FOOD IN MEDIEVAL TIMES
Multiple cooking of meat and fish is one of the characteristic fea-
tures of medieval German cuisine as evidenced in the oldest recipe
collection. In one extreme case, a suckling pig is prepared by first
skinning it, then cooking its meat and returning it to the skin. Af-
terward the piglet is boiled, and finally grilled over a low heat.178
There are several reasons why medieval cooks may have opted for
multiple cooking. It was a way to make sure the meat was fully
cooked, especially that of larger animals that were to be roasted. It
also gave cooks the opportunity to debone the meat, season it, and
turn it into a delectable stuffing. And it added an element of sur-
prise to the dining experience: not knowing what the inside of an
animal may actually contain. The motivation for the multiple cook-
ing of fish surely had less to do with fully cooking it than with the
cook’s desire to display his skills and imagination, as in the follow-
ing pike recipe:
Von gefuelten hechden [About Stuffed Pike]
Stuffed pike you prepare in the following way: you take suitable pike, scale
them, and pull the intestines out through the gills. Take fish of any kind, boil
them, and remove the bones. Grind them in a mortar, and add chopped sage,
ground pepper, caraway, saffron, and salt to taste. With this you stuff the pike,
and sprinkle them with salt on the outside. Roast it on a wooden grill and grill
it nicely.179
Eel is prepared in a similar fashion in the cookbook.180 The number
of cooking processes is limited to only one or two in the second half
of the collection. This is mainly due to the types of dishes that pre-
dominate there. Many of them are for purees, puddings, or casser-
oles, for which the cookbook uses the collective term muos, for
dough preparations similar to pizza, called fladen, and for doughnuts
and fritters, called krapfen. Fish, fruits, nuts, vegetables, or mush-
rooms are turned into creamy purees and puddings that are ideal for
the many fast days of the year. For a sour cherry puree the cherries are
boiled with a little wine, then pressed through a sieve cloth together
with bread crumbs. Then lard and beaten egg yolks are added and
seasoning is sprinkled on top.181 Fritters stuffed with fish, fruits, or
nuts were also popular Lenten food in Germany judging from this
collection. Fladen, literally “flat cakes,” consisted of rolled-out
dough topped with a wide range of ingredients, from fish on fast days
to meat, liver, cheese, eggs, and the like on meat days. A typical ex-
ample of a fladen recipe is the following:
138
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