Two Recipes for Green Tart

Posted on 9 March 2024 by carlton_bach

I love green tart, and these two recipes from the collection of Philippine Welser are interesting:

Beta vulgaris, c. 1550, courtesy of wikimedia commons

51 If you want to make a tart of greens (krautt dortten)

Take on your table sage leaves, eight marjoram sprigs, a handful of parsley, 5 leaves of lemon balm (melisen, Melissa officinalis), 12 leaves of bugloss, a little chervil (?), 10 endive leaves, 10 borage leaves, a little chervil (?), and about four times as much chard (mangelt) as there is of the other herbs. If they are clean, do not wash them and chop them small. Then put them into hot fat and fry (reschs) them in it. Then put them in a bowl and grate cheese of the best kind into it, a little ginger, pepper, sugar, and 10 eggs or more, until it is quite thin. Mix it well together and pour it out on a base that is very thin, and let it bake. When it is almost baked, put a little butter on it and sprinkle it with sugar. This is for two tarts, take half as much to make one and let it bake fully.

52 If you want to make a tart of greens (krautt dortten)

Take young chard (piesen) and all kinds of fragrant herbs, wash them, press them out well, and fry them in fat. Then put them into a bowl and grate good cheese into it as well as a wheaten bread. Put this in with the herbs and stir it together. Take eggs and a little cream, colour it yellow and season it with good spice powder. Stir it together well and make a base, put it into the tart pan and pour the filling on it. Cover it with another (dough) sheet and close it with a wreath (braided edge). Let it bake, but grease the pan with fat beforehand, then it will not burn. If you want it sweet, add sugar. When it has baked for a while, but a hole in the top and put in some sweet butter and put it in (repetition?). You can also bake this in an oven.

While this is not quite exactly the identical recipe, the two are so close to each other that they are functionally the same thing. Recipe #51 gives an unusually detailed list of the herbs and spices required while #52 remains unspecific. Recipe #52 calls for cream, which #51 omits, and specifies the addition of a top crust which is not mentioned in #51. Altogether, though, this is the same filling of chard, herbs, cheese, eggs, and spices we know in various iterations from several other recipes. I am quite fond of it, though I haven’t tried this sopecific mix yet.

One interesting feature is that the two recipes use a different name for chard. Recipe #51 calls it mangelt, a cognate of the modern Mangold, while #52 has piesen, a word that today only survives in dialects. This suggests that the two recipes originate from different sources and were copied faithfully into one collection at one point without standardising the vocabulary. This flexible recombination of recipes and whole sections seems to be a feature of many German recipe collections.

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).

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A Sage-Flavoured Green Custard

Posted on 8 March 2024 by carlton_bach

It is called a “tart” in Philippine Welser’s recipe collection, but really it isn’t. I need to try this.

Sage, Tacuinum Sanitatis, late 14th c.

50 If you want to make a sage tart

Take 2 bunches of sage and two bunches of parsley greens and pound them together in a mortar. Press the juice out thoroughly. Then take a pound of sugar, well pounded, and put it into a bowl. Take ginger to the value of one kraytzer and pepper to the same value, and a little salt, all pounded small. Further take eight eggs and a quarter (qwerttlich) milk, or a little more. Then take the above juice, mix it all together, coat the pan with butter and make the base as thin as possible. Have a care with the embers, you must often lift the lid and make sure that it doesn’t burn. It takes much effort. It is written that you should not use any base, but only flour strewn over the butter.

This is a fascinating recipe that doesn’t really need much in the way of guesswork. The “quarter” of milk probably refers to a quarter of a Maß, somewhere in the reqion of a cup. The spice measure is less certain, given how much prices could fluictuate, but it illustrates neatly that at this point, spices were still a luxury item. The Kreuzer referenced here was a silver alloy coin valued at 1/60 of a Gulden and represented somewhere around 10-20% of a day’s wage for a labourer. Spending that amount was not bank-breaking, but it is still the rough equivalent of putting 30-40 Euros worth of one ingredient into one dish. It is not a trivial expense unless you are someone like the Welser family.

I expect the consistency that is aimed for is a light, soft custard, slowly cooked at a gentle heat. The herb juice would coour it an even green, and of course it would be very sweet. If it was cooked in a greased and floured pan, removing it in one piece must have been a challenge.

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).

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English Tart

Posted on 6 March 2024 by carlton_bach

A continuation of yesterday’s cheese tart, this recipe from Philippine Welser’s collection is referred to as ‘English’, putting it in the direct tradition of a number of earlier sources.

