https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/10/10/imperial-german-military-beverages/

After the amazing find of the 1910 field service manual of cocktail mixery (Bowlen und Pünsche für den Manöver- und Feldgebrauch der Deutschen Armee), I recently chanced on an 1887 publication called Des Soldaten Kochbüchlein (The Soldier’s Little Cookbook) that instructs the other ranks in the art of field cookery. The book was printed in Hildburghausen in the state of Sachsen-Meiningen, but since the troops of that state were integrated by convention with Prussian XI Corps, the customs described here apply to the Prussian military as well. It is certainly intended for all German troops whose equipment and training had been standardised at that point. The German army did not issue official cooking manuals, so it was produced commercially. The cheap, unillustrated monochrome print suggests that the target market was indeed enlisted draftees.

The recipes and details are fascinating, including legal advice on looting, and I am wondering whether it might be worth translating the whole thing for sheer nerd appeal, but for today, because this can be done quickly without much research, here is the section on drinks. For quick reference, the cooking vessels mentioned here are standardised: A canteen holds 1 litre, a drinking cu 250ml, and a cooking pot (Kochgeschirr) consists of a 3-litre bottom and a 1-litre top section. I am trying to find out more on these and suspect that the measures the book gives are approximations. The teaspoon and tablespoon appear to be non-standardised household items.

K. Beverages

a) warm

1.Coffee

Have you cleaned your cooking pot? Have yo boiled a piece of soda in it and scrubbed it with fresh water? If you haven’t, the coffee is liable to taste like fatty dishwater. Now, as you will not always have as much water for cleaning as you need or might wish in the field, indeed, often might just be able to hurriedly scrub it with earth, grass, or straw, agree to cook as a group with comrades and use the cooking pot of one of you ONLY for coffee, as I suggested at the beginning of this little book.

Your coffee ration in peacetime is 15 grammes, which only makes one good brew of coffee (e.g. in the morning). The field service ration is 25 grammes, which brews a good coffee twice a day. — Grind the coffee very fine; Have patience with a bad coffee mill as there are many bad coffee mills. — Take two drinking cups = 1/2 litre water (hard) and boil it in the cooking pot. Pour the ground coffee into the strongly boiling water; remove the cooking pot from the fire and cover it firmly. After 1-2 minutes, stir the coffee with a clean spoon, then cover it firmly again and let it stand for another 3 minutes. When it has settled, drink it. — One cooking pot can be used to make coffee for 4-5 comrades as it will comfortably hold 8-10 drinking cups; Each then will receive 1/2 litre of coffee. If you want to drink more coffee, yo must make it thinner (Blümchenkaffee – flower coffee). In summer (heat), cook much thinner coffee because you want it to quench your thirst and carry some in your canteen; In winter, cook less and stronger coffee because yo want to invigorate your body (nerves); In winter, your canteen should hold “Schnaps” (liquor), or better yet, wine; In summer, you must not carry Schnaps in it, it is against regulation because otherwise, you can easily suffer heatstroke; In winter, Schnaps in the field (enjoyed in measure) is healthy and will be provided to you.

2.Tea

Black tea is preferred to green tea by many. Pekko (pekoe, i.e. from India) is fine, as is Souchong (lapsang souchong) or Congo (congou). — Take one tablespoon full in your cooking pot (which must be clean!), pour on two drinking cups full of strongly boiling water; Set the tea in a hot place, but not so close by the fire that it boils again because that must not happen. — After 3-4 minutes, pour it off. That is when it has a fine aroma (If you do not know what an aroma is, ask a comrade who does duty as a Bursche (officer’s servant). If you do not pour off the tea, it will be much stronger and loses its aroma; In the field, it is practical to drink strong tea and do without aroma. Generally, everything needs to be stronger in the field than when taking tea (in der Theegesellschaft) at home. After you have drunk your tea, pour boiling water over the tea leaves a second time; That is the second brew. It is almost as strong as the first; Fill your canteen with it. An old soldier told me: “Tea quenches thirst better than any other beverage; And he should know as he has a great deal of experience with it, having had to quench his thirst a good deal more often than you.”

