Another entry in the Dorotheenkloster MS, not exactly a recipe:
186 (no title)
You can make good dishes from a porpoise (merswein). They make good roasts, quite like other pigs do. You also make sausage and also good venison of their blood and the meat. And you can make pheffer (sauce dishes) from it and other good gemues (side dishes).
This is more of a culinary briefing than a recipe, and it is clear why: No matter how healthy the ecosystem, nobody living in and around Vienna ever got to see a living porpoise, let alone cook one. The idea here is not instruction in any practical aspects of cookery, but in providing the kind of information an educated eater would be expected to have. Notably, in the second sentence a ‘they’ slips in – they cook porpoises. We have some practical recipes e.g. in the Opusculum de saporibus, but these are not that.
The descriptions are superficial, but interesting. Apparently, porpoises were cooked as meat despite the fact they were canonically classed as fish. Their name, merswein, literally sea pig, suggests as much, and here it is explicitly said they are treated like any other pig. Today, of course, the word Meerschwein refers to a guinea pig, but they are still called Schweinswal in modern German.
It is possible that salted or otherwise preserved porpoise meat was actually brought to the Alps. If it was, though, it was not likely a major trade item and certainly not usable for many of the dishes described here. Rather, these may have bewen familiar to people from their travels to coastal regions of Italy or Western Europe. The upper classes of fifteenth-century Europe often travelled widely, after all.
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.