I’m just back from a trip to the Netherlands preparing a historic Burgundian-themed feast, and the deplorable state of the German railway network made the trip an adventure. I have thus only a short and already familiar recipe today. From Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 cookbook:
A baked dish in Lent
cxxiii) Take roe and chop it, then pound it in a mortar. Take the livers of fish and also their fat and small raisins and chop it all together. Prepare a sheet of dough for it, put the chopped filling on it, bake it in a pan, and serve it warm.
This looks very close to a recipe we find in manuscripts a good century earlier: A fladen topped with fish roe to be eaten in Lent. Fish roe was used for a variety of purposes in Lenten cuisine, sometimes even standing in for egg to bind pastry. Here, it is used more like meat, chopped small to serve as a topping on fladen, a kind of flatbread or proto-pizza dish. Fish liver and fat as well as raisins and, I assume, unmentioned spices would make a flavourful topping, though the combination might not appeal to modern diners. The earlier recipes add flour to bind it, and I believe that may be going unmentioned here. Fish roe once crushed in a mortar becomes almost liquid.
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.