I am badly in arrears and promise to write up what I did over the Easter weekend, but there are still recipes and experiences from the Palm Sunday open. The main course of our meal that day were two meat pastries from the recipe collection of Philippine Welser. I used the opportunity to try the pastry crust recipe she suggests.
58 How you should make pastry coffins (bastetten hefen)
Take half fine flour and half second flour (nach mel, flour of lesser quality), break 2 eggs into it and put in melted fat into it, about as much as the size of one egg, and hot water. Or boil the fat in the water and once the water has cooled a little, pour it into the flour. Work it well until it is dry and elastic, otherwise it cannot be raised (auf setzenn). Except for venison pastries, I only use fine flour alone, and when it has had enough, I pull it, thus it becomes good and elastic.
I went with the proportions that had already worked for a tart shell made on a similar principle: Four cups of flour (two each Typ 550 and Typ 1050), 75 grammes of fat, two eggs and one cup of hot water. Though I had expected to need more liquid, I didn’t. The crust turned out pleasant to work and roll out as well as tasty, though not as ‘short’ as I would have liked. More fat would most likely remedy that. The pastry recipes we served were one chicken and one venison, though we had to settle for substituting lean stewing beef.
60 If you want to make a capon pastry
Make the pastry crust as you know and take the capon and clean it well. Parboil it a little, but not long. Then take it and chop off its neck and its feet. If you want, carve it up, but not all the way through, and season it well with pepper, ginger, not much mace, and a little cloves and cinnamon. Put it into the pastry crust together with the neck and the feet, and add the yolks of hard-boiled eggs and raisins. Take capon fat or marrow and also put it in, and put the leftover spices on top. Add sugar, and do not forget the salt. Close it and let it bake slowly, and brush it well with egg all around.
Of course, capons are rather difficult to find these days, but modern broiling chickens are competitive in terms of tenderness and fatness. I considered using an entire bird (as I had done before), but decided to go with legs instead to ease portioning. A dearth of pastry moulds and an unwarranted concern over the watertightness of the crust made me opt for a loaf pan to hold it. I rubbed the thighs and drumsticks with the spices, layered them in the case, put raisins, fat, and boiled egg yolks on top and closed the whole thing to bake it at 180°C. The result was beautifully tender, spicy, slightly sweet chicken, an interesting flavour combination that I am happy to repeat. I think actually using this on an entire bird, pre-carved to come part easily at the joints, would make a nice conceit for serving. Someone more talented at sculpture than me will also be able to produce a pretty crust.
The other recipe called for venison:
66 Further to make a venison pastry; I think this is better than the above
Take the venison and boil it in water for an hour. Then let it cool. Cut long (strips of) bacon and take spices like pepper, ginger, and a little cloves , and salt; use much pepper, stir it all together, and coat (lit. roll) the bacon in it. Lard the venison well with this, and what bacon you have left over, lay (in the pastry crust) with the venison. Take the leftover spices and sprinkle it all over the venison. Make a kneaded (uber schlagenn) dough for it with only flour of second quality. Poke 5 holes in the top and let it bake for 4 hours.
This turned into mere proof of concept for the spicing. The stewing beef we had was cut too small to lard properly, so I layered it with the spiced bacon instead. The filling fused into a solid mass which was difficult to serve out, but it tasted excellent and most likely would be even better in the original configuration.
The crust was very well-behaved and practical. It rolled out well, unmoulded without trouble, and held liquid wherever I didn’t flub the closing. I suspect it would work well with more ambitious shapes and moulds, maybe an Easter Lamb or something similar.
Philippine Welser (1527-1580), a member of the prominent and extremely wealthy Welser banking family of Augsburg, was a famous beauty of her day. Scandalously, she secretly married Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg in 1557 and followed him first to Bohemia, then to Tyrol. A number of manuscripts are associated with her, most famously a collection of medicinal recipes and one of mainly culinary ones. The recipe collection, addressed as her Kochbuch in German, was most likely produced around 1550 when she was a young woman in Augsburg. It may have been made at the request of her mother and was written by an experienced scribe. Some later additions, though, are in Philippine Welser’s own hand, suggesting she used it.
The manuscript is currently held in the library of Ambras Castle near Innsbruck as PA 1473 and was edited by Gerold Hayer as Das Kochbuch der Philippine Welser (Innsbruck 1983).
My apologies – again – for not writing anything in a week. It has been a very busy week, much of it good, but I have something big in store for Easter. Not only was I able to spend the long weekend with friends, cooking (reports to follow), I also finally had the time to finish up the König von Odenwald’s poem in praise of the chicken. So, in time for the eggiest holiday, I give you this:
II Of the Chicken and the Egg
You Will Find Many Things to Say
If I were not so lacking in art
I would want to write some verse.
