In honour of the day, I am once more departing from the Feeding the Revolution series to bring you a fragment from the rich non-recipe manuscript tradition of medieval Europe. I referred before to the Scottish (or Saxon?) dish and the April fish from the Liber de ferculis malis. This story needed piecing together from two distinct sources.
In a manuscript of the Ulenspiegel tales dating to the early sixteenth century, a marginal gloss preserves a cryptic instruction:
Du schal nene flasken eden in dinem brode as ein Dene
You shall not eat bottles in your bread like a Dane.
The diction is very similar to the Wahre Hovescheit, a fifteenth-century manual of good manners which includes a number of such admonitions citing various professions and nationalities: Do not spread butter with your thumb like a Frisian, drink from bowls like a Wend, or warm your fingers in your armpits like a fisherman. This one is not included in the surviving manuscript, and neither does it make any sense. Who would eat bottles in bread? What does ‘in bread’ mean anyway?
A possible answer is offered by the Möllner Panglossicum Strigospecularium, a late sixteenth-century collection of quotes from earlier literature much of which is lost today. It includes the following lines which I would suggest must have been familiar to the anonymous glossator:
Pleno foro edunt butelli rubri inpositi in panes quasi dicitur vulgo semil id est similia, longiori sunt quam nostri. Sinapi salatibus cucumeribusqve condiant et ceppi in larido sartagine assati superponunt. Et porcellum baubantum vulgo varkelen ille odiosum valde laudant. E carro venditi calidi vidi.
In the marketplace, they eat red sausages (butelli) placed inside breads like those commonly called semil that is similia which are longer than those common with us. They season them with mustard and salted cucumbers and place onions fried with lard in a pan on top. And they greatly praise this disgusting barking piglet (porcellum, commonly varkelen). I have seen them being sold hot out of carts.
Clearly, whoever read this when they glossed the Ulenspiegel was unfamiliar with the Latin expression butellum for a sausage. It is etymologically related to the word bottle (budel in Middle Low German), so the mistake is easy to make. That said, there are problems with the Latin quote that go beyond this faulty translation.
The quote is incomplete, and the short introduction in the Panglossicum is little help. According to the marginal notes, it was taken from:
Itinerarium regni Dannorum ab Caroli Balnearioli vulgo Badeker scriptum a.u.c. mdcccxxxiii
An account of a journey to the kingdom of the Danes written by Carolus Balneariolus, commonly Badeker, in the year 1833 after the founding of Rome
This is pretty atrocious Latin and not very good Low German, either. The name is derived from balnearius, the bathhouse attendant (Bader), with an added diminutive, and the proper Low German form should be Baderken. If we take the date seriously – which was clearly deduced and added by the compiler in the sixteenth century – it is unlikely we are looking at a family name this early. Even allowing for a broad estimate, this places the author in the second half of the eleventh century, a remarkably early time for travelogue writing. Beyond this, we are dependent on speculation. Might the text have been produced for Adam of Bremen as part of producing his Gesta Hammaburgensis? He includes a large amount of information about Denmark and Sweden in his work, not all of which he likely collected himself. A balnearius, a bath attendant, had a place in both monastic communities and ecclesiastical courts.
The use of the word semil to describe the bread may be a problem with this interpretation., It is a South German word derived from the Latin similum, with the northern equivalent being wegg(h)e. Both describe particularly fine, white breadrolls in individual portion sizes. However, since we know little about the origin of most of the senior clergy of northern Germany, it is entirely plausible the author could have been educated at one of the major centres of learning in the south.
The presence of cucumbers equally presents a problem since these are not generally thought to have been present in Germany until the 15th century. Might the text be misattributed, of a much later date? It is possible, though by the fifteenth century, Denmark was a familiar neighbour, no longer the subject of ethnographic writing in Germany. Equally, this may be an early reference to their appearance, associated with West Slavic cultures from where they were adopted into German and Danish cuisine. Another plausible explanation is that the word refers to a different plant, as it most likely did in classical Latin. Some variety of gourd may be meant.
Finally, it is very hard to see what the author may have meant by a ‘barking piglet’. The expression seems intended as a euphemism, but it is hard to imagine anyone eating dog sausages sold hot from carts. One might speculate that this is a dig at residual pagan practices, but 1080 would be very late for this and the stereotypical sign of pagan barbarism to medieval Western Christians was eating horse, not dog. The combination with elongated fine breadrolls and condiments suggests that this was a luxurious dish. Pork seems an appropriate choice of meat. Neither need we assume the ‘red’ to be a reference to a blood sausage. It is not clear how it was achieved, but the colouration clearly was important to the observer and must have been different to the sausages he knew, and perhaps ate, in Germany. Red sausages eaten in long breadrolls with mustard, cucumbers (if that is what they are) and fried onions – one can see the appeal.