I apologise for the length of gaps between posts. My life and my other obligations leave me increasingly little room. Here are three ways of serving partridges from the Dorotheenkloster MS:
156 Of partridges
Take three partridges, clean them well, but leave on the feet and the necks. Then take chicken broth that is sweet and boil them in this. Take 1 lad (Lot) whole pepper, wash it well, and put it in with the partridges. Let them boil as long as chickens, but do not let them overboil (versieden). Then cut an apple into long, thin slices and season it. Season it with spices. When you want to serve the dish, put the apple on it. Item, if you want to have it yellow, add ten almond kernels to the cooking liquid (sultz) or more, and serve it.
157 A furhess of partridges
Take three partridges and the blood of other birds (hunern). Cut each partridge in four pieces and boil them in the blood. Take an apple and an onion, blacken (fry?) it together and boil it in (the dish). If the blood is too thin, take a crust of bread, toast it dark (prenn) and add it. Season it with spices, but add no saffron if you want to have a furhess.
158 Again another dish of 3 partridges. A cold dish
Take three roast partridges, let them cool, and split each one. Take white semeln bread and toast it for a pheffer sauce that is not black. Take vinegar and wine and add it to that, and also add honey. Prepare a good, thickened (chebundes) phefferl sauce and do it justice with all kinds of spices and saffron. Add a quarter of a pound (virdung) of raisins, blacken (sautée?) them nicely, and add 2 lot of almonds to it. Stir it together, pour it on (the partridges) and let it set. Cover it so it cannot ‘smell out’ (verachen i.e. lose its scent) and serve them cold.
Partridges were highly desirable gamebirds fit for the tables of the nobility. Here, we see them prepared in three ways, each of which is fairly typical of medieval German culinary sources.
In the first recipe, the birds are boiled whole in clear chicken broth. I assume the reference to ‘sweet’ means fresh and clear, not old or cloudy, rather than actually sweetened. That is also how fresh butter, milk, and cream are described. A remarkable quantity of pepper (a Lot was 1/32 of a pound, about 15 grammes) is added to the cooking liquid and further spices before serving. The dish is decorated with apple slices and served with either the broth or a sauce made with it. Sultz, the word used here, can refer to a thickened sauce, but also to a jellied broth. The instruction to make it yellow by adding almond kernels is somewhat puzzling, but it may refer to the change of colour a rich chicken broth will undergo when it is made into almond milk.
The second recipe is for a fürhess, a class of dish frequently described in our sources. At its most basic, this was made from the blood of a small animal and the meat of its less desirable parts, basically a civet. Here, the process is a good deal more elaborate: The entire bird is used and the sauce calls for blood from a different source. That is likely because there would not be enough in a partridge to make sauce for the whole body – usually, fürhess was made with the meat of forelegs, necks, and feet. The word huner usually refers to domestic chickens, but since it is also part of the name of the German word for partridge (as well as moorhen and capercaillie), it could refer to gamebirds here. Either way, and presumably it would not matter much, the blood is turned into a sauce with onion and apple and, if necessary, thickened with toasted bread. This seems to have been a popular flavour combination. The goal is to have small pieces of meat in a thick, dark, richly seasoned sauce.
The third is to be served cold and is one of a class of dishes that use a thick, spicy sauce to cover and thus preserve cooked meat. In a wealthy household, this might well be the kind of thing you would have ready in case of need, or prepare in advance of a visit. Vinegar and wine, spices and raisins, and fine, white bread to thicken it made this a strong and expensive concoction poured over the cooked meat while hot and allowed to congeal to exclude air. The technique is quite old, found as early as the thirteenth century, and may be the origin of modern aspic. At least the same words are used in Middle High German for both.
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.