Life has not let up much, but I have a brief recipe today.
A capon soup with cheese
clxxxix) Boil the capon in its own broth. Pour the broth onto toasted semel slices. Take good Wendish cheese or some other good cheese, grate it, and sprinkle (read streu for schneid) it onto the soup and sprinkle mild spices on them. Cover it with a second bowl and thus serve your capon.
This is the kind of plain, but refined dish we can imagine served to a wealthy person dining alone, or having a light lunch. It is basically Suppe; meat broth served over bread, the everyday food of much of Germany. In this case, made with a capon, served over fine white semel bread, and sprinkled with spices, it is a meal for the ruling class. Reconstructing it today is fairly easy: chicken broth is served over slices of crusty white bread. The cheese is a slight challenge. ‘Wendish’ suggests an origin from what is today northeastern Germany, an area where a now extinct West Slavic language was still widely spoken, but what kind of cheese Staindl means by this is not explained anywhere.
A small detail adds a glimpse of historic kitchen craft: the soup is covered with a second bowl for serving. This is frequently depicted in art and seems to have been the standard method of keeping dishes warm and protected during transport from the kitchen to the table. Serving bowls are sometimes recorded as coming in pairs, and a few examples even have a raised lip around the rim to lock with their mate. As today’s illustration from the fifteenth-century Hofämterspiel (today held at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna) shows, the method could be adapted to acrobatic displays of skill that rivals modern restaurant servers. It shows the Truchsess serving a ceremonial meal.
This is not a depiction of a food server. The Truchsess was a senior court official of the Holy Roman Empire whose ceremonial duties included serving food to the emperor. The office was hereditary to Elector Count Palatine of the Rhine and by the time this image was most likely created was held by Frederick I the Victorious. There is no reason to think this is meant to represent him personally though. The Hofämterspiel depicts offices, not individuals.
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.