Whatever may happen to me because of it
I will not forbear.
If I let the art go to waste
How could I earn
The favour and the gifts of lords
Of knights and servants of high spirit?
Now I will versify as I can
And begin with the seasons:
Beloved summer is coming
Winter is leaving us
We shall gladly let it go
Pale people rejoice
Who were sad before.
Each bird wants to build
Its nest again
And let go of sadness.
They lay eggs in it
And raise small birds.
The meadow is turning green
For them and for us (lit: those and these)
The forest is wearing leaves
Uncles and cousins
Aunts and female cousins
Enjoy the flowers
That rise from the ground
That has become pregnant;
Violets, lilies, green clover
You now see coming out
And the flowering of May
Shows the goodness of summer.
Hedges seek to
Cover themselves in roses
The heather is never pale
Stork and swallow return
Magpie and jay
Make it more beautiful yet.
You hear the cuckoo calling
That also belongs here
Larks, thrushes, nightingales
How they sing everywhere!
The small birds, too
Are no longer silent,
They are bold now
And their beaks are built
For singing with them now.
That is the custom when summer approaches
But all the singing would be for nothing
If there wasn’t the clucking of the chickens!
Now I will declare:
The chicken is a valued bird
The egg comes from it
And that gives us
Many good dishes
I must make a poem about this!
If you now say it is a useful thing
For me to say what good comes from the egg
I will then speak of this
To men and women.
One man goes on a journey
And boils his eggs hard
The other says “My dear,
Fry my egg plain!”
The third wants the yolks soft
Otherwise he will hit him (the cook)
The fourth does not want to poker around in it
And makes a kolhopfen (Olt: Kugelhupf)
This seems worthless to the fifth
He breaks his egg into the pan
The sixth wants his fried in fat
And sprinkles salt over it
The seventh calls for frying it in butter
He will not change his mind about this
The eighth likes it best
To break his eggs over cracklings (grieben)
Then the ninth speaks up
“Hand me a pan
And scramble it altogether”
I am also of this number
The tenth is so bold
As to call for pancakes
The eleventh is so strange
To break his eggs into milk
And the twelfth has decided
That he wants his eggs poached (verlorn)
The thirteenth surely calls for
Parsley and vinegar
To cut his eggs into
The fourteenth prepares a little drink (süffelin)
His head hurts
He wants the pain to go away
The fifteenth wants the shells (?)
And calls for a hirn wallen (?)
The sixteenth calls for an egg porridge
That he wants to sit over
The seventeenth says “I do not care”
And wants an egg fritter (eyerkuochen)
The eighteenth wants to do it a different way
And breaks his egg over a chicken
The nineteenth fills chickens with it
That is also a good custom
The twentieth drops the egg into whey
Easily it becomes two.
Further I will say
They are also put into brain sausages
That you want to be filled with eggs
By someone who knows how to do it.
Egg mus dishes, custards (eyermueser, kachelmutzen)
Of those we must not be silent.
They make women beautiful
So you take pleasure in looking at them.
If a man is wounded,
an egg is good for him
It is made into a plaster
This is no shame.
And egg is needed for ink
For a man who can write.
You dust and stiffen (fabrics) with it,
Someone who makes clothes does this.
You colour wine and crossbows
With eggs, that is a joy.
Eggs are used to treat
Leather for wearing
Gloves, know this,
Are treated assiduously,
And white, comfortable boots
That you wear smartly (kluokeit can mean wisdom, but also fashion sense).
You also break them into fish
That you serve at the table
Pastries large (bastede) and small (krepfelin)
Are both made from eggs.
Eggs “on the breach” (uf dem scharte)
You are glad to wait for.
And still, another thing must be done:
You fill the bellies of young (animals)
Heads and feet, too
You should be happy to welcome with eggs.
Morels, crawfish, and young piglets
Are also filled with eggs.
Fladen (flat bread baked with toppings) succeeds,
The blessed meat for Easter,
Is brushed with eggs.
When it is carried along,
Underneath it, chopped,
Are eggs, the whites and yolks separately
And spiced eggs
Are commonly turned over (stood on their ends?).
When young chickens come of them,
That run around everywhere boldly,
You see them happily,
And call them a new harvest.
It really needs no mention:
If you have a cherished guest,
Friendship will remind you
the hen that is nearest the rooster,
Is held for the best,
You roast that for your guest.
Neither is it forbidden,
To have a chicken boiled,
With parsley sauce over it,
Those who like it will have it.
And it would be stupid not to mention:
You boil an entire chicken completely,
And pound it in a mortar,
Then you call for a cloth,
To pass (literally: wring) it through,
That is good for sick people (gesinde – servants or household members).
