Just a brief recipe today, and a reminder how much food preparation was seasonal work. Balthasar Staindl on smoking hams and the heads of pigs:
Pigs’ heads and hams
clix) (They are) cleanly salted and left to lie. In March, they are washed by a clean creek, cleanly scraped and washed so the salt is removed everywhere. Then they are hung up with string and juniper berries (kramatsber) put over them and attached (? befest). Do not smoke them too much, this way they turn out flavourful (rößlet) and taste good.
Early winter was the traditional season for slaughtering pigs, and much of the meat was salted away to east over the year. Here, we learn how and when to take some of it out of the salt and hung up to smoke. March was the tail end of winter, a cold Month, but not freezing, and you could expect rivers to be flowing again as the snow and ice melted. Now we can envision household servants of the urban upper class busily scrubbing and scraping salted pigs’ heads in the cold snowmelt and wrapping them with juniper branches. The smoking process is glossed over here, but we have more detailed instructions in other sources. The berries, of course, were dried – no fresh ones will grow in March – and I assume that befest, which means attached or fastened, means they were dried on whole branches which were then tied to the meat rather than ground up and rubbed over it as we do today. The meat is smoked until it is rößlet, a very general word derived from resch. This can mean spicy, crunchy, or savoury and really fills a niche modern German does not.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
In German, we say “das ist mir Wurst“, it is sausage to me, to mean that we do not care about something. These are sausage to Balthasar Staindl, though we would not necessarily call all of these dishes Wurst today:
Of sausages. Good sausages of the meat of lamb lungs.
clxii) Wash them or (?and) chop them very small. When it is very finely chopped, take the caul (netz) of the lamb as fat and also chop it into that. Break eggs into it and add a very small amount of cream. Add a little of the blood and spices. Add raisins. Then take the guts of the lamb or its stomach, or the gut of a calf or the thin gut of a cow. Fill it into these, but not fully, and boil it. To serve over these sausages, you make a gescherb sauce or a pfefferlin sauce with the cooking liquid, or whatever (else) you may want. You can serve these to a woman in childbed.
Sausages of veal
clxiii) Take roasting-grade meat of the veal Diechbraten (prob. leg). These sausages are for roasting and not for boiling first. Chop it very small as you do for meatballs (knoedlen) and chop the fat of a calf with it. Then also chop mace, peppercorns, and salt. Then take the caul (netz) of the calf if you can spread it (? so geets auseinander). Then take the chopped meat and lay it out lengthwise on the caul, but cut it off (at the ends) so it becomes rounded like a sausage. Tie it round and round and round with string and bend it like a sausage. If the caul is large, you can make three sausages in it. Then take a pan. You must add eggs and cream to the chopped meat and put it into the caul as is described above. Do not scald it too long, then roast it for a while until the caul bends of its own accord (?). After it is roasted, take off the string. Serve it on root vegetables. Cut it in slices and lay it all around a platter on the outside.
Of veal and beef sausages made from lung and liver
clxiiii) Take the liver of a beef (Rind) and also the lung. Chop each very small separately, then chop both together. Place them in a vat (Muelter), salt it, add pepper powder and take a small amount of good fat (lit: a good lesser fat, guets gerings faist). Cut that into it, not too small or it will boil away completely. Then pour on sweet cream and stir it together. Next, take the wide guts of an ox and put it into those, but properly loosely packed (eerlich laer). Tie it up with a string and scald it. These sausages are very good served on kraut or rueben, they are very mild. You can also make sausages of a calf’s liver, with or without cream.
To make a Lungel of beef
clxv) Take the stümpffel that is at the back of the mollen braten (molle can refer to a cow or calf, but here clearly means a cut, possibly from the rump) or any other tender (marbs) piece of the Diech (prob. leg). Chop it small. When it is chopped thoroughly, also chop fat into it. Break eggs into it and make it as thick as a choux pastry (pranter taig). You can also well add some cream, that only makes them milder. Have this chopped meat (ghaeckts) also encased in a gut, tie it at the ends, boil it, then slice it and serve a pfefferlin sauce over it. But if you want it in the gut (missing word: separated?), you must wrap it like a dumpling (knoedlein) in boiling water. You must wrap it large (in large pieces?). When you serve it, cut them apart from each other. This is a good dish if you have no venison. Serve a yellow or black pfefferlin sauce over it. You can also prepare this dish as described above from deer venison.
