturgeons (or hare? hausen daz vaist) or bacon into it and let it boil.
This is the kind of plain but attractive vegetable dish we do not find often in the medieval recipe corpus. Of course it is still elevated by the addition of almond or poppyseed milk (I assume that this is in place of the milk that would normally be used) and the rather enigmatic fat of sturgeon (hausen) or, if we assume a copying error, no less unusual hare (hasen). At bottom, though, it is the whites of leeks cooked in milk with added fat. I’ve made it frequently and redacted a parallel in my Landsknecht Cookbook.
There is a parallel for the idea of cooking leeks with milk in the Munich Cgm 384 recipe collection:
14 Kraut of leeks
Take leeks, greens (krutt) and cabbage and cut them the length of a digit (aines gelides lang). Sauté them in fat, pour on water, and let it boil up. Then put it into a sieve so that the water runs off. Lay it into a pot and pour on milk that has been passed through a cloth with white bread, and add fat.
This is clearly not the same thing, but it suggests that the practice was widely known. A more interesting thing yet is a record from the monastery at Reichenau in 843 that mentions a dish called warmosium to be given to sick brothers. To make it required leeks and the milk of four cows, which are the reason it is recorded in writing (they are provided each by one rent-paying village). This tradition may go back a good deal farther than the fifteenth century indeed.
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.