A campaign turns out poorly,
When a chicken gives courage (hohen muot)
Counts and free men
They run and shout,
Be they armed or unarmed,
They clamour after the chicken,
With sticks and cudgels,
They throw at its wings,
Knights and sergeants,
Make a great noise,
All shout “Ha! Catch!”,
The chicken is what they seek,
Across fences and ditches,
Whoever grabs it wants to keep it,
One says “Surely,
it will hide in the bushes.”
Another hurries,
To crawl after it,
So he cannot come out by itself,
Unless someone else helps him to that purpose,
They are lucky,
That they are a large group,
And they carry it, sweating (in dem sweize – bloodied?)
Until they wish to eat,
All are out of breath.
All the inedible parts (gehurwe) are removed,
They stand and laugh,
Until a fire is lit,
They call for water to be put on (i.e. a cauldron hung over the fire),
Princes and counts stand and watch,
Until the chicken is plucked,
Scalded and skinned.
One or another then shouts out:
“Bring salt, the liver and the stomach!”
You must get it for them,
They are thrown on the embers,
And even before they are fully cooked,
Each one says “That is my piece”
And pulls it from the coals,
That gives them high spirits,
Those who burn themselves shout “Ow!” (och)
The chicken makes a cook of many men,
The feet and the head of it,
Are allowed the boys,
They can work on them over the day,
And have their pleasure until the night.
They go away and are busy,
While the others are busy roasting,
They are then ordered brought to the table,
The turnspit (der breter) is due the necks,
That are given to him.
They are stuffed with hay,
And stuffed into a travel bag (wotsak),
Until the third day,
Which serves them ill (lit: distresses them).
Each man will order his servant:
“Bring me a chicken,
See how flushed I am!”
One says to another “Come on (zerra hin),
Give me one of yours,
I will give you one of mine (at another time).”
You shall take pleasure in this:
People also set roosters on wagons,
So they call time
At night when they lie down.
The shiny rooster (feather tail),
Is put on for a dance.
And you see jumping about,
Girls and boys
And once it is no longer good for that,
You have the wisdom,
to take it off.
But the feathers are still useful,
You make a plume from them,
That is firmly set on the helm.
Of the (lords of) Seckendorf and Ehenheim,
They carry them, big and small .
Oh, and the capons!
The grey ones and brown ones,
The black ones and red ones,
Those are a fine roast!
Someone who has many of them,
Keeps a fine house,
Which he owes to the chicken.
You must also have their dung,
You use it to make,
Stiff bedsheets,
Which you lay above and below.
And that is also a miracle,
That the chicken announces the day,
I will not be silent about that.
Truly, I say this:
Many kinds of meat cause you revulsion,
Over the year,
Except for the chicken,
that is good all year round.
I will tell you clearly,
This I say:
You feed your hawks with it.
Coarse cloth (wotmol) and finest pieces,
The chicken brings both, believe me,
And the nightly chicken – that is their right -
So say knights and sergeants,
To demand from serfs
Who house them when they arrive.
That has God made for them,
And the king can only confirm it.
Here ends the fine tale,
Of the chicken that gives joy to many.
There is so much here it is hard to know where to begin. the most fascinating aspect to me is the many ways of cooking with eggs – a sophisticated cuisine we may not expect in the Middle ages. I am not entirely sure what the various preparations are in every case, but clearly there are hard- and soft-boiled eggs, various ways of frying (probably shallow and deep-frying), poaching, and scrambling, as well as custards, pancakes, and recipes that depend on mixing raw egg with liquid, probably to drink it. The kolhopfen that Olt renders as a kugelhupf more likely is a kind of pancake-based pastry cover where a thin batter is run around a pan to coat the sides and then filled. Cooked eggs, meanwhile, are served with vinegar and parsley or used to fill roast chickens and, as well see further down, all kinds of other dishes. Both large pastries (bastede) and small ones (krepfelin) depend on eggs as a base for their filling, something we see reflected over a century later in the recipes of the kuchenmaistrey. Again, I am not sure what preparation eggs uf dem scharte are, but the answer very likely is hiding in some recipe collection or poem I have yet to meet. Fladen , a kind of meat-topped flatbread,are a commonplace dish depending on eggs to bind their meat toppings. The tradition of serving chopped boiled egg, whites and yolks separately, is still found in sixteenth-century recipes for presenting Easter lamb. Eggs, most plentiful in spring and eartly summer, were a staple of Easter cooking and closely associated with spring.