49 If you want to make an English tart

Prepare as tart base (bedalin) as for any other tart, and take a cheese filling (kes tayg) as for the cheese tart described before. To bake it, you must do as follows: Put it into the tart pan and bake it for a good while until you think it is half baked. Then take it out and pour hot fat over it. Then put it back in straight away and let it bake well. When you want to take it out, take it out again and brush it with dissolved sugar (er lasnen zucker) and put it back in for a while. That way, it will turn nicely brown from the sugar. It should also be sprinkled with rosewater, that way it is proper.

There are a few interesting aspects to this, and it resolves that the er lasnen zucker of both this and yesterday’s recipe very likely is a clarified and caramelised sugar syrup. It also suggests that what made a tart “English” was at least in part a method of preparation, not just its ingredients. The sequence of baking the tart, removing it from the pan to soak it in hot fat, baking again, then brushing with sugar syrup and browning it over is fascinating and suggestive of the things that may be left unsaid in terser instructions elsewhere.

The filling is that of yesterday’s tart:

First take a good, sweet, fat cheese that is not old or crumbly (resch). Grate it small and put the grated cheese into a bowl, as much as you please. Add 2 times as much egg and 4 times as much butter so it can become like a thin batter (diner tayg), and add a very small amount of flour to it. Stir it well in the bowl, but do not make the batter too thin, so that you can keep it on the tart base (boden). Last, add some dissolved sugar (der lasnen zucker) to it. Then bake it nicely small, and when it is baked, sprinkle sugar on it while it is hot. Thus it is proper and good.

Like I said before, the proportions feel off to me, but not so much as to suggest an error. Depending on the relation of flour to egg and the consistency of the cheese, this could work. Here, the cooking technique involves a higher heat and may produce soome rising, especially if the egg is beaten thoroughly. I wonder what the purpose of applying hot fat may be, given there is already so much butter in the mix. It may be for browning, or to prevent sticking, or perhaps the crust is expected to absorb so much of it. This is certainly a recipe worth playing with.

Finally, it is a recipe we should keep in mind when inmterpreting earlier instructions for making “English” tarts such as this one from the Meister Hans collection of around 1460:

Recipe #95 Ainen ennglischn fladen mache den also

Make an English fladen (flat pie) thus

Item (take) soft cheese, butter and pepper, mingle it together, make a pastry case of dough and fill it with the cheese over half (halfway full). Let it bake in a pot (baking dish). This is called an English flad(en)

Clearly this is not the same recipe. However, it may be aiming for a similar technique, a certain fluffiness produced by high top heat, and maybe browning on top. I haven’t tried this or its parallels yet, but if I do, I will certainly take the recipe in Philippine Welser as a guideline for my experiments. Extrapolating backwards is perilous, especially in a tradition as allergic to proper names as the German one, but the recipes are too similar to be unrelated. It is at least a plausible approach.

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).

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Cheese Tart

Posted on 5 March 2024 by carlton_bach

Another brief recipe: Cheese Tart from Philippine Welser’s collection.

46 If you want to make a cheese tart

First take a good, sweet, fat cheese that is not old or crumbly (resch). Grate it small and put the grated cheese into a bowl, as much as you please. Add 2 times as much egg and 4 times as much butter so it can become like a thin batter (diner tayg), and add a very small amount of flour to it. Stir it well in the bowl, but do not make the batter too thin, so that you can keep it on the tart base (boden). Last, add some dissolved sugar (der lasnen zucker) to it. Then bake it nicely small, and when it is baked, sprinkle sugar on it while it is hot. Thus it is proper and good.

Thus is an interesting recipe, if not an innovative one. It is quite similar to the rich “English” tarts found in a few earlier sources. These would typically combine cleese and butter with or without eggs. The addition of sugar is not surprising in the sixteenth century, but I am not entirely sure whether the der lasnen zucker mentioned here is sugar syrup (see clarified sugar) or melted sugar. In any case, clarifying sugar does not preclude caramelising it to some degree.

The proportions of 4 parts butter and two parts egg to one part sugar seem improbable, but bound with fine flour, this could become something like an extremely rich batter. It is not an ancestor of Yorkshire pudding though – baking at a low temperature would keep it from fluffing up. I am tempted to try it just to see what it will actually do.

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).