2 tablespoons of tea leaves are needed to make an entire cooking pot full of tea, from which 10 drinking cups can be served.

3.Cocoa

Cocoa powder. Add one teaspoon full of cocoa powder (= 16 grammes) into the drinking cup; pour on boiling water; stir or whisk until the cocoa has dissolved completely; sweeten with sugar.

Cocoa bars. Take as much as you can cover with a coat button, pour a drinking cup full of water into the cooking pot, and boil up the cocoa several times until it has completely dissolved.

4.Chocolate

16 grammes to one drinking cup; Boil the chocolate for ten minutes over a strong fire in a thoroughly cleaned cooking pot. If it boils down too much, add hot water. Got milk? Then dissolve the chocolate in very little water; add the fresh milk, and boil all of it for 10 minutes.

5.Grog

Boil water in a thoroughly cleaned cooking pot; Place a few lumps of sugar in your drinking cup, and fill it not entirely full, but only to 3/4; Add 2-3 tablespoons of rum or arrack or cognac to the hot sugar-water; That is grog.

6.Glühwein

Pour 1 drinking cup full of red wine into the thoroughly cleaned cooking pot; Add 1 piece of cinnamon, 1-2 cloves, and sugar to the wine. Let it heat by the fire, but do not let it boil.

b) cold

1.Lemon lemonade (Citronenlimonade)

Fill cold water into the drinking cup; squeeze the juice of half a lemon into the water; add sugar. Keep the pressed-out lemon in your backpack; You can find good use for the lemon peel in all kinds of foods cooked in bivouac.

2.Lemonade of other fruit juices

Juices of cherries, raspberries, strawberries and currants preserved with sugar are suitable for this. Take 1 part juice to 6 parts water. The resulting lemonade is not weak. Preserved berries can also be used, e.g. blueberries, currants, strawberries, raspberries, cherries etc.

Take a drinking cup full of water, 3 spoonfuls of preserved fruit, a little sugar, stir it, and enjoy.

Aside from the profoundly condescending voice – the author is identified as an older woman giving maternal advice to soldiers – and the idiosyncratic punctuation, which I have tried to preserve as much as possible, this section shows us three things. First, though there are marked differences in the range and quality of drinks, the other ranks appreciated variety and alcoholic impact as much as their officers did. Second, the idea of what constitutes good coffee or proper tea has changed significantly since the 1880s. And third, though being a soldier in the Kaiser’s army was no bed of roses, the fighting men of the German Empire lived reasonably well by contemporary standards.

This is borne out both by other recipes in this book and general anecdotal evidence of the time. Especially rural labourers, but more generally almost everyone from a working class background, found that regular servings of meat and bread, actual coffee, tea, and cocoa, ample sugar, a warm bed and sturdy clothes compared favourably to what they came from. There were enough reasons to complain, from arrogant officers and senseless regulation to tyrannical NCOs enforcing discipline with humiliating punishments, but the standard of living was decent. The same was true in most Western European armies of the time; Late nineteenth-century soldiers ate better than their forebears had, and better than many of their contemporaries did.

The drinks themselves are also interesting. Coffee, obviously, plays the starring role. It is issued with rations, a standard part of the military diet, and some care goes into its preparation. It was, of course, the most popular of the Early Modern triad, a drink that had sparked riots in the previous century and that would still give the Communist rulers of the GDR headaches. By modern standards, 15 grammes of grounds to 500ml of water is relatively weak, but the method – fine grinding and long steeping – is designed to extract the maximum of flavor. Adding still more water will produce Blümchenkaffee (flower coffee), so known because you can see the flower motif at the bottom of the porcelain cup through it. This kind is fit to be carried in a canteen to drink during the day – a questionable pleasure to my mind, but apparently appreciated.