These are four recipes for rather different kinds of sausage, but apparently a good cook was expected to manage all four, and notably none are meant to be smoked and stored, but eaten immediately.
Recipe clxii is for a lung sausages. These are quite commonly found in German recipe sources, and I guess it is because you had to find a way of using the bitsnobody really liked to eat. German has no word for ‘offal’, it is all meat, but some meats are better than others, and lungs are very far down list. Here, the lungs are chopped together with caul fat and mixed with eggs, cream, and blood. Since we have no exact proportions, it is hard to guess what the final consistency is going to be, but my guess is closer to a red Grützwurst, coloured with blood, than a blood sausage proper. There is no mention of any cereal, though this was common in German organ meat sausages at the time, and it may go unmentioned here. The sausage is seasoned with unspecified spices and with raisins – still a component in some traditional North German recipes – and boiled to be served with spicy fruit or pepper sauce. Gescherb, a fruit and/or onion sauce, and pfefferlin, a thickened spice sauce, are as much standard in sixteenth century cuisine as ketchup and mustard are today.
In recipe clxiii, the quality shifts and we have a dish made of high-grade muscle meat. With the addition of eggs and cream, we might call this a meat loaf rather than a sausage, but Staindl uses an earlier, broader concept here. Fine meat, most likely from the leg (that is what diech usually means), is chopped very fine with fat, has egg and cream added, and is seasoned with pepper and mace, a sharp mixture that would also not interfere with the fairly light, creamy colour of the dish. It is wrapped in caul, not in guts, which was commonly done with dishes meant for roasting. Stabilised by being wrapped in string, these sausages were then cooked, apparently first given a quick scalding, then roasted over the coals. We see that they are done by how they bend (sich selbst beügt). I have not worked with similar recipes enough to understand this, but this is the kind of thing cooks were trained to observe and it would make sense to anyone in the know. Finally, the sausage is unwrapped, sliced, and arranged around a dish of rüben. This could refer to any number of root vegetables, from turnips to carrots and skirrets, and was generally thought of as a peasant dish. Very likely, this is a playful way of imitating common foods with expensive ingredients.
Recipe clxiiii returns to organ meats with a mix of liver and lung that I suspect is rather close to Leberwurst. Lung and liver chopped very finely, interspersed with larger chunks of fat and cream to carry flavour, suggests a soft consistency. The sausages are also cooked in the inedible large intestines Leberwurst traditionally is and served over kraut (leafy greens) or rüben (root vegetables), two quintessential peasant dishes. The expression gering faists is interesting. It could be a misunderstanding or misprint, but it suggests some hierarchy of animal fats. Here, something less desirable would do fine.
Recipe clxv is made with muscle meat again. Staindl calls it a Lungel, but it has no connection with lungs. Instead, it looks like a bratwurst sausage: It consists of high-grade meat, and a closer study of the various terms for cuts would probably clarify exactly which. Fat, egg, and cream, along with presumably salt and spices, are added and the mass, of a fairly thick consistency comparable to a choux pastry batter, boiled in gut casings. The description of how to cook it in separate segments is quite convoluted and potentially garbled, and may mean nothing more than making short sausage links, though it may also describe a distinctive shape I do not know. Once cooked, the sausages are served with a thoroughly unexceptional yellow or black pfeffer sauce.
All these are sausages to eat fresh and would have been available within a few days of slaughter, as an animal was processed. They are also clearly thought of as fit for a wealthy table, despite the deliberate appearance of rusticity. They may well be a good approximation of the sausages eaten as feast day fare by the peasantry, though with the addition of spices and refinements that probably did not grace village tables.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
I am sorry for yet another long silence and must say that, for reasons mostly good, there are more demands on my time coming up and I expect more such dry spells. However, I will continue to try and post as I can. Today, there are two recipes for venison party from Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 cookbook:
Hot venison pastries
cxli) Of deer or roe deer. When the pastries are made with rye flour, take the venison and singe it. Make two long cuts into it, wash it in three or four changes of water, and take fresh oxmeat. Chop that and a little bacon with it. Add a handful of marjoram, (the meat is) salted and seasoned (with) ginger, pepper, and other spices mixed together. Moisten it a little with vinegar, and see no bone is in the pastry. You can also add lemons. Let it bake for three hours and serve it warm.