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Pine Nut Tart

Posted on 3 March 2024 by carlton_bach

I will need to limit myself to shorter posts for a while because I have a lot going on at work. Today, sixteenth century pine nut tarts. First by Philippine Welser:

44 If you want to make a pine nut tart

Take pine nuts, soak them and then clean them. Add sugar, cinnamon, and raisins and put it on the tart base. Prepare a crust (blad) on top and cut it, and when it is half baked, pour fat on it and let it bake fully.

Pine nuts belong to a set of fashionable luxury goods imported from the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century. Like lemons, oranges, and Parmesan cheese, they aided in imitating an Italian lifestyle aspired to by the very wealthy. They are not native to Germany. Thus, despite the simplicity, this is a very luxurious recipe. It is not easy to read how this would turn out because much depends on proportions and cooking techniques. The related recipe in Marx Rumpolt does not clarify much:

41 Also make a tart of pine nuts (piuni), small black raisins mixed in, and made nicely sweet.

(p. clxxviii v)

Good pine nuts are quite soft and will not be hard or crunchy, especially if the soaking takes place soon before adding them to the tart. It is possible that this is simply meant to blanch them – remove the brown skin covering the kernel – and they would be dried beforehand, though. This will make a difference to the consistency, with soaked nuts softening almost to a paste, especially if hot water was used. I used to use them as a base for sauces in Roman recipes before they were priced out of my range.

The next question is the quantity and consistency of the sugar being added. We have seen before that clarified sugar, which is called for in some recipes, was used as a thick liquid. This, added to soft nut meats in quantity, could easily produce something akin to the beloved modern American pecan pie. Crystallised sugar, on the other hand, is more likely to produce something crumbly and dry.

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).

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Another Pumpkin Tart

Posted on 1 March 2024 by carlton_bach

Philippine Welser’s recipe collection also has a pumpkin tart:

Curcubita pumpkins c. 1508, courtesy of wikimedia commons

43 If you want to make pumpkin tart

Take pumpkin and let it boil long (jber syedenn) and chop it small. Take grated bread and cheese and put it in. Add saffron, pepper, cinnamon and mace to it and also break 6 eggs into it and add a little fat. Put it on the tart base and let it bake nicely.

This is another pumpkin pie/tart recipe from pre-1600 Germany, and it looks quite attractive. Combining boiled pumpkin or gourd with cheese, egg, and spices should produce something unexpected to modern diners, but potentially delicious. Note that around 1550, we cannot say for sure whether Eurasian lagenaria gourds or American curcubita pumpkins would have been used. The American cultivars quickly overtook the original, less palatable ‘pumpkin’, but the process was not complete this early. It is entirely possible that the distinction did not matter to the recipe’s writer. I intend to try it with one of the more aromatic curcubita versions for sale this autumn.

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).

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A Breadcrumb Cake

Posted on 28 February 2024 by carlton_bach

I am back to shorter posts of individual recipes that can hopefully be more frequent again. Today: Something the recipe collection of Philippine Welser calls a tart (dortten):

41 If you want to make a tart of semel bread (semla)

Take 10 eggs on the table, beat them well, and put grated semel bread into it. Make the filling (fyllin) for this as though for a fladen. Take almonds, cut them small and stir them into it. Take fat and put it into the tart pan, and do not let the tart pan get too hot. Pour in the filling and do not let it bake for as long as the other tarts. Check often to see that it does not stick, and salt it.

This is clearly not like the other tart recipes in the collection; There is no crust. It is much more like what we would think of as a cake or baked pudding, and what other recipes from the period describe as a mortar cake or just cake. It is interesting that this source calls it a tart, and indicates that terminology here is thought from the process, not the dish. This is cooked in a tart pan, therefore it is a tart, regardless of having no crust and no filling. Incidentally, several other recipes indicate that top heat produced by stacking embers on the lid of the tart pan was needed to produce a degree of fluffiness and brown the top. This was presumably what distinguished these dishes from pancakes using identical ingredients.

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).

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Fastenkrapfen

Posted on 27 February 2024 by carlton_bach

The second part of Saturday’s experiments from the Mondseer Kochbuch, plus one pie. We served a varied and rather heavy dessert, and I was slightly surprised that all recipes worked out well. Much food was taken away again.

First, there were the recipes for Fastenkrapfen from the Mondseer Kochbuch:

54 Fritters (krapphen) of nuts

Take entire kernels of nuts and cut as many apples into that in cubes, Fry (röst) them well with a little honey and mix it with spices. Place it on the (dough) sheets (pleter) that are prepared for the fritters and let them fry, and do not oversalt it.