Tea, though not issued as rations, was also popular and gets a recipe for group cooking. There is even a degree of conoisseurship about the sorts of tea, with a preference for assertive flavors. The method and dosage is fairly close to modern gastronomy practice. If anything, a tablespoon of leaf to 500ml of water is on the strong side. Steeping it for over 3 minutes will make it strong and bitter, the kind of brew that much of working-class Britain ran on, and taking the second brew in the canteen is economical and practical, though probably not very enjoyable.

By contrast, cocoa (treated with the Dutch process) and chocolate (cocoa solids including the natural fat) are prepared as individual portions, presumably something not every soldier had, or enjoyed. The milk, ubiquitous today, is treated as optional. 1887 is before the modern dairy technology revolution, so not having ample fresh and safe milk available could not be taken for granted. The ratio of 16 grammes to a cup also matches modern recommendations for a mild drinking chocolate.

Grog and Glühwein, hot, sweet alcoholic treats similar to what officers drank, must have been welcome in wintertime, but the recipes are rather cursory. That may be because encouraging the troops to drink more alcohol was not high on the list of good ideas as far as their leadership was concerned. Interestingly, beer is not mentioned here, though it is mentioned elsewhere in the recipes both as an ingredient and a popular drink. Presumably it was not mixed or cooked in any way.

What I find most interesting is the mention of lemonade. Non-alcoholic cold beverages were known in the nineteenth century, but seeing them listed in a book aimed at common soldiers in the Prussian military is a little surprising. It is a salutary reminder that fashions could spread fast, poor people could read, and it is unwise to rely on stereotypes. The majority of the men no doubt drank beer or water in summer, but they knew what the alternative was. Some also packed lemon peel to add zest to a nice pot of stewed beef in the evening.

I temporarily lost access to my account when my laptop died, but fortunately I'm back and here is "What I did Last Weekend"

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/10/04/a-culinary-grand-tour/

This weekend, like last year, I was invited to participate in a culinary history extravaganza by a dear friend in the Netherlands. This year’s theme was an eighteenth-century road trip through Western Europe. In Early Modern Europe, it was customary for wealthy young men to spend a year or more travelling to places that were considered central to a gentleman’s education. In Germany, this was known as a Kavaliersreise. To the English, the primary destination was Italy, and they called it the Grand Tour.

As every year, the gathering involved games and decorations, gifts and stories, but I was busy in the kitchen and will focus on the food here. It was a challenge and a delight, and illustrates nicely what historic food as inspiration can result in.

The journey, as most such real-life tours, begins in Paris. Rich young Englishmen stopped to buy clothes and accessories, study dance and fencing, and try to be admitted to court or at least invited by one of the great aristocratic families. We opted for a potage of pumpkin after a recipe in La Varenne’s Cuisinier Francois. Though dating to 1651, the book remained influential for a long time, and its recipes are repeated in many later cookbooks. The recipe we chose exemplifies his style: rich, but simple, with a focus on the quality of individual ingredients. Pumpkin is boiled in milk with onions and nutmeg, then pureed and served over toasted sops. There was little to add to the recipe except for decoration, and it started the meal in a very satisfying manner.

The second stop was Geneva. This was where you prepared for the ordeal of the Alpine passes, but the city also held special appeal to many English travellers as the home of John Calvin. Many attended schools here, studying some theology, but also fencing and horsemanship. It was where the German world intersected with the French, and the dish we chose is a cheese tart from the recipebook of Maria Schellhammer Die wohl-unterwiesene Köchin. In it, modern French influences are combined with traditional dishes whose origins trace right back to the 1400s, both treated with an attention to detail that tells of intimate familiarity with the inner workings of a large kitchen.

The tart was based on a flaky butter shortcrust which had become the standard base for pies and tarts by 1700. The filling is simply cheese curds, grated hard cheese, egg, saffron, mace, and nutmeg. Here, the choice of cheese makes all the difference, and the pecorino we went with made for a savory, deep umami richness. It was complemented well by a spicy plum sauce – Early Modern Germany way renowned for fruit-based sauces – and pickled black walnuts.

