Here is another recipe from the Solothurn S 392 manuscript with parallels in several other sources that are not otherwise closely related:
B23 Krapfen (filled fritters) in Lent
Take nuts and figs and pound them small together, spice it, and colour it well with saffron. Lay it in a pan, add butter (ancken), and wrap it (read bewindts for erwels) in a leavened (erhebten) dough in the manner of krapfen, and fry it in butter or oil. Serve it cold.
The recipe is both promising and interesting: Figs and nuts, probably walnuts, pounded into a paste, spiced, and possibly fried, then wrapped in a leavened dough to make fritters. We rarely have any information on the dough fritters are made with. Here, while we do not know what kind of leavening was used, we can speculate about yeast or sourdough cultures. I come down on the side of yeast.
Further, there are several parallel instances of this recipe. The first is again in the Meister Hans collection of 1460:
Recipe #114 von krappfen fuell
Of filling for fried pastries
Item pound nut kernels and figs together in a mortar and season it well and colour it and place it in a pan. Pour oil with it and boil it up and put it into the pastries (krapffen). Make a dough of white leaven (vrhab) and fry it in oil and serve it cold.
This version contains the key information that the filling is actually fried, not just mixed with the butter or oil. The change from oil to butter may reflect an actual shift in custom as dairy products were exempted from Lenten prohibitions for the Holy Roman Empire in the late 15th century. Butter would certainly improve the taste compared to the oil that would have been available north of the Alps at the time.
There are two more parallels, though. One comes from the Rheinfränkisches Kochbuch dated to the 1440s:
1 If you would make small fritters (kreppelin) in Lent, take nuts and figs and pound them small with each other and season it according to your will and heat it in oil and fry them (wrapped) in a leavened (erhabendem) dough in the way of kreppelin (modern German Krapfen) in a pan and serve them cold at the table, those are well-tasting fritters.
The other is from the Munich-held Cgm 384, another early recipe collection from the Western parts of South Germany:
64 Fritters (krapfen) in Lent
Make fritters in Lent thus: Take green nuts and figs and pound them together, and season that and lay them in a pan in oil or fat so that it boils up. Afterwards, wrap them in leavened (erhabem) dough in the way of krapfen and fry them. Serve them cold or in a pepper sauce.
Here, interestingly, the instruction is to use oil or fat and the fritters are served either cold – the universal instruction elsewhere – or in a pfeffer sauce, that is, warm. Also, the nuts are described as ‘green’, which may just mean they are previously unprocessed, but could also refer to unripe nuts which, presumably, would have been leached and pickled before. Otherwise, they are fairly inedible. Certainly, it is an interesting exercise in tracing the descent of recipes as pieces of literature – texts with a specific wording rather than just technical data – and how they change over time.
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.