CUISINES BY REGION
Einen fladen [A Flat Cake]
If you want to make a flat cake of meat, take meat which comes from the loin
or from the belly, and take marrow. See to it that it is boiled well, and chop it
small. Grate half as much cheese, add it, mix it with eggs so that it thickens, sea-
son with pepper, and put it on a thin dough. Put it into an oven, and let it bake.
Serve it hot.182
These flat cakes are also the basis for the most luxurious dishes in the
collection, such as the heron on a platter.183 To prepare the dish, a
baked fladen similar to the one described in the recipe above serves as
the base. It is put on a platter, decorated with four roasts that are
topped with pies, and surrounded by a golden fence made from eggs
and saffron, and a baked wreath with leaves. Finally, the roasted heron
is placed in the middle of the platter.
In the oldest German cookbook as in all the other European ones
examined in this chapter, color plays an important role. The main col-
oring agents are saffron, parsley, violets, and cherries. And yet, com-
pared to the vast array of colors used, for instance, by Taillevent or
Maestro Martino in their multicolored dishes, the German application
of color is still fairly basic. One type of dish that produced dazzling
colors is jellies, and they are conspicuously absent from The Book of
Good Food. Also missing from the German recipe collection are soups,
which may have been considered too low class to merit inclusion.
Overall the cookbook sends a mixed message concerning the social
milieu from which it originated. It is definitely not a royal cookbook
in the league of Taillevent’s Viandier; it may not even have been an
aristocratic cookbook, given the scarcity of game and venison. What it
seems to reflect is the cuisine of Michael de Leone’s employer, the
bishop of Würzburg, and perhaps the cuisine of Michael’s own patri-
cian household.
In the course of the fifteenth century, The Book of Good Food was in-
corporated in several bigger collections that contained more and more
international dishes favored by the aristocracy, such as the boar’s head
with hellish flames shooting from its mouth, pies and tortes, jellies, and
other often intricately colored dishes. Two fifteenth-century cooks
even attached their names to their respective compilations of recipes:
Meister Hannsen and Meister Eberhard.184 The latter’s keen interest
in nutrition manifests itself in his inclusion of the dietetic list of food-
stuffs by the physician Konrad von Eichstätt in his text. Eberhard’s
culinary recipes are also remarkable in that they combine dishes found
139
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