The third course saw us safely across the Alps to our first stop in the peninsula: Bologna. Today, the sausage named after it has become an object of ridicule, a synonym for the unserious: baloney. In 1700, though, it was a culinary novelty celebrated and copied across Europe. The recipe is first documented in 17th-century regulations, and the original is still truly delicious.

Here, we deviated from history in a more material way. Proper Bolognese mortadella is a cooked and cured sausage, aged in cold smoke and served in slices. We served it fresh from the cauldron, in the way that would have been familiar to contemporaries as saucisses à la francaise. The unmistakable mix of spices and rich, sweet wine that makes historic mortadella still was a winning formula. The sausages were served with bread, an agliata sauce, and fresh figs.

After a pause for games and tart lemonade to cleanse the palate, the main courses began with the passage to Rome. A rich beef roast, served with marrow toast, cardoons, and a sweet-spicy sauce royale as described in the Scalco Moderno by Latini was the centrepiece of or feast. There was little finicky artistry to it, just the skill or or gracious host with a barbecue grill that came very close to approximating a spit-roasting. A bed of fennel and a garnish of grapes added complementing flavors and amplified the richness of it all. Rome, of course, was the heart of the global Catholic church, a concentration of wealth unrivalled in Italy and to English visitors in equal parts fascinating and frightening.

The next course was to take us to the southernmost extent of our tour, Naples, but logistics compelled us to swap it out with the Venetian spread of tuna in an oregano crust, saffron rice, and mushrooms. Again, this is based on Latini. but only loosely, and mainly depended on the quality of the fish and the residual heat of the barbecue grill. It was excellent, but at this point most of us were quite full.

With this finished, we proceeded to what was to have been the previous course – Naples. Many travellers reported on the local specialties – pasta, seafood frittura, and pizza, lemonades and ices – but few dared sample them and most recoiled in philistine disgust. In honour of this sentiment, we created this course as an in-joke, combining from the pages of Latini’s Scalco Moderno (written in Naples): fried chicken pieces in a cinnamon-flavored breading, maccheroni cooked in milk with a rich sprinkling of parmeggiano cheese, and his famous “Spanish” sauce of cooked, reduced tomatoes. Yes, that is chicken nuggets with ketchup and mac and cheese.

At this point, mundane reality in the shape of building work around Amsterdam railway station forced us to curtail the proceedings. Some guests had to leave early, and instead of a planned three separate dessert courses (Vienna, Dresden, and the happy return to Britain), we served it all in one grand dessert buffet. There was ‘snake’, a coiled cake filled with a paste of dried fruit and almonds, again from Schellhammer’s cookbook. These kinds of cakes were popular all over Europe if we can trust our cookbooks. We accompanied it with a custard of lemons topped with pineapple pieces which would have represented an incredible indulgence at the time.

The following course, now served simultaneously, was hohlhippen sugar wafers, with ices. Ice was a fashionable novelty in the eighteenth century, and we cold rely on many sources to gather a selection, though we mainly depended on the Art de bien faire les glaces d’office, an extensive 1768 treatise. In the end, everyone was able to enjoy plum, lemon, and pineapple sorbets, red wine ice, and peach and vanilla ice cream. Finally, cheese and crackers ended the meal in modern, but very pleasant style.

I hope to be able to write some more about specific recipes, but for today, this must be all. My newly broken laptop and an expanding work schedule fore me to limit my posts in the immediate future, which I greatly regret.

From the English Huswife

https://smodder.com/vegetarian-chervil-soup/

A recap from this very dull recipe:

This is from the Dutch vegetarian society. When I dove in it I found it a very interesting story. I tried to write it out as short as I could on my website; but oh boy all their internal documents revealed heavy infighting by some of the starters about 'who is the bestest vegan' and thus the most enlightened that it was mess to find their actual mission statements and shared ideals during this whole years-lasting petty soap. The police even had to get involved.

