Just a short recipe from Solothurn S 392 tonight, another familiar dish:
B36 Item if you want to make good fish in aspic (sultz fisch), mix water and wine together and wash the fish with that. Take their innards (ingereusch) out of the fish and clean it with water. Also, take the scales separately in a cloth and boil that with the fish in the wine and water. Add the innards, and when they are cooked, drain them, put the fish into a serving bowl and let them cool. Then add good vinegar to the cooking liquid and let the broth and everything in it boil well. Season the broth and then strain it (sy den herab). Also let it cool and then pour it over the fish, that ways it will doubtlessly gel. This way, you have good fish in aspic. Do not cover them or they will go rotten (werdent fall) .
B37 But if you want to have the fish aspic transparent, all pure and clear, let them boil very well, and they drop down (? gefallen sich, i.e. let the broth drain), then strain it off and boil it up well and add spices, then pour the broth over the fish and it becomes transparent.
There are many recipes for jellies in the German medieval corpus, usually known as a galrei or sultz. In the way of German culinary terminology, both words can also refer to a thickened spicy sauce, probably because both the sauce and the jelly serve the same purpose: keeping cooked meat or fish fresh by excluding air. Here, the sultz is clearly a jelly.
There is little surprising about the instructions. Boiling specifically the scales and the swim bladder of a fish would dissolve the collagen that caused the broth to congeal as it cooled, creating the solid jelly the cooks aimed for. In a world without refrigeration and standardised ingredients, this did not always work, so the assurance that “it will doubtlessly gel this way” offers important reassurance. Many recipe collections offer nostrums to ensure that jellies congealed, some useful, others dubious. By the sixteenth century, adding isinglass, i.e. the dried swim bladder of sturgeons, to the mix. This provided large amounts of extra collagen.
One aspect of this recipe is new, though: The second part. First, we learn how to make fish jelly, then we get instructions how to make it transparent in a separate entry. It looks like an option, not a regular feature, and very likely initially it was. We are used to the idea of transparent jellies, filtered extensively, and the effect clearly was familiar to cooks early on, but apparently it was not universal. Here, the simple expedient of allowing the impurities to settle and pouring off the clear broth at the top is enough to classify the result as ‘transparent’.
This helps explain why German uses identical words for what we feel are two different dishes, though: They were not that different. A bread sauce galrei was still made on the basis of broth which could congeal, and a meat broth galrei cold still contain enough of what we wold call impurities to make it opaque and viscous. It probably took a significant amount of time for the two to develop separate identities.
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.