…
Cold venison pastry
cl) Take the venison when it is scummed (verfaimt), larded lengthwise so the bacon reaches well into the meat. Salt it and spice it with twice as much pepper. Then take ginger, mix the spices together, and when the meat is seasoned well, it is laid into the dough thus dry. The dough must be made of rye flour. It must not be auff dönet (raised?) but you must use a finely bolted rye flour kneaded with hot water and worked thoroughly. Then take the dough, roll it out flat and broad, lay the above described venison on it, and fold the (dough) sheet over it the way you make krapfen. Let it bake this way for two hours. It is also good, if you want it, to take fat meat and lard it (with that?).
These two recipes are interesting because they are so similar – they are large pieces of venison baked in a rye crust – but differ in crucial details because one is meant to be served hot, i.e. immediately, the other cold.
Recipe cxli is not easy to fully interpret. I think the idea is to have a piece of venison with two long, deep scores along it that are filled with a mixture of beef and bacon. The whole is seasoned with marjoram and spices, drizzled with vinegar, wrapped in a rye dough, optionally with lemon slices, and baked. This would be sliced and served out at the table, hence the admonition to have no bone in it.
Recipe cl is simpler: the meat is parboiled (most likely to clean rather than cook it) and larded through along its long axis, making sure the fat reaches all the way inside. Rubbed with spices, it is wrapped in the dough dry and cooked for a long time. This could be kept for a while and cut open as needed, and it would be rather similar to a roast in its flavour profile. It is also very similar to one of my favourites from a century earlier.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
clxxviii) Take half a pound of almonds, three small egg yolks are added to it, and chicken liver, (grated) semel bread as much as two eggs, and two pfenning worth of cream. Then take the broth of old hens, well boiled, and pass the pounded almonds through a cloth with it, or take young chickens. Then take cinnamon, cloves, and salt in measure. Then lay the chicken meat that has been boiled before into the broth and let it warm up together. See the broth is not too thin. It should not have any colour from spices except that which is written above (i.e. do not add saffron). Serve it.
I started out with a rather small bird, the kind we call a Suppenhuhn in German, and boiled it for broth. My schedule required me to do this in intervals, so it must have been five or six hours altogether, and I suspect actually simmering it overnight would produce better results. As it was, I was left with about 1.2 litres of dark amber broth and a thoroughly cooked, sodden chicken. I stripped the meat for later use and discarded the skin and bones.
The next morning, I made almond milk from the broth and about 100g of blanched, chopped almonds in my blender. I only strained it through a sieve rather than a cloth because I was pressed for time, but though some small pieces of almond remained in the soup, that did not turn out to matter very much. I returned it to the stove and, once it was boiling hot, threw in about two tablespoons of dry grated bread which I stirred in and then smoothed out with a stick blender. The proper method would be straining it, but I lacked the patience.
Next, it was cream – about 100g – salt, cloves, and cinnamon. It came out tasting cohesive and smooth, but the scent of cinnamon was jarring to my modern expectations. Finally, I decided the yolks of two medium-sized eggs would be more than enough to thicken it, and I was right. The result was a creamy, rich soup. It tasted good enough that even my eight-year-old son, despite the alternative option of storebought tortellini, opted for it. With the meat added in to heat through, he cast the deciding vote for (modern) rice over (historically accurate) bread as an accompaniment.
The result is a lovely dish for cold, wet days, though one very rich in animal fat and protein and markedly lacking in vegetables. Adding some peas and carrots would make it almost a modern Hühnerfrikassee. I could also see it as a first course in modern ‘historic’ feasts, though it probably functioned as a standalone meal originally.
The previous day, place the chicken in a pot with the whole, peeled onion and cover with water. Salt lightly and simmer for several hours in a closed pot. Allow to cool, remove the chicken, and pick off the meat. Refrigerate meat and broth (or keep on the balcony, in German October).
Heat the broth in a pot and place the almonds in a blender. Add the hot broth to the blender, process thoroughly, and return to the pot straining through a fine sieve or cloth. Return the liquid to a full boil and stir in breadcrumbs, blending or mashing as required, until they fully dissolve. Then stir in the cream and season to taste with salt, cinnamon, and cloves. I think it might produce better results to add the cloves to the broth from the start, relegating their taste to the background and foregrounding cinnamon alone. Certainly, cloves should be used sparingly.
Finally, remove some of the soup from the pot to mix with the egg yolk. Heat the soup to almost boiling point and stir in the egg yolk mixture. Continue stirring until it thickens, then remove it from the stove. Cut or tear the meat into small pieces, heat it in the soup, and serve.