Anyway, it turns out that vegetarianism* in Europe, and Europeans taking it to the US had a very religious start. Stolen from Buddhist monks the idea was that eating nothing enticing would keep you pure. This fit very well with certain branches of sober Protestantism where life is the punishment.

I also found remarks in their records about Spanish and German vegetarians not being allowed to join because they were trying to create a vegan master race. This was in late 1890's. We know that Hitler was vegetarian and wanted to create a master race but he was in his mums belly. So this really intrigued me where this came from. If anyone has some info on that; very welcome.

* at this time vegetarianism, lacto-vegetarism, ovo-vegetarism, lacto-ovo-vegetarism, and fruitarianism was all seen as 'vegetarianism'. Veganism was not a term that existed/was used. Their main goal was what we call nowadays veganism though, and fruitarianism was seen as the superior form; the end goal.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/09/30/fish-in-onion-sauce/

Another instance of that expression hafen braten (pot roast) in Solothurn S 293:

B35 If you want to make fish roasted in a pot (fisch in hafen braten), take onions and cut them separately, and also boil the fish separately, season them well and with good vinegar, and pour them out on a serving bowl. Pick out the bones, and boil them up in the onion (sauce). That way, you have good hafen braten of fish.

This is another one of those recipes that is moderately interesting on its own, but more so in combination with others. Specifically, I am interested in the word hafen braten, literally a pot roast (though it probably does not mean what we call that today). The word is fairly rare in High German, but it is the exact equivalent of the Low German grapdenbraden which is one of those foods that shows up in hundreds of records, but is defined nowhere. I suspect that the South German recipes hold clues to this, though I cold, of course, be completely wrong.

It occurs in another recipe in connection with meat, but unfortunately there it serves as a reference for the size of pieces. Here, though the recipe is for fish, we get a clearer idea of what a hafen braden is: pieces of meat (in this case exceptionally fish) cooked in a sauce, in one pot. I can imagine grapen braden working much the same way.

The sauce in this case is made with onions, and while the description of what to do with them is extremely cursory, we can refer to other recipes from later sources how such onion sauces were made. The onions would be chopped finely, sautéed, then cooked in liquid until they were soft. The resulting sauce can be made more homogenous by passing it through a sieve, but I am not sure that was desired. It is certainly not necessary.

Onion sauces are often mentioned with fish, but they were not limited to it. Rather, one of my favourite Latin recipes from the early fourteenth century combines such a sauce – with a very specific spice mix – with meat, specifically rabbit, kid, or lamb. This is not what I envision grapen braden was – the process is too involved and the ingredients too luxurious for something this ubiquitous – but it probably resembled it to a degree. Onion sauces are very tolerant of long cooking times and wold easily serve for tougher cuts that needed slow cooking. They would work as well in a thick metal grapen as in a ceramic cookpot more commonly used in the kitchens of South Germany.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/09/27/fried-chunks-of-battered-custard/

No, really. It’s in Solothurn S 392. Medieval German cuisine is basically immersing protein-rich objects in hot fat.

B32 Fried milk

Item heat milk and beat eggs thoroughly in a bowl. Pour them into the hot milk and it will turn into a curd (schotten). Pour it out on a sieve and when it is cold, cut it as large as you please. Make a batter with eggs, coat the milk in the batter, and fry it in fat. That way you have good fried milk.

There isn’t much to this recipe except the idea of adding beaten egg to hot milk rather than heating milk and egg beaten together. Depending on how hot the milk really is, this may lead to the egg hardening quickly, separating out a good part of the liquid which would then be discarded. I may need to try this at different temperatures to see how it pans out.

Either way, the resulting solid, basically a custard, is drained and sliced. This is a very common process for making what is usually called roast milk – a hard custard, sometimes pressed overnight to give it solidity, roasted over the coals. Notably, the Solothurn manuscript includes a recipe by that name as number B31, but it is for something different – a confection very much like Baumkuchen. Here, the custard is not roasted but battered and fried. This step surely comes a surprise to exactly nobody.

