This is the companion piece to yesterday’s cowberry preserve, a sauce that is clearly culinary:
Sauce of Elderberries
ccxxxvi) Make it this way: Take good, ripe elderberries that are quite black, break them off the stalks, and put them into a clean pot. Set them by the fire, let them boil, and see that they do not burn. Press them out through a linen bag and pour that back into a clean pot (haefelin). Let it boil until it turns as thick as a thin porridge (ain koch). If you want it sweet, add sugar or honey. Let it boil in this for a long time. Keep this and also serve it with roasts. This is good with black dishes (i.e. those cooked with blood).
Cowberry (Paysselbeer) sauce
ccxxxvii) You also use barberries (Saurach, Berberis vulgaris). Boil them in the same way. This is very good for those who suffer severe thirst in illness, but you can also make it sweet with honey, or sugar it.
This looks less like a recipe than a method for turning fruit juices into condiments. The treatment for quinces and apples is not very different, though the result there is not described as a sauce. I suspect the original recipe was medicinal, a fruit juice reduction to preserve the qualities of a seasonal product for use throughout the year, and the addition of sugar or honey may well be later. Interestingly, there is a very similar preparation of redcurrants in Johannes Coler’s Oeconomia which is described in very clearly medical language, but also recorded as making a good dipping sauce.
(…) Pick them after St John’s Day (Johannis i.e. 24 June) when they are quite ripe and press them through a sieve, cloth, or colander (Sieb, Tuch oder Durchschlag). Then put the same juice into a glazed pot and boil it until it turns thick, and add plenty of sugar that must also be boiled and clarified (gereiniget), and use it as a dipping sauce (Einstippe oder Eintuncke) when you eat roast. You may also stir in ground cinnamon if you wish, and nutmeg or mace, you are free to add those, they do not spoil it. This juice cools nicely in summer. (…)
Of course in modern Germany, we prefer a chunky compote of cowberries or redcurrants with dark meat, but the tradition seems to start somewhere around here.
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.