Following up yesterday’s recipes for lung in sauce, here are some more ways of turning lung into something more familiar and appreciated:
Lung Kuechlen
clxxx) Take the lung of a lamb, one or two, and chop it very small. Cut the caul fat (netzlin) off a lamb and also cut it very small. Break eggs into it, add a very small amount of cream if you wish, and add grated semel bread. Spice it. Raisins are also good. Then take a mortar. Lean it towards the fire so it heats up. When it is hot, melt fat the size of an egg and pour it into the mortar. Pour the chopped lungs into it. Set it on a low trivet or a griddle so it does not stand on the embers directly. Cover it with a pot lid with hot coals (on top) so it will rise in the mortar. When it if cooked, invert the mortar and shake it. The Kuchen will fall out. You can serve it dry (i.e. without sauce) or cut it in pieces to serve in broth or a gescherb sauce. You can also make this dish with liver.
clxxxi) You can also take (prepare) any kind of filling with a calf’s liver. Also chop it and fry it in a mortar. Pellitory (Berthram) is very good in it if you have it. Chop it, that is very good laid out dry with a roast. Many chop the liver of a lamb. Break eggs into it, spice it, salt it, and take a caul (netzlen). Pour the liver into it and fry it in a pan in hot fat, over the embers, covered with a pot lid. Also serve this dry, with chopped green herbs in it.
Item you take the stomachs (Wampeln und maeglen) of lambs and the guts of sheep. When you prepare the lungs of lambs as described above, pour that into the guts and make sausages, or into the stomachs and boil them in water. When it is boiled, take it out of the stomach, that way the stay (shaped?) like a lung. Serve them in an almond gescherb sauce or in in broth. This is a good mild dish.
Not everything about these recipes is clear, but there are some good instructions and are enough clues to try and reconstruct what we lack. The first is the clearest: It is a variation on the theme of mortar cake. This kind of dish could be made from all kinds of ingredients, held together with eggs and cooked in a greased and heated mortar. Here, the result is going to be a meat loaf made of chopped lung. This could then serve as the basis of several dishes, either served as a main dish in one piece or cut up and served in a broth-based sauce or a gescherb, another common serving sauce which was usually made by cooking apples or onions to a pulp.
The second recipe is less certain. It looks as though a mass of chopped liver is treated much as the lung is, cooked in a mortar and made into a meat loaf, but the description is cursory. It is followed up by another set of instructions in the same paragraph that look like a variant of liver wrapped in caul fat, a very common recipe in fifteenth century sources.
The following paragraph seems to refer back to the earlier recipe with its mention of lung. Presumably, the same mass that is used to make a mortar cake there is here filled into sausage casings or stomachs that are then boiled in water. Sausages using lung as well as liver referenced a lot in our sources, including elsewhere in Staindl, and Leberwurst is, of course, still a prized delicacy in Germany. Here, the finished product is served in a broth or gescherb sauce which is not how we eat liver sausage today and suggests a firmer consistency than as modern paté.
All of these dishes would be made when an animal was slaughtered, from organ meats that needed using up quickly. They would not have lasted long. In a wealthy household, this is what might have been shared with neighbours or given to servants on slaughter day, though if a lamb or calf were served for a feast, they might as well have gone out as side dishes. On an urban market, these meats were cheaper than high-grade roastable muscle meat. Absent spices, poorer people may have eaten similar foods as well.
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.