Another instance of that expression hafen braten (pot roast) in Solothurn S 293:
B35 If you want to make fish roasted in a pot (fisch in hafen braten), take onions and cut them separately, and also boil the fish separately, season them well and with good vinegar, and pour them out on a serving bowl. Pick out the bones, and boil them up in the onion (sauce). That way, you have good hafen braten of fish.
This is another one of those recipes that is moderately interesting on its own, but more so in combination with others. Specifically, I am interested in the word hafen braten, literally a pot roast (though it probably does not mean what we call that today). The word is fairly rare in High German, but it is the exact equivalent of the Low German grapdenbraden which is one of those foods that shows up in hundreds of records, but is defined nowhere. I suspect that the South German recipes hold clues to this, though I cold, of course, be completely wrong.
It occurs in another recipe in connection with meat, but unfortunately there it serves as a reference for the size of pieces. Here, though the recipe is for fish, we get a clearer idea of what a hafen braden is: pieces of meat (in this case exceptionally fish) cooked in a sauce, in one pot. I can imagine grapen braden working much the same way.
The sauce in this case is made with onions, and while the description of what to do with them is extremely cursory, we can refer to other recipes from later sources how such onion sauces were made. The onions would be chopped finely, sautéed, then cooked in liquid until they were soft. The resulting sauce can be made more homogenous by passing it through a sieve, but I am not sure that was desired. It is certainly not necessary.
Onion sauces are often mentioned with fish, but they were not limited to it. Rather, one of my favourite Latin recipes from the early fourteenth century combines such a sauce – with a very specific spice mix – with meat, specifically rabbit, kid, or lamb. This is not what I envision grapen braden was – the process is too involved and the ingredients too luxurious for something this ubiquitous – but it probably resembled it to a degree. Onion sauces are very tolerant of long cooking times and wold easily serve for tougher cuts that needed slow cooking. They would work as well in a thick metal grapen as in a ceramic cookpot more commonly used in the kitchens of South Germany.
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.