Chicken, too, is prepared in a variety of ways, though it is nowhere near as complex as egg. Basically, it can be roasted, boiled and served with a parsley sauce, or cooked to a mush to feed to invalids (the word gesinde to describe them can, but need not mean servants). The vivid description of hunting down and collectively cooking a single chicken is entertaining and may well reflect the kind of fun young men of standing had on campaign, but it is unlikely to have happened very often.
What makes the chicken stand out in the kitchen is its year-round near-universal availability. Almost everyone had chickens, and unlike other livestock, they were not slaughtered seasonally or tied to a breeding cycle. A chicken could always be slaughtered and served to an honoured guest or – less welcome – to a landlord or official claiming a right to hospitality. The Nachthuhn as part of the feudal duties of serfs must have rankled even where the demand was occasional.
The many technical uses of chicken dung, feathers, and eggs are fascinating in their own right and I am not entirely sure of all of them. They are less numerous than those for the cow, though, making this poem much more food-focused than its companion piece.
Der König vom Odenwald is an otherwise unknown poet whose work is tentatively dated to the 1340s. His title may refer to a senior rank among musicians or entertainers, a Spielmannskönig, but that is speculative. Many of his poems are humorous and deal with aspects of everyday life which makes them quite interesting to us today. The evident relish with which he describes food and the fact his work is first recorded in a manuscript owned by the de Leone family led scholars to consider him the author of the Buoch von Guoter Spise, but that is unlikely.
This Sunday, we had a meeting with local people from my medieval club to craft, sociaslise, and talk about our various projects. For me, it was an opportunity to try out a few recipes for an appreciative audience. Most were taken from the collection of Philippine Welser, and all were broadly successful, though they will need further fine-tuning.
I will try to address what I learned and how it turened out overt the coming days, but today I will have to limit myself to one. The grape juice tart that made me so curious turned out to work after all. The recipe says:
56 To make a wine tart of grapes (wein draubenn)
Take the berries of the grapes and a little flour, melted butter, sugar, and cinnamon. Press it through (a sieve) together and put it in a pan. Let it boil until it turns thick, put it into a tart and let it bake a quarter of an hour. When you think it has had enough and it is turning nicely brown, take it out and let it cool. Then sprinkle it with sugar and cinnamon and serve it.
This is an interesting take, and I wondered whether it might set like a jelly or be reduced like a syrup before being baked. To start experimenting, I opted for a simple combination: storebought grape juice, butter, sugar, cinnamon, and white flour. Depending on how fine the sieve was and how much force was used in straining, the original mix may well have been a great deal thicker, more like fruit pulp, and I think I will try passing some grapes through a foodmill in season for comparison.
Today, I mixed about half a litre of red grape juice with about a tablespoon of melted butter, two tablespoons of sugar, a teaspoon of cinnamon, and two tablespoons of Typ 550 flour first stirred into a paste with some of the juice to make sure no lumps formed. This was to test the idea that the flour was the needed thickening agent, and it worked quite well. The liquid thickened as soon as it boiled and quickly started coating the pan so I needed to take it off the stove to stop it from burning. It did not reduce much.
Poured into a small pie shell based on the tart crust recipe in the same collection, it went into the oven at a medium heat and baked until it bubbled and started browning. With the dark colour of the grape juice, the colour change was hard to observe. The filling was still quite liquid when it came out, but set further as it cooled. However, it leaked and spread out as we cut the tart to serve it.
I think the first thing I will do when I try it next time is use white grapes, and a more pulpy mix. The tart base also might benefit from a ‘shorter’ and more absorbent crust, though this one held the liquid well and tasted quite good. Also, this may actually work better with small, portion-sized tarts than with one large one.
Philippine Welser (1527-1580), a member of the prominent and extremely wealthy Welser banking family of Augsburg, was a famous beauty of her day. Scandalously, she secretly married Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg in 1557 and followed him first to Bohemia, then to Tyrol. A number of manuscripts are associated with her, most famously a collection of medicinal recipes and one of mainly culinary ones. The recipe collection, addressed as her Kochbuch in German, was most likely produced around 1550 when she was a young woman in Augsburg. It may have been made at the request of her mother and was written by an experienced scribe. Some later additions, though, are in Philippine Welser’s own hand, suggesting she used it.
The manuscript is currently held in the library of Ambras Castle near Innsbruck as PA 1473 and was edited by Gerold Hayer as Das Kochbuch der Philippine Welser (Innsbruck 1983).
This is a pretty exciting find from Philippine Welser’s recipe collection:
58 How you should make pastry coffins (bastetten hefen)
Take half fine flour and half second flour (nach mel, flour of lesser quality), break 2 eggs into it and put in melted fat into it, about as much as the size of one egg, and hot water. Or boil the fat in the water and once the water has cooled a little, pour it into the flour. Work it well until it is dry and elastic, otherwise it cannot be raised (auf setzenn). Except for venison pastries, I only use fine flour alone, and when it has had enough, I pull it, thus it becomes good and elastic.