Have the hams taken out of the skin so that nothing else, no braet, attaches to them. Cut them, salt them, and let them lie in the salt for three weeks. Then break them out (hacks auff) and let them hang in the smoke for three or four weeks. Then they become like the Italian ones. You boil them whole and eat of them for eight days cold.
This recipe is really too short to attempt a full interpretation, but it is interesting in a number of ways. First, there is something to Italian hams that makes them special, and Staindl is trying to replicate it north of the Alps. Of course as long as I don’t know what that something is, I can’t attempt informed guesses what Staindl is doing here. The instructions themselves are very brief, but there are some points that may indicate differences to common practice.
A Hamme is basically a ham, though Grimm indicates that it can specifically mean the foreleg of the pig. As per the recipe, the leg is detached from the body with no other meat – presumably of the neck or back – attaching to it. It is then skinned, and this seems to indicate a difference because hams in contemporary art are shown with the skin on. The instruction to ‘cut’ (schneids) probably refers to trimming them, smoothing the surface and removing sinews. The next step is dry-salting in a large quantity of salt from which the meat needs to be hacked free. It is then smoked for a number of weeks and is ready to serve.
This still lacks almost all the vital information: How do you prepare the ham? How much salt is used? Is the liquid drained or kept? What dryness and consistency do we aim for? How warm or cold is the smoke supposed to be? How are we supposed to cook the ham afterward? What spices and sauce go with it? All of this, no doubt known to the author in practice if not in theory, would help us replicate the dish with greater confidence. It is, however, still an interesting piece of kitchen lore and more than we usually learn about these things from other sources.
Finally, the kind of Teutonic domestic bliss that is evoked by the image of a whole ham, boiled and ready to slice off pieces as desired for days on end, is sort of funny. But it bears remembering that a lot of things people ate on a regular basis were not cooked freshly. Eating cold foods was common enough. Boiled ham like this surely made a welcome addition to a wealthy householder’s Schlaftrunk, the late night bite that traditionally ended a long drinking session.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
I am just back from a brief and spectacular sojourn in Paris (it wasn’t me!) catching up with work, so this post will be brief. I have postednumerous times on the subject of blanc manger in the German tradition and how often it is called by different names. Balthasar Staindl, too, has a recipe for this dish that dare not speak its name:
Still feeling a bit dizzy
A good dish of capons
clxxvii) Take a capon, scald it, salt it, and stick it on a spit. Roast it. Then take half a pound of almonds and pound them as well. Make a thick milk of them. Take the capon, have all its meat taken off, but make sure the skin is not included. Tear up the meat very small, not too long (i.e. not into long fibres). Then take rice flour, mix it with the meat, season it with spices and sugar, and boil it in the almond milk until it turns dry. Add fat again (repeatedly?). That is how it is made.
You also take the white meat of capons that are roasted and cut it into cubes, only the white part. Then take it and pound it in a mortar. Pound rice into flour, and take good, thick almond milk. Take the pounded meat, put it into the almond milk, and let it be thin. Now add the rice flour, also boil it in this. Add sugar. Let it boil until it seems to be enough to you. Serve it as a side dish (gemueß) and sprinkle triget or good mild spices on it.
There is absolutely no question what this recipe is, but again, it is named an anodyne “good dish of capons”. I honestly have no idea why that keeps happening, but there is general tendency in the German tradition to favour descriptions over specific names. Perhaps that is all the explanation there is. In culinary terms, it is very traditional: white chicken meat, rice flour, almond milk and sugar, maybe some additional spices and fat. There is little to recommend it on that account.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
We do not have a lot of soup recipes surviving, and this one from Balthasar Staindl looks like it will even be tasty:
To make chicken broth of almonds
clxxviii) Take half a pound of almonds, three small egg yolks are added to it, and chicken liver, (grated) semel bread as much as two eggs, and two pfenning worth of cream. Then take the broth of old hens, well boiled, and pass the pounded almonds through a cloth with it, or take young chickens. Then take cinnamon, cloves, and salt in measure. Then lay the chicken meat that has been boiled before into the broth and let it warm up together. See the broth is not too thin. It should not have any colour from spices except that which is written above (i.e. do not add saffron). Serve it.