55 Fritters (Krapfen) with Italian raisins (wehlischen weinpern)

Take Italian raisins and take as many apples with them and pound them small. Add spices and fill it into the fritters and let them fry, and do not oversalt them.

These are fairly safe recipes in that it is quite hard to make something unpleasant from apples, nuts, honey, and raisins. For the first filling, I simply processed equal volumes of chopped apple and raisins together and added cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg and cloves. The second took a little more work as the cubed apples and whole hazelnut kernels were first fried in butter, then had honey added. The result, though, was excellent. I wrapped both in a hot water short crust based on a sixteenth-century recipe and baked them because this was mainly a test of the fillings and time economy was important.

The dough was on hand because of the second dish, a tart of root vegetables from the sixteenth-century recipe collection of Philippine Welser:

23 To make as root vegetable (raubenn) tart

Take roots (ryeb) and peel them. Then put them in water and let them boil. Then, you pound them very small in a mortar and add six egg yolks and freshly melted butter, sugar, cinnamon and ginger, grated semel bread and a little milk. Salt it well and let it bake a quarter hour, then sprinkle cinnamon and sugar on it.

This recipe interested me from the start, with the main question being what kind of root vegetables would suit it best. Rüben can mean almost any kind, with variations differing regionally in an era before standardised seed trade. For this first attempt, I decided to go with parsnips and parsley roots. Their sweetness would harmonise with the cinnamon and sugar, and their spicy note add to the depth of the dish. I peeled, boiled, and mashed the roots, added egg yolks, and seasoned the mix with cinnamon, ginger, and a small amount of sugar. A little butter stirred in completed the filling which I then baked in a covered pie, slowly at 175°C. The result was convincing, but not as excellent as the Fastenkrapfen which I will definitely include in future feasts and a projected childrens’ historic recipe book.

The crust is my usual standby for sixteenth-century recipes: one cup of water and a quarter pound of butter or lard are heated in a saucepan until the water begins to boil. Meanwhile, you ready four cups of flour in a bowl and lay out two eggs. The water and fat go into the flour first, boiling hot, and are stirred in quickly. Then you add the eggs and work everything into a dough. Turn that out on a work surface and knead it, working in flour gradually until it is no longer sticky. It is best rolled out still warm, but can be worked cold and even kept in the fridge. This crust holds liquids well and, if it is made thick enough, can be made into free-standing pastries. It is not as pleasant to eat as proper short crust, but much nicer than most contemporary recipes I know.

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A Meatless Recipe Testing Session

Posted on 25 February 2024 by carlton_bach

On the anniversary of last year’s fritter experimenting session, I got together with some local friends from my mnedieval club for an arts & sciences meeting. I, of course, provided food. It was a good opportunity to try out a few recipes from recent translations, and since the hostess is vegetarian, I picked meatless food.

The main course

As our main course, we opted for that mysterious pancake/omelet/thing called a reuschkuochen from the Mondseer Kochbuch.

48 How to prepare a Reußchkuochen

Chop equal amounts of parsley and sage and fry it in butter. Cook eggs soft and mix this together, and grate cheese and bread into it. Prepare a pancake (plat) of eggs and pour butter underneath. Set it over the fire and let it fry. These are Reuschkuochen.

reuschkuochen filling

There is a world of latitude in these sentences, but the basic thrust at least is clear. I started out with a handful of fresh sage and parsley each which I chopped and briefly fried in a tablespoon of butter. I did not let the leaves crisp and brown, though that is a possibility. Then, I added four soft-boiled eggs and mashed trhe whole. It is possible that instead, scrambled eggs is intended, but I doubt it. More plausibly, this instruction could refer to just the yolk of soft-boiled eggs, excluding the solidified whites. Since my eggs turned out a little too hard, I added another raw egg to achieve a spreadable consistency. For cheese, I used grated gouda and a tablespoon of breadcrumbs which, in this case, really served no function which suggests the eggs are supposed to be a lot more liquid.

In the pan

The next question is the plat, a word that just means a flat thing. I interpreted it as a pancake in the modern sense, mostly consisting of beaten egg stiffened with a little flour. Just egg also works, but I was concerned about burning it too fast. I poured the egg batter into hot butter, waiterd for it to solidify along the bottom, spread the filling on it, and sprinkled it with leftover grated cheese. Then I covered the pan and let it cook on a medium heat until the whole was solid and the cheese on top had melted. Again, we do not know that is how it was done – the filling could also be wrapped up and deep-fried – but the word kuochen suggests a round, flat shape. As things went, it worked. The resulting dish is rich, savoury, and very pleasant. We ate two of them between the four of us.