How to make the dough for tarts (dortten)
Take fine flour, an egg or two, a little water, and a spoonful of fat. Beat it well together and sprinkle on flour until until it turns as thick as semel dough. Then work it well under your hands until it turns dry and make a tart base that is quite thin with a wreath around it.
Unsurprisingly, these recipes closely parallel that recorded in the recipebook of Sabina Welser:
To make a pastry dough for all raised pastries
Take flour, the best you can get, about two handfuls, or depending on how large or small you want it, place it on the table, stir in two eggs with a knife and salt it a little. Put water and an amount of lard the size of two good eggs into a pan and let it melt together and boil, then pour it onto the abovementioned flour on the table, make a stiff dough and work it well as you see fit. In summer, you must use meat broth instead of the water and fat ladled from the top of soups instead of lard. When the dough is kneaded, roll it into a round ball and stretch it out well forward with your fingers or with a rolling pin, so that a rim remains, and then let it harden in the cold. Then shape the dough in the measure I showed you and retain some dough for a cover, roll it out and moisten it and the top of the the raised pastry with water, then press it well together with your fingers. Leave a little hole in one place, and when it is pressed together well and no openings are left, blow into the little hole you left so the lid rises up nicely. Then press it together immediately. Put it in the oven, but flour the container beforehand and see that the oven is heated well, thus it will be a good pastry. That is the way you make dough for raised pastries.
(Sabina Welserin #61, translation by Valoise Armstrong)
Beyond the fact that these recipes come from the same place (Augsburg) and time (early 1550s), they even have a connection with the same family. We do not know exactly how Sabina and Philippine Welser were related, but they were both members of the Welser baking clan. It is entirely plausible that their recipe books reflect the practices the same kitchen and its staff. No matter what nineteenth-century historians liked to imagine, we should not envision a Welser woman working in the kitchen herself.
That gives me a greater level of confidence to draw on them to better understand the respective other one. Most prominently, the quantity of flour is not given in Philippine Welser’s collection, but we can use the ‘two handfuls’ of Sabina’s as a reference point. Both recipes agree on the need to work and knead the crust, and the second one presented here compares it to semel, a dough for fine, white breadrolls. That suggests to me that I was wrong to increase the ratio of fat to flour in my most recent variation of Sabina Welserin’s recipe. The intent really is a kneadable, elastic dought with well-developed gluten. This really works as we found out in my pie workshop last November. The mix starts out hot and sticky, but as it is worked and cools, it becomes pliable and stiff. The resulting crust is smooth and holds liquid in well. It is not really a short crust in the modern sense, but it belongs to that development and is much closer to modern hot water crust than the earlier attested method of having the dough absorb melted butter during baking found in the Kuchenmaistrey, among other places.
We also hear that tart and pastry dough differ in the quality of the flour used. While tarts consist of fine white flour, pastries are made of half nach mel, an expression that suggests seconds, a lesser quality. This might help us understand what the perceived difference between tarts and pastries was since there seems to be no clear dividing line otherwise: Both tart and pastry are closed, both can be baked in tart pans in the embers as well as in ovens, there are round pastries, pastry fillings can be sweet and fruity, tart fillings meaty and spicy. Unfortunately, while the author of the collection suggests using only second-quality flour for a venison pastry later, they immediately inform us that no, many pastries are also made with the same fine flour tarts are made with.
Anyway, I hope to try both these recipes tomorrow and see what happens.
Philippine Welser (1527-1580), a member of the prominent and extremely wealthy Welser banking family of Augsburg, was a famous beauty of her day. Scandalously, she secretly married Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg in 1557 and followed him first to Bohemia, then to Tyrol. A number of manuscripts are associated with her, most famously a collection of medicinal recipes and one of mainly culinary ones. The recipe collection, addressed as her Kochbuch in German, was most likely produced around 1550 when she was a young woman in Augsburg. It may have been made at the request of her mother and was written by an experienced scribe. Some later additions, though, are in Philippine Welser’s own hand, suggesting she used it.
The manuscript is currently held in the library of Ambras Castle near Innsbruck as PA 1473 and was edited by Gerold Hayer as Das Kochbuch der Philippine Welser (Innsbruck 1983).
My apologies, there is again only time for a short recipe today. I might as well give up hope of returning to doing them daily. From the recipe collection of Philippine Welser:
57 If you want to make a crawfish tart
Take crawfish and boil them until they are done. Then remove the unclean parts, and then put them in a mortar and pound them small. Take half a semel loaf and sweet wine, the semel bread must be grated finely, mix it together and pass it through a cloth or a small sieve. Let it boil in a pan until it thickens and add butter, cinnamon, and sugar. Spread all of this on a tart base and let it bake for a quarter of an hour, then serve it cold.
