culina vetus

I was rather busy yesterdayand couldn’t finish my post, so I’ll give you my brief report today. I tried out the recipe from the Dorotheenkloster MS I posted two weeks ago:

92 Of young white cabbage (kraut)

Take young white cabbage and cut it into wedges. Lay it in the pot and let it boil, then pour off the water. Have ready boiled meat in a different pot, mutton or beef, and lay the meat in with the cabbage. Then take eggs and boil them hard. Peel them and fry them in a pan whole. When the meat and the cabbage are nearly boiled, put in the eggs and hard cheese and let it boil together again. Make it quite fat. But if you do not want to cook it with meat, put on eggs prepared in the pan as described before and the cheese, and serve it.

I speculated about the form this dish was supposed to take back then, and it made me sufficiently curious to want to try it out. Two shopping trips later, I got started. For meat, I opted for a pound of stewing-grade mutton which was likely still a lot nicer than what medieval people got from sheep primarily kept for milk and wool. The cabbage wasa small head Spitzkohl, a type of white cabbage with looser leaves than the typical heads we get today, though I suppose savoy cabbage would also do fine. The eggs were free-range chicken eggs, larger than the ones the original would have used, and the cheese leftover Babybel snack cheese because I needed a way to get rid of it now my son decided he no longer likes it. This is not as far off the mark as one would think; A ‘hard’ cheese in medieval terms would be one that held together as a loaf, not necessarily something like parmeggiano or Schabziger. We know from later documents that relatively soft, mild and fat cheeses were popular. While this was still a long way from the industrial pellets I used, it would not be a different world. That said, I believe the cheese is the place where this recipe can be most effectively varied and improved.

My first assumption was that the recipe decribed slow stewing, perhaps in the ubiquitous pottery cookpots stood by the embers or in a thick-walled brass vessel. I oped for a cast-iron pot to replicate the process and first simmered the coarsely chopped cabbage in salt water. Meanwhile, I also cooked the meat, again a slow simmer in salt water, though this likely would be and probably was improved by adding root vegetables and onions. After draining and cursorily squeezing out the cabbage, I returned it to the pot together with the meat and its broth and kept it simmering away for about an hour. At that point,l the meat was very tender, the cabbage soft and almost gelatinous, and the broth had reduced to a small amount of intensely flavourful sauce.

I was unsure what frying hard-boiled eggs in a pan would achieve and found that this is actually difficult to do. They stick, the white tears off on patches, and any browning is uneven. I suspect it was meant to be done with much more fat than I used, and I could see it working very well if the egg were floating in hot oil. I did not care for the taste much, though. Adding the cheese to the hot cabbage was a success. I was uncertain what it would do, and positively surprised that it melted and dissolved, coating the cabbage and imparting its flavour and richness. I decided no further addition of fat was needed, though dependsing on the proportion of vegetable to meat and cheese this might well be called for. I had a very generous 500g of meat (including bone) to 1.2kg of cabbage and about 100g of cheese, and it was very rich.

The resulting dish was very far from where upper class medieval cuisine usually takes us. There’s no play of colours, no blend of spices, no smooth texture or appealing shape. It was, however, a very satisfying meal for a cold night served with fresh brown bread (made with German Type 1050 wheat flour, broadly similar to fine bread by medieval lights). While not upper-class cuisine, this was in no way a poor meal. Eating like this took resources not everyone had. It may reflect the way rich people ate on a daily basis more accurately than many more commonly found recipes involving luxurious ingredients.

This first trial can be improved. Above all, the dish can use more seasoning, and there’s every reason to think that would have happened. Whether through vegetables cooked with the meat or seasonings added to the cabbage, this is an easy dish to liven up. I would suggest depth through a bunch of Suppengrün (carrot, parsley, leek, and celeriac) and some pepper and caraway at the end.

The flavour of mutton came through surprisingly weakly, and leaving out the meat in exchange for more cheese would not be an issue. Adding a different kind of cheese is likely to do the most good. I don’t think a very mature cheese would do much good – it would be hard tro melt and the nuances of flavour will be lost – but something with more character should do fine. The dish certainly can take it.

The Dorotheenkloster MS is a collection of 268 recipes that is currently held at the Austrian national library as Cod. 2897. It is bound together with other practical texts including a dietetic treatise by Albertus Magnus. The codex was rebound improperly in the 19th century which means the original order of pages is not certain, but the scripts used suggest that part of it dates to the late 14th century, the remainder to the early 15th century.

The Augustine Canons established the monastery of St Dorothea, the Dorotheenkloster, in Vienna in 1414 and we know the codex was held there until its dissolution in 1786, when it passed to the imperial library. Since part of the book appears to be older than 1414, it was probably purchased or brought there by a brother from elsewhere, not created in the monastery.

The text was edited and translated into modern German by Doris Aichholzer in „wildu machen ayn guet essen…“Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Erstedition Übersetzung, Kommentar, Peter Lang Verlag, Berne et al. 1999 on pp. 245-379.