This is a short post, because life has been leaving me little time for long ones. I will be very busy for the coming week and a half, and not sure I will be able to post anything, but here at least is a recipe from the Solothurn MS:
B7 A yellow pepper sauce
If you want to make a yellow pepper sauce (to serve) over fish, take bread and grate it on an iron grater. Lay it in warm water to soften it and pass it through a cloth. Then take pepper and saffron and add it, and set it on the coals. Stir it continuously and add a glass of verjuice so it turns sour, or use vinegar.
If we go by surviving recipes and mentions, bread-bound pepper sauce was the ketchup of medieval German upper-class cooking. Everybody knew how to make it, and it went with just about anything. There is considerable variety in the recipes though, so we may really be talking about a broad category of sauces. This recipe adds an interesting detail about the preparation process: The bread is first soaked and strained, then added to the other ingredients and boiled. This is likely to improve consistency, removing the gritty feel many modern eaters dislike about bread-bound foods. Other than that, this is as unexcitingly ubiquitous as it gets.
I hope to be back with stories about making fun of Prussian officers when I am back at my keyboard reliably. Until then, I must ask for your patience.
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.