This is not a complicated recipe, and it seems quite close to some crawfish dishes described in earlier recipe collections that are served as spoonable Mus. Interestingly, some of those recipes specify that the crawfish, whether cooked or raw, must be ground up with their shells which will be strained out as the mass is passed through a cloth. We tend to automatically assume the crawfish in this recipe are shelled, but there is really no reason to do that.
A tart of bread-thickened, sweet crawfish puree probably does not look all that appealing to modern diners. We may well be happier with the more sophisticated combination in the Kuchenmaistrey‘s pastries. But it shows how popular preparations could survive through several iterations, from a porridge to a tart in this case.
Philippine Welser (1527-1580), a member of the prominent and extremely wealthy Welser banking family of Augsburg, was a famous beauty of her day. Scandalously, she secretly married Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg in 1557 and followed him first to Bohemia, then to Tyrol. A number of manuscripts are associated with her, most famously a collection of medicinal recipes and one of mainly culinary ones. The recipe collection, addressed as her Kochbuch in German, was most likely produced around 1550 when she was a young woman in Augsburg. It may have been made at the request of her mother and was written by an experienced scribe. Some later additions, though, are in Philippine Welser’s own hand, suggesting she used it.
The manuscript is currently held in the library of Ambras Castle near Innsbruck as PA 1473 and was edited by Gerold Hayer as Das Kochbuch der Philippine Welser (Innsbruck 1983).
Take the berries of the grapes and a little flour, melted butter, sugar, and cinnamon. Press it through (a sieve) together and put it in a pan. Let it boil until it turns thick, put it into a tart and let it bake a quarter of an hour. When you think it has had enough and it is turning nicely brown, take it out and let it cool. Then sprinkle it with sugar and cinnamon and serve it.
This is an interesting recipe, though the technique is not unique. we have a few recipes where tarts are prepared from fruit juices, including one from the same collection. I tried out one with apple juice unsuccessfully, wondering how much thickening would have played a role. This recipe suggests that it was indeed a factor.
As regards the title, this is not a wine tart and I suspect it is called that by scribal error. The title repeats the word wein twice, and in both places it could be intended to identify grapes (wein draubenn) but for the interposition of the word for tart. I suspect this is accidental. It is an easy mistake to make, and the recipe does not involve wine. That meant that this was also a seasonal recipe, depending on the availability of fresh grapes. Those could be preserved into winter by coating them in glue, but it’s not likely this elaborately secured fruit would be sacrificed to make a tart.
Depending on the proportion of flour, butter and sugar to juice, what actually went into the tart might have been more like a batter than what we would consider juice. We do well to recall that contemporaries, again including this very collection, use the word saft for things so strongly thickened we would class them as jellies. I do not know how this will play out, but I am definitely interested and likely to try making this, just to see what happens.
Philippine Welser (1527-1580), a member of the prominent and extremely wealthy Welser banking family of Augsburg, was a famous beauty of her day. Scandalously, she secretly married Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg in 1557 and followed him first to Bohemia, then to Tyrol. A number of manuscripts are associated with her, most famously a collection of medicinal recipes and one of mainly culinary ones. The recipe collection, addressed as her Kochbuch in German, was most likely produced around 1550 when she was a young woman in Augsburg. It may have been made at the request of her mother and was written by an experienced scribe. Some later additions, though, are in Philippine Welser’s own hand, suggesting she used it.
The manuscript is currently held in the library of Ambras Castle near Innsbruck as PA 1473 and was edited by Gerold Hayer as Das Kochbuch der Philippine Welser (Innsbruck 1983).
Today, my son and I visited his grandmother and she had bought Schoko-Quarkbrötchen (a nice, if slightly heavy kind of bun with chocolate flakes baked into it). My son, though, asked for a Franzbrötchen. This above all marks him out as a proper Hamburger, but it also gave me the opportunity to involve him in producing that sticky confection – or to try, given he defected from the kitchen to watch an Asterix movie with his grandma. He enthusiastically helped eat them, though.
The Franzbrötchen is a legendary piece of local lore, its history lost in the mists of deep time, but like many such patriotic fables, it turns out to be an invention of the nineteenth century. Today, it is ubiquitous. No bakery in Hamburg is without the sticky, squashed cinnamon roll either in the buttery original or the many varieties that have been multiplying lately. Depending on the season, I can now get Franzbrötchen with nuts, chocolate, marzipan, streusel, plums, strawberries, pumpkin, apple, or cherry compote on my way to work. My preference is still the basic version, though.
