I have another few busy days coming up, so there will be no articles or recipes this weekend. But today, I can give you a short recipe for a galantine of hard-boiled eggs from the Solothurn MS:
B1 A galantine of eggs
Make a good egg galantine this way: Take good, well-boiled broth of veal or other meat, or take good fish broth, season it well with good spices and vinegar, and colour it yellow with saffron. Then take hard-boiled eggs and lay them in the broth, cut into quarters. Let it cool until it congeals. Then you have a good galantine of eggs etc.
Basically, this is a bowlful of quartered hard-boiled eggs covered in jellied meat broth. With the vivid contrast of white and yolk under a golden translucent jelly, it has the potential to look quite striking I am sure, but it raises the question if there was anything medieval German cooks did not think was improved by putting it in aspic.
The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.
The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.
The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.