Raisins were one of the more understated luxury items of medieval German cuisine. Most of them were imported, but the Solothurn S 392 recipe collection contains this fascinating recipe:
B14 Of ugesicke (uva sicca – raisins)
If you want to make ugesicke, take of the good, sweet, white grapes and let the grapes lie in the sun for 2 days. Turn them over often, and do that for 2 days in succession. Then, after the bread is taken out of the oven, take the grapes and lay them into the oven over small sticks so they do not touch the bottom. Let them lie in it overnight and turn them over once, and then no more.
This demonstrates the ingenuity and skill of medieval cooks as well as the reason why raisins were usually imported. Drying grapes at scale requires sustained dry, warm weather which north of the Alps was not something you could reliably expect. That is why raisins, along with dried figs and dates, were usually imported from the Mediterranean and some recipes even specify Italian (welsche) ones. However, unlike figs and dates, grapes grew in the warmer parts of Germany. The climate just was not conducive to drying them.
This recipe presents the solution: You begin by drying the grapes in the sun, then transfer them to a bread oven after baking. Bread was normally baked in thermal-mass ovens which were first heated by lighting a fire inside, them removing the cinders and baking the bread in the heat radiating from the oven’s walls and floor. Much of this heat remained after the bread was finished, and at this stage you could still bake pies or flat cakes, dry fruit and vegetables, or keep pots warm. The floor was still hottest, so sensitive things like grapes needed to be kept off it, but it was no longer so hot it could set alight branches, so they were used as a bottom layer. The instruction to turn them over exactly once suggests practical experience.
And then there is the title: ugesicke. Nothing at all suggests that this is raisins, which are typically called versions of Rosine, Weinbeere or Zibebe. Of course it makes sense as a creative rendering of uva sicca – dried grapes – but really only once you already know what it is. Without that, it is just another reminder to not trust German recipe names, ever, to usefully identify or describe what a dish actually is.
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.