I will likely be away over the weekend and may not have time to post any recipes, so for today, have a longer one from the 1547 Künstlichs und Nutzlichs Kochbuch. Balthasar Staindl plays with food in a grand tradition:
Jellied Almonds that Can Have any Colours You Want
xviii) Almonds are white by themselves. Make it yellow with saffron and green with parsley. Red can be had from an apothecary. A thing called a coloured cloth (farbtüch) from the apothecary should be taken and boiled, then the water will be red. You can make almond (jelly) with that, but you must boil isinglass in it and mix in a good amount of sugar, just like with the egg cheese.
xix) You make brown colour this way: Take ground almonds and add tart cherry sauce, and the almond (jelly) will turn brown. To make it black, you take cloves, (and?) spice powder (gstüp) and water that has been boiled with isinglass. Boil peas in it and strain the pea broth through a cloth, and sweeten it with sugar. It will turn black.
To Make Red Color
xix) (the number occurs twice) Make it this way: Take water in which isinglass has been boiled, sweeten it, and strain it through a cloth. Then take red color from a sworn (i.e. guilded) apothecary, let the abovementioned water cool, and stir in the color. Pour it soon, as it will gel. You can pour it into any mould you want.
To Make an Almond Cheese that Has as Many Colours as You Want
xx) Make it this way: Pour one of the abovementioned (liquids) into a cup a finger high and let it gel. Afterwards, pour another color into it, not hot, only cold, or they will flow into each other. Pour in as many colors as you want until the cup is full. After it has all boiled and gelled, immerse the cup in hot water, but take it out again soon and turn it out over a bowl and you will have all the colors. Cut the pounded almond (jelly) lengthwise so you see all the colors one after another.
This is an impressive achievement if you can make it work, but it’s not exactly innovative for its day. In fact, there are similar recipes from much earlier sources. Again, Staindl works in the tradition of his forebears, as we should rightly expect from a respectable craftsman.
The Dorotheenkloster MS preserves a list of food colourings that is very similar to Staindl’s: Yellow from saffron, green from parsley, brown from tart cherries. Here, red is made with berries and black with toasted gingerbread rather than cloves. The list also includes blue, made from cornflowers, which Staindl omits here (but mentions in other recipes). Interestingly, where the earlier text emphasises the self-sufficiency of the well-run kitchen, Staindl twice mentions that red colour should be bought in. I am not sure what the ultimate source of this colour would have been, but the mention of a dyed cloth and dissolving it in water suggests it might be what contemporaries called a lac or lake. These could be produced from a number of materials, including kermes beetles and brasilwood, which are reasonably safe to eat. Staindl also mentions brasilwood as an ingredient in another recipe (vii).
The idea of layering colours also features in the Dorotheenkloster MS, though here is is not jellies, but a firm almond mass pressed between wafers. Jellies in contrasting colours also make their appearance in the fifteenth century, notably in the Innsbruck MS where white (almond milk), yellow (saffron), green (parsley) and black (tart cherries or toasted bread) are grouped together. Filling a cup with layers of colour and slicing the resulting jelly is not a great leap to take, and the idea proved popular enough to survive not just into Franz de Rontzier’s 1598 cookbook, but to modern Götterspeise, a perennial children’s favourite layered into serving bowls traffic-light style (cherry, lemon, and woodruff).
Balthasar Staindl’s work is a very interesting one, and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.