The instructions are not entirely clear, but we can discern a general principle: This is chicken soup. You start with the broth of old chickens, the kind we call Suppenhühner in German, and use it as the base for making almond milk. I am not entirely clear why you would want to do that given the recipe also involved eggs and cream, providing enough fat and white colour, but freshly made almond milk can provide a discernible flavour, and perhaps the point was simply to include it for health and status.
The list of ingredients that seem to be, counterintuitively, added to the almonds are fairly clearly actually added to the almond milk made from the broth: egg yolk and grated bread to thicken the soup, cream for richness and colour, the chicken livers, presumably pounded into a mush, also to thicken and enrich it, as was commonly done. We are more used to thicken our soups with starch or just cream, but grated bread and mashed liver, often in combination, are a familiar method in historic recipes.
The proportion of ingredients is unfortunately left unclear to us. The author, of course, knew how much cream a pfenning coin bought and had a clear idea how much broth to make for one pot of soup. We do not, and are thus left guessing. I suspect we are not looking at too much broth, given the resulting soup is meant to be thick and presumably white, and half a pound of almonds and three yolks will only go so far. I would thus go for a fairly rich and creamy mix, seasoned cautiously with cinnamon and cloves and lightly salted. Interestingly, this dish is expressly not to be coloured, something that may have needed saying in a cookbook where it seems every other recipe includes the instruction gilbs – colour it yellow.
Finally, the meat of the boiled chickens, at this point probably gelatinously soft and fairly tasteless, is heated in the soup and the whole served. Again, I would argue for a fairly high proportion of meat to broth, making sure a bit of meat comes with every spoon. It does not say so, but I suspect this recipe is meant to help people recover their strength and health.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
Here is another recipe from Staindl’s cookbook that goes back to a deep tradition:
To make a chicken ‘put back on the bone’ (angelegts Huen)
clxxi) Take a hen of a capon, either old or young, cut it apart, remove the meat from the leg bones raw, and chop it quite small. Break raw egg into it and stir it with a spoon. If you have raisins, add them. Season it with good mild spices, colour it yellow, and cover (bschlags) to every limb of the hen with the chopped meat. Lay it into a chicken or meat broth in that state and let it boil until it has had enough. This kind of food is quite good for women in childbed (Kindbetterin) or to people who have been bled (Aderlassern). Item, you may sometimes also chop veal into it, that makes it mild. You must also chop in fat (faist). You also sometimes take a small amount of cream if it is not eaten by women in childbed.
Item you can also make dumplings this way of hen or capon meat, but the meat must be raw. If it is cooked, it will become dry (sper).
This is an interesting addition to a tradition I had already looked at earlier: Faux chicken legs that are basically dumplings or chicken nuggets with bones stuck in them. Comparing this one to the parallel in the Inntalkochbuch (a manuscript dating to c. 1500) also illustrates the difference between continuing a tradition and transmitting a text, as in the case of the fire-breathing boar head:
<<14>> Von rohen hünern
Of raw chickens
Take the meat from the bones, chop it, but keep the bones. Take hot broth and take 2 eggs and the meat and shape patties out of it around the bones and put them into the broth. If you have bacon (speck) or beef or meat of castrated ram (castrauneins), (add that and) and chop that with parsley or sage.
This is clearly the same dish in spirit, but the two recipe texts are completely unrelated. We also find similar dishes made with cooked meat and both boiled and covered in batter and fried. Clearly, this was a popular thing to do.
Staindl’s recipe is gratefully detailed and clear: Raw chicken is chopped finely, the mass held together with egg and enriched with veal and animal fat. The word faist means this is fat as it is taken from the body, not melted into schmalz. The mass is them seasoned with spices and saffron, carefully shaped around the bones, and cooked in broth, most likely very gently poached.
The author considers this a strengthening dish and recommends it for people who need to recover. It is fit both for women lying in (this is not an uncommon recommendation) and for people undergoing bleeding, a common medical treatment that could quite literally take a lot out of you. I am sure, though, that it was also served for the novelty of it.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
Take juicy pears such as Speckbirn (lit: bacon pears) or Muscatellerpirn (muscatel pears) and other pears that have much juice. You must not peel them but just stamp them in a vat or grate them on a grater quite small, put them in a sack and press it out. Boil the juice in a brass cauldron close to seven hours and always skim it, and put the foam into a separate container because it can be used. You must not stir the juice because juice does not burn. Let it boil until it is brownish or yellowish and is drawn with the ladle like honey. Then it has enough. It must be given a gentle fire so that it always boils steadily because if you boil it too much, it does not turn out well. In the end, you pour it into new pots rinsed with boiling water (außgebrühete). It is a deliciously sweet thing that is used in food in place of sugar when you cook black dishes (i.e. dishes cooked with blood) of hares, fish, and birds.
