I regret the long hiatus since the last post. Neither my health nor my life currently seem to cooperate with a regular schedule of updates, and I am not sure when I can resume that. For today, I have two recipes from Balthasar Staindl that clear up the identity of the frequently mentioned triget:
To make a spice mix (Species)
ccxlvi) With fish, take four Lot of cinnamon, one and a half Lot of ginger, one Lot of pepper, half a Lot of grains of paradise, galanga, cloves, costmary and nutmeg each the weight of one guilder, and whole saffron, rue, and sanicle (Sanickel, prob. Sanicula europaea) each the weight of two guilders. Soak the saffron and the sanicle in good brandy wine (brannten wein) for one hour or two. Cut the cinnamon, ginger, galanga, and nutmeg and leave the other ingredients uncut. Then put it all together into a mortar and add eight Lot of sugar. Afterwards, pour in the saffron and sanicle together with the brandy and pound it so it becomes very small. Do not sieve it until the saffron and the sanicle are well mixed with all other ingredients, but after that, sieve it. But if it will not pass through, let it stand covered in the sieve or in the sun or a heated room until it turns dry and hard (rösch). Then pound it and sieve it. Mix it all together very thoroughly. You can use a little sugar with it or not, as you please.
To make Triget
ccxlvii) Take two Lot of white ginger, four Lot of cinnamon, the long kind, half a Lot of mace, and make a powder of all of it. Take two times as much sugar as there is of spices, but if you do not want it so sweet, use less sugar, or if you want it sweeter, use more. This is good with toasted bread.
Spice mixes were popular in medieval and early modern German elite cuisine, and we often find instructions how to prepare them, though they do not all agree. It is likely that there were different recipes in circulation, and – as suggested here – proportions were varied according to taste. These powders could also be bought from apothecaries, but at least the owners of cookbooks seem to have thought it preferable to make them at home.
I already wrote about the popular fifteenth-century trysenet. These recipes date to a century later and introduce an interesting, potentially new technique. The first recipe is for species, which simply means spice, a mixture for fish. The mix is complex and I have never tried it, so I cannot speak to its taste. What is interesting to me is that it uses alcohol to extract the aromas of sanicle and saffron. The word brannten wein is a reference to distilled liquor that was most likely fresh and very high-proof, more like grappa than the cask-aged drink we know as Branntwein today. The liquid plays no role in the final product. It is evaporated completely, the result is a dry powder.
The second recipe for triget is simpler and much more conventional. It looks like a direct descendant of trysenet, having lost some complexity and added sugar content in the intervening years. Similar recipes show up under names like salsamentum in other works, and to this day German children enjoy a mixture of sugar and cinnamon, sometimes livened up with ginger, nutmeg, or cloves, on rice pudding and pancakes.
If you intend to replicate the mixes, the units are reasonably straightforward. The Lot and pound most likely refer to a local trade weight. These differed from town to town, but were broadly in the region of 450-500 grammes. A Lot was 1/32 of a pound and thus around 15-18 grammes. A Gulden is harder to parse, but most likely refers to the long-established gold coin of that name, not the silver one just coming into circulation. That would put its weight just over 3 grammes (legally 3.278 grammes between 1490 and 1559, though this probably varied a fair bit in practice). I doubt most cooks had access to a set of scales that weighed this precisely anyway.
Triget, the easier flavour, would thus be 30 grammes of ginger, 60 grammes of cinnamon, 7-8 grammes of mace, and about 200 grammes of sugar. That is stronger than most modern Zimtzucker mixes, but still recognisably similar, and very good.
Species would consist of about 60 grammes of cinnamon, 22.5 grammes of ginger, 15 grammes of pepper, 7.5 grammes of grains of Paradise (also known as Melegueta pepper, a West African spice), 3.2 grammes each of galanga, cloves, costmary and nutmeg, and 6.5 grammes of saffron, rue, and sanicle, the last three steeped in alcohol before being ground up. It may need saying that rue is not recommended for pregnant people and sanicle, while not poisonous, is not considered a food plant today.
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.