Legend has it that Franzbrötchen were created by Hamburg’s bakers when the occupying troops of Napoleonic Marshal Davout demanded croissants. This is implausible because a) though they look a little like failed croissants, the technique is not similar at all, b) Hamburg’s bakers were quite capable of producing a flaky butter dough and c) croissants are not that old. Rather, they seem to be associated with the Franz’sche (French) Bäckerei in neighbouring Altona and make their first appearance in the 1820s. While this business had been founded by French immigrants, it was then run by a German family. There is no reason to think they were inspired by croissants, Emperor Franz, or a Franciscan friar’s medieval charity. The nineteenth century saw a creative explosion in confectionery. The Franzbrötchen is, after all, quite similar to the Danish cinnamon roll which was also invented then (and Altona was a Danish city until 1864).
So, what is this thing the Hamburgers are so proud of? Basically, a Franzbrötchen is a piece of butter-laminated yeast dough rolled up with cinnamon and sugar. Unlike a Danish pastry, it is not turned on its side, but squashed down the middle to expose much of the filling during baking. This caramelises the sugar as it mixes with the melting butter, creating the sticky, brown layer covering a proper Franzbrötchen. It’s a great treat for a wet, drizzly, dreary day.
A professionally made Franzbrötchen depends on folding butter into its dough multiple times. Bakeries use machines to do this and produce many layers. If you are working at home, there is no need to. All you need is a yeast dough of flour, milk, eggs, and sugar that you roll out, spread with butter, fold over, and roll out again once or twice. Since you are working with yeast, you need to use room temperature butter rather than the iced blocks of classic pate feuilletée, but that actually makes it easier. After you have worked the butter layers in,m you rioll out the dough one last time, brush it with water (or melted butter, if you are looking for a very rich mix), cover it with sugar and cinnamon, and roll it up. You then cut the roll into pieces about four centimetres long and squash them dowen the centreline with the handle of a wooden spoon. That produces the characteristic shape of the Franzbrötchen.
If you make them at home, you are free to vary the spices – I like ginger and mace along with my cinnamon – and the richness, and produce small rolls rather than the large portions bakeries sell. I like to have them about 5-8 centimetres across, perfect for serving with tea. So far, all responses have been encouraging. Try it, and be sure to mention that the recipe was brought to the Hanseatic city of Hamburg by a baker sentenced for manslaughter to complete a pilgrimage to Rome, where he learned it from a Franciscan. It’s not true, but everybody likes to hear these kind of stories.
I suspect this recipe in Philippine Welser’s collection, unlike the previous one, is meant for dried plums:
47 If you want to make a plum (gwestenn) tart
Take plums and wash them cleanly in much water. Put them in a pot that is glazed on the inside and pour in good wine. Let them boil for a long time so the stones are removed easily. Then take them out and remove the stones. Prepare a tart base (bedalin) with sugar and cinnamon, and then put the plums on it one next to the other until it is full. Then sprinkle it well with sugar, cinnamon, and a little ginger and make a cut top crust. Let it bake, and when it is half baked, pour in one or two spoonfuls of this broth (the cooking liquid?) and brush it with an egg, then let it bake fully.
If this is made with dried plums, it may come out not too dissimilar to the date tart in recipe #42:
42 If you want to make a date tart
Take the dates and remove the kernels, and boil therm in good wine. When they are boiled well, place them on the tart base. Put on cinnamon, sugar, and ginger and let it bake nicely.
I wonder how well they would have held together as they were boiled, but it seems they were expected to stay discrete even after quite some softening. That suggests a rather tough, leathery consistency. Beyond that, I am sure the result was attractive. A similar combination of spices using mashed fruit is one of my favourites.
Philippine Welser (1527-1580), a member of the prominent and extremely wealthy Welser banking family of Augsburg, was a famous beauty of her day. Scandalously, she secretly married Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg in 1557 and followed him first to Bohemia, then to Tyrol. A number of manuscripts are associated with her, most famously a collection of medicinal recipes and one of mainly culinary ones. The recipe collection, addressed as her Kochbuch in German, was most likely produced around 1550 when she was a young woman in Augsburg. It may have been made at the request of her mother and was written by an experienced scribe. Some later additions, though, are in Philippine Welser’s own hand, suggesting she used it.
The manuscript is currently held in the library of Ambras Castle near Innsbruck as PA 1473 and was edited by Gerold Hayer as Das Kochbuch der Philippine Welser (Innsbruck 1983).