(Oeconomia, p. 209)
This weekend, I had the unexpected opportunity to try and recreate it. I am not sure what kind of pear the author envisioned, but my choice was guided primarily by accessibility in the form of a special offer which allowed me to get about five kilos of pears for a little over six euros. The fruit were firm, large, juicy, and aromatic, but not exceedingly sweet. Still, being modern cultivars, they are probably sweeter than what Coler had available.
I grated them whole, by machine, on the finest setting, and pressed them through several layers of cheesecloth to produce a cloudy, already quite flavourful juice. My son helped, which is unusual. All the historic stuff I do is very uncool, but the opportunity to operate powerful and loud machinery proved a decisive draw.
Next, I reduced the juice an enameled cast-iron pot set on my trusty induction plate to a temperature of 120°C. I am willing to believe Coler that juice boiled over a fire will not burn, but not to the extent of risking several hours worth of effort. After about six hours and several rounds of skimming off the froth, it had turned dark golden, though still cloudy, and took on a syrupy consistency. I turned off the heat and ladled it into jars. In the end, five kilos of pears produced six tiny jars full of precious syrup – all told, maybe 250ml.
Is it good, though? Yes, quite. It is about as sweet as honey, but with a notable acidic and fruity undertone and clearly tastes of pears. We had some with Zwieback. I think it will do admirably with porridge, too, and I look forward to trying it with sweet-spicy sauces in the future.
I would still recommend the process only if you care intensely about cooking from scratch. The result I produced tastes fruitier and, I think, better than the Birnendicksaft you can buy at health food shops, but the amount of fruit you need to process is prohibitive. It’s lovely, but not worth the effort for just the result. As a learning experience, though, I highly recommend it. It would also make a lovely tradhusband TikTok reel, just saying.
Johann Coler’s Oeconomia ruralis et domestica was a popular book on the topic of managing a wealthy household. It is based largely on previous writings by Coler and first appeared between 1596 and 1601. Repeatedly reprinted for decades, it became one of the most influential early works of Hausväterliteratur. I am working from a 1645 edition.
This is a really interesting recipe from Balthasar Staindl, but I am not at all sure I am reading it right.
To make a pickled tongue
clxviii) Take a tongue, cut the hind part (troß) and the (attached) meat off it, and beat it against a bench or a stone so it turns soft. Then take red beets and wash them nicely and boil them until they are soft as though for a salad. Cut them into thin slices as though for a salad. Take a pot and lay in the beets with a little pounded anise and coriander. Salt the tongue well and lay it on top. Then add more beets and anise. After you have put the tongue in completely (i.e. covered it), pour on the broth you boiled the beets in when it is cool. Lay a small board on top and weight it down. Let it stand this way for four or six weeks, because that way it soaks (?schöls) quite slowly. You must soak (schölen) it for three weeks or more, because if it soaks quickly (gählingen (jählings?) schölt) , it turns smelly in summer. Let it stand in a cool place while it lies in the marinade. Then chop it open and when you want to cook one, serve it in a gescherbel or a pfefferlin sauce.
Obviously, any recipe for preserving meat is interesting. This one adds red beets, one of my favourite vegetables, into the mix. The general principle is easy enough to see: beef tongues are wet-salted in a container together with sliced beets. However, there is a question about what two sentences towards the end mean because that verb is just odd.
Schölen would seem a good candidate for a variant of schälen, to peel, except that makes absolutely no sense. It also exists as a verb in its own right meaning to wash or rinse, which sort of allows an interpretation as ‘soak’. The main problem with that is that it is a typically North German usage and Staindl writes a highly standardised, but clearly southern German. By contrast gählingen is relatively straightforward; It occurs as a variant of jählings, quickly or suddenly, by the 18th century.
I went with the interpretation as a slow pickling process and I wonder whether the method would produce lactic acid fermentation. That would certainly give the meat a very different flavour, potentially quite attractive. I may not be able to try it any time soon myself, but would encourage anyone with the requisite experience and equipment to give it a go and share your results. Served with an apple-onion sauce (gescherbel) or a spicy bread- or blood-thickened one (pfefferlin), or maybe just on its own, it looks like it has potential.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
