A short recipe today, and one not strictly culinary. Staindl gives instructions how to distill a spice-flavoured schnaps he calls Güldin wasser:
Golden water
ccxlviii) Item take one kandel of Malmasier (malmsey wine) or muscatel wine and one quarter more of the best kind of (ordinary) wine you can get. Take three Lot of sage, a handful of lavender, and also spikenard flower if you can have it, one Lot of ginger, one Lot of cloves, one Lot of galanga, one Lot of grains of paradise, one Lot of mace, a good handful of anise, as much coriander, one Lot of raisins (Zytweben), one Lot of long pepper, one Lot of zeodary, and one Lot of nutmeg. Put all the spices together into a fine linen bag and put it in the wine as described above. Let it steep (waychen) in it for two or three weeks. After that, take the spices, pound them small in a mortar, this will become like a puree (mueß). Then put it back into the wine it has lain in before. Then put it into a distilling vessel (außbrenn zeug), the kind you distill brandy wine in is best. You must catch the heads (den vorschuß) separately in a glass and keep it in that, and also keep the tails (den letzten schuß) separately. Such waters are good for people to take who have internal illnesses, and they also strengthen the heart.
German cookery books do not often contain distilling recipes. These typically are found in separate works, some of them written by physicians and treated as medical texts. However, the overlap clearly existed, especially in wealthy rural households people did their own distilling, and sometimes we encounter such descriptions. This one is particularly detailed, to the point of allowing us to actually produce the beverage.
The most notable feature of this particular mix is how extremely luxurious it is. Many householders, even middle-class families, owned distilling apparatus and made liquor for sale, but few could possibly have produced this. I wonder whether the main reason anyone would do it in-house was that they did not trust the apothecary to use the required quality of wine. Malmasier or Malvasier, malmsey wine, was a rich, sweet wine imported from the Eastern Mediterranean and easily the most expensive kind you could find. Even just a kandel – a little over a litre – of it was a considerable expense when you consider how little you would notice its qualities once the distillation was finished. A quarter – 0.27 litres – of regular high-end wine was added and it is rather hard to see why.
The total amount of aromatics added is striking. A Lot is about 15-18 grammes, and that amount is added of ginger, cloves, galanga, grains of paradise, mace, anise, coriander, raisins, long pepper, zeodary, and nutmeg in addition to 45-50 grammes of sage and an unspecified ‘handful’ of lavender and spikenard flower (probably Valeriana celtica). Incidentally, while we rarely meet long pepper in culinary contexts, it does show up in medicinal recipes quite often. With a solid two to three weeks of steeping and being added to the distilling vessel, these aromas must have been quite overpowering.
The process of distilling is taken as familiar which was probably a safe bet in the mid-sixteenth century. It is interesting that Staindl explicitly points out that the heads (the first distillate to come out) and the tails (the final distillate before the still runs dry) must be kept separate. These parts contain high concentrations of unwanted chemicals, among them methanol, and are regularly discarded by modern distillers. Professionals would have known this – there were technical terms for both – but perhaps not everyone did or cared.
Is it culinary history, though? I would say yes. The recipe clearly has medicinal origins, but throughout the long history of flavoured schnaps, they were drunk socially and for pleasure. It was customary in Germany well into the twentieth century for men to carry flasks of herbal liquor to use and offer others when faced with stress, shock, or worry: ‘strengthening the heart’ in sixteenth-century language.
A word of warning, though: If you intend to try out this recipe, take both legal and technical advice beforehand. I have made floral waters, cosmetic scents, and medicinal liquor from historic recipes, but this required a permit from the authorities and I never felt confident enough to actually offer anyone any of the results to drink. It is easy to produce undrinkable and even outright poisonous results, easier yet to end up on the wrong side of local law.
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.