A bit after the first recipe for sour cherry tart, Philippine Welser’s recipe collection gives two more:
36 If you want to make a sour cherry tart
Prepare a bottom as for other tarts. When it is finished, take a semel loaf, grate it small, and fry it in fat. Then spread it on the bottom and spread it out evenly. Break off the sour cherries (off the stalk) and lay them on this close together. Take out the pits (beforehand), that way it cooks better. Sprinkle them with sugar and cinnamon and make a fine thin cover on top. Cut this as you like and brush it with egg, and let it bake until it is enough.
(…)
53 If you want to make a sour cherry tart from juice
Take sour cherries and put them into wine. Let them boil. The wine must be sweet. When you boil it, put in a semel loaf and sugar. Then pass the cherries through and put them into a pan, let them boil and let them cool again. Then take sugar and cinnamon and put it into the above, put it on a tart base, and let it bake for a quarter hour. When you take it out, take melted butter and put it on the tart, and add sugar and cinnamon, that must always go on at the end.
54 To make a different sour cherry tart
Take sour cherries and remove the kernels. Lay them on a (dough) sheet one next to the other and put sugar, butter, raisins and spices on them. Put a thin crust (bedalin) on top and let it bake carefully.
Sour cherries were very popular in German cooking. We find them used in sauces and confections, so putting them in a tart should not be surprising. Aside from the consistency – achieved by thickening the liquid puree with fine wheat bread boiled in it and passed through a sieve – the three recipes are very similar and again attest to a the unadventurous nature of this recipe collection; sugar, cinnamon, butter. This is good, but it must have got old quickly.
Philippine Welser (1527-1580), a member of the prominent and extremely wealthy Welser banking family of Augsburg, was a famous beauty of her day. Scandalously, she secretly married Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg in 1557 and followed him first to Bohemia, then to Tyrol. A number of manuscripts are associated with her, most famously a collection of medicinal recipes and one of mainly culinary ones. The recipe collection, addressed as her Kochbuch in German, was most likely produced around 1550 when she was a young woman in Augsburg. It may have been made at the request of her mother and was written by an experienced scribe. Some later additions, though, are in Philippine Welser’s own hand, suggesting she used it.
The manuscript is currently held in the library of Ambras Castle near Innsbruck as PA 1473 and was edited by Gerold Hayer as Das Kochbuch der Philippine Welser (Innsbruck 1983).
I had the time to try out something I came across a while ago. A half sentence in the Marvel of Milan, a praise poem by Bonvesin de la Riva on the extensive virtues of the city, describes an interesting use for walnuts:
Also almonds, may I say a little about this, wild hazelnuts, walnuts in incredible quantity, which are enjoyed all through the year and all citizens delight in them after any meal/dish (post omnia ferculla).They are also added, ground up, to cheese and eggs and pepper with which meat is filled in wintertime. There is also oil (made) of them which flows richly for us.
This mixture intrigued me, and I got myself some walnut meats and Rouladen beef for rolling up to try a few versions in manageable portion sizes. My first question was what to do about the eggs. Since there are recipes including boiled egg in stuffings for roasts from later years, I opted for hard-boiled egg processed with the nuts and cheese rather than raw to bind the mixture. The next variable to address was the choice of cheese, and I decided to make two stuffings with grated Padano cheese and one with mozzarella to see how they would perform. I do not think either is a very plausible candidate historically, but similarly fresh or aged cheeses would have been available. Processed into a paste with plenty of pepper, they produced a credible filling.
I do not have evidence for this, but for sheer curiosity I wanted to see how this filling would work with green herbs. This turned out to be completely superfluous because the flavour of the cheese and nuts overpowered them almost completely. Something stronger, though, perhaps green garlic, would certainly harmonise well. Given the hostility of the upper classes to anything that made your breath smell, though, I do not think this is likely. The rich, smooth consistency I got very likely was what the recipe aims for.
I spread the stuffing on the Rouladen beef and rolled it up, then cooked them at a low temperature to soften them. The meat turned out pleasantly tender, most likely because of the oil and fat from the cheese and nuts preventing it from drying out. Today, we tend to use bacon for this. It was also pleasantly tast, rich and unctuous. I had added some chestnuts to the mix because Bonvesin de la Riva also mentions them:
Green (fresh), they are cooked in the fire and are eaten after other foods in place of dates, and in my estimation they give a better flavour than dates. They are often boiled and thus softened (? sive lessa) and eaten with spoons by many, thus cooked.
When the water has been discarded after cooking, they are often eaten without bread, or rather in place of bread.
I suspect that when such a roast was prepared on a spit, adding chestnuts to the dripping pan would produce something very similar to what I got. We know this was done with other vegetables by medieval cooks. It is how traditional Yorkshire pudding is still made in a pan under the roast, and medieval Islamic cuisine had an entire class of dishes made this way called judhab. I cannot be sure this is what people did, but it is plausible enough to use until I come across that elusive recipebook from the age.