As a side dish, I opted for beans in a spicy beer and vinegar sauce, also from the Mondseer Kochbuch:

Heating the beans in the sauce

29 How to prepare a condiment sauce over beans

Boil green (i.e. fresh) beans until they are soft. Then take fine bread and a little pepper, and three times as much caraway. Grind it together with vinegar and with beer, add saffron, and pour off the broth. Pour on the ground (sauce) and salt it in measure. Let it boil up in the condiment sauce and serve it.

This is an interesting recipe, one of the few we have for cooking beans, which must have been much more common even on the tables of the wealthy than the paucity of sources suggests. The sauce is interesting for using beer, but otherwise it is a basic bread-thickened pfeffer sauce more commonly served over meat. Another question is the identiy of the spices. The modern Kümmel in Germany clearly refers to caraway, so that was my preferred translation, but the word is not as clear in Middle German. I am obligated to Jim Chevallier for pointing me to the ubiquity of cumin (German Kreuzkümmel) in early medieval cuisine which got me to start looking at the word again. I am not at all sure that it must mean cumin here, but I believe at least that it could, and that this merits further research. So I decided to go with cumin this day to see if the combination works, and it did.

I started out with cooked broad beans (Vicia faba, the most likely candidate whenever ‘beans’ are mentioned before the 1550s) and made a sauce by boiling beer and vinegar, stirring in breadcrumbs, and seasoning it with pepper, cumin, and salt. I passed it through once, but it could well have stood more pureeing. Because I had used too much bread, I had to dilute it with water to get it liquid enough and found that this improved the otherwise too concentrated flavour. Of course, what constituted ‘beer’ in the 1450s versus today is a far bigger stumbling block for reconstructing this in a modern kitchen. Still, the principle held and it worked. Heating the beans in the sauce melded the flavours nicely. It may not look like much, but it tastes very good. Adding copious saffron may help the optics, but is unlikely to improve the taste.

To accompany both, I decided to try a third recipe from the Mondseer Kochbuch: Snalenberger or Swallenbergs sauce.

45 How to prepare Snalenberger sauce

Take wine and thick honey and let it boil. Add ground ginger, more than pepper, and pound garlic, but not too much. Make it strong (season it strongly) and stir it with a piece of wood (ainer schinnen). Let it boil until it begins to burn. You shall eat this in cold winter.

Garlic in honey, before cooking

I really did not know what to expect here, but was going to give it a try. Garlic, honey, a little wine, and ginger and pepper boiled down until it begins to caramelise (at least, that is how I read “until it begins to burn”). I used chopped garlic mainly for time economy, and it turned out not to hurt, but I think mortar-pounded garlic, even heeding the instruction not to do this too much, would have a finer consistency. But this was a first attempt and as such, it succeeded beautifully.

Cooking down the honey on a low heat took over two hours, fortunately not requiring continuous stirring on a modern electric stove, and resulted in a reddish-brown liquid that, when cooled, solidified into a sticky paste. The conststency reminded me strongly of the portable honey mustard I tried years ago, and I suspect that the original may be meant as a similar instant sauce to be diluted before serving. We didn’t because we were hungry, and it worked very well with the reuschkuochen, to general surprise. Ginger, garlic and honey make a tasty combination, vaguely reminiscent of some Chinese sauces.

Clockwise from top left: beer beans, reuschkuochen, and undiluted Snalenberger sauce.

There was a dessert of pie and three kinds of krapfen, but I will deal with it in a later post.

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Philippine Welser’s Strawberry Tart

Posted on 22 February 2024 by carlton_bach

I’m very busy and today’s recipe is brief again:

39 If you want to make a strawberry tart

Lay the strawberries on the tart base and strew them with sugar, then lay on more strawberries and sugar again, until it is full to the brim (yber let). Then prepare a cut top crust to go on top and let it bake nicely. When it is half baked, put butter on top.

I have written about strawberry tarts in history before, and the recipe in Philippine Welser is among the less interesting ones. It is, however, quite early. At this time, strawberries would have been gathered wild, not cultivated, and the recipe is unlikely to work with modern commercial varieties. European forest strawberries, on the other hand, will probably produce something tasty and cohesive.

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).

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