Today, I only have a brief note from the Dorotheenkloster MS, but an interesting one. Again, not really a recipe, but serving instructions:
173 Note what kind of game should have spices added to the pot or not
You must prepare spices for all kinds of game and add it to the pot. For a roast roe deer or boiled deer, you set the prepared spices aside in a separate serving bowl. But with hares, squirrels, and all birds, you add the spices to the pot. Now note: You must not salt any pheffer or prepared spices that you serve separately with game, because the game is salted already.
There isn’t very much of a story here, but we learn some interesting things. First, spices were blended to be served along specific foods. We sort of knew that, but it is good to have confirmation. Second, there were rules for how to do this. Specifcally, a bowl of blended spices would go with a large piece of venison while small game was seasoned in the cooking process. Thirdly, the use of the word pheffer is interesting here. It usually means a spicy sauce, but that looks implausible here. Apparently, it can also refer to a spice blend.
Unfortunately, we are still left high and dry as to which spices to blend. There seems to be no German equivalent to the generally agreed-upon apothecary blends of powder fort and powder douce.
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.