Continuing Balthasar Staindl‘s chapter on fish recipes, here are two more recipes, one using the newly fashionable lemon:
To prepare the back (Grad) of a Danube salmon or another large fish with sauce
cv) Take good wine, half sweet, or if you do not have sweet wine, add sugar. Colour it yellow very well. Chop several onions and one or two peeled apples very small and throw that into the liquid (süppel) coloured yellow. Let it boil for a long time and add mace and good spices. Once the fish is cooked to doneness, let it also boil up in the sauce (süppeln).
Another way of cooking fish in sauce the way cooks usually do it
cvi) Whether it is a back piece (grad), ash, or trout, take the pieces of the fish and salt them nicely. The larger the fish is, the longer it must be left lying in the salt. Then take out the pieces one after the other, wipe off most of the salt with your finger, and lay them into a cauldron or pan. Then add good sweet wine, unboiled, to the fish. (It should be) spiced and coloured yellow. Also add some fried onions and let it all boil together. If the fish is a Danube salmon, it must boil for a long time. Ash, trout, and pike must not boil long. You can cook yellow sauces over fish with lemons, those are very courtly dishes. Cut up the lemons and let them boil in the sauce. When you serve the fish in the sauce, lay slices of lemon all over it (and) ginger on the pieces of fish.
You can also cook fish in black sauces this way, salting them first and boil fish and sauce all together. But more than a back piece (? meer grad ghrädt) it takes spices, wine, and sugar.
Despite the recipe titles suggesting it is specific to a grad (I suspect that means a back piece) of Danube salmon, the recipe is for a very common kind of sauce – apples and onions. Apple-onion sauce (sometimes just onions) is found in most surviving recipe collections, often several times, and often gets named a gescherb or ziseindel, though not by Staindl. It seems to be a stand-by of the period, like the ubiquitous cherry sauce, green sauce, and honey mustard. Here, it is coloured yellow (most likely using expensive saffron, with the specific exhortation of doing so thoroughly) and made with sweet, that is expensively imported, wine and sugar.
The second recipe introduces a different approach, one that Staindl describes as common with cooks, but does not make his own: The fish is salted, then cooked in spiced wine and fried onions. This sauce, too, is coloured yellow, and Staindl suggests adding lemons to it. These were still a novelty, and German cooks of the mid-sixteenth century were generally content to boil them in the sauce. Later recipes use lemon juice as an ingredient on its own. Again, Staindl also states that the fish can be boiled briefly in the sauce, but that doing the same in a black sauce (which he does not describe again) requires adjustments. The text is not entirely clear here, and I suspect it was garbled in transmission or typesetting.
I have yet to try the combination of lemons, wine, sugar, and saffron, and I suspect it will not appeal to me, but it was the height of luxury. Cooked with an assertive sweet-sour note, it might end up reminiscent of some Chinese dishes, though a more plausible interpretation is a spicy, wine-based broth with just a sweet top note and pieces of lemon floating in it.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source 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.