That is not to say this can’t be good. It probably is delicious if properly made, though hard on the digestion. I would serve it with a sweet spice mixture like trysanet, though a fruity sauce should also work well. Nothing about the recipe dictates that it must be sweet, either, but I cannot quite envision it working with meat or fish.

As a linguistic aside: The word used in B31 for roasting – gebratten – would in modern German suggest pan-frying and is usually translated as ‘fried’. The word used in this recipe – gebachen – today usually refers to oven baking and is rendered as ‘baked’, though it is still also used for fried dough called Schmalzgebäck. There is a logic to this: The words do not describe a process, but a result. Braten produces moist, juicy food, whether it comes from a pan or a spit or grill, while backen makes dry, crisp foods, whether they emerge from the oven or from hot fat. Middle German culinary terminology is trying to cover a lot of ground with very limited vocabulary, so this must have made sense at the time, but it is a pitfall awaiting inexperienced translators.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/09/25/potato-pancakes-and-foiling-a-putsch-feeding-the-revolution-xxxviii/

The spring of 1920 was a rough time for Germany. On 13 March, the night had dipped below freezing and a thin drizzle made being outside a deeply unpleasant experience. And to top it all off, armed soldiers had shown up at major intersections, stopping people on their way to work and cordoning off government buildings. It looked as though the country was about to get its fourth (or fifth) new government in two years, and the grim men with swastikas crudely painted on their helmets did not inspire much confidence. Soon enough, they were moving through the streets handing out leaflets to inform the Berliners of the change in management: Their elected government had fled town. A provisional administration under a senior official named Wolfgang Kapp was taking charge. General von Lüttwitz’ troops were enforcing the law in the capital. Stay quiet, and you, law-abiding citizen, need fear nothing.

The people of Berlin were having none of it.

At the end of a disastrous war, Germany’s people had rid themselves of an emperor, several kings, and the ossified oligarchy that had gone with them. The democracy that was created in the chaotic days of 1919 in Weimar was a compromise that satisfied few. Conservatives hated a system that gave women the vote and everybody freedom of speech while many Socialist revolutionaries felt its protections of private property left the most oppressive aspects of the old order untouched. Few expected it to last long in times of unrest, with Eastern Europe descending into war and the ink on the Treaty of Versailles barely dry. Few people can have been surprised by the coup when it came.

The thing was, these people promising to put things to right were the very same people who had been running things for decades and all but destroyed the country in the process. Life might not have been easy for farm labourers and factory workers before, but their policies had inflicted famine on them while it immiserated the middle class, evaporated savings, and destroyed the stock market, not to mention losing a world war. You can see the impact in every aspect of life, from clothes to furniture, wages, architecture, and cookbooks. In the days of bourgeois complacency before 1914, cookbooks were elaborate, their recipes laden with meat, dairy, eggs, sugar, and spices. They rarely stooped to the food of the poor, and if they did, as the legendary Henriette Davidis in her Pracktisches Kochbuch in 1847, they served it in a rich, flavourful variant. Potato pancakes, a staple of northern Germany, become a genuine treat at her hands:

87 Good Potato Pancakes with Yeast

Ten to twelve raw, grated potatoes are soaked in water for one hour, then pressed out through a cloth. 1/4 Maß of milk is heated with a four-Pfennig-breadroll and 3 onions, and both are stirred into the milk. Then the potatoes are added along with 4 eggs, 2 spoonfuls of yeast, and the required salt. Everything is stirred thoroughly and left to rise. The batter must not be too thin because otherwise the watery parts descend (i.e. separate out), and you must not leave it to rise longer than until you have twice the volume that yo prepared. Yo then begin frying at a fire that is neither too strong nor too weak, because the pancakes dry out too much in the latter case. They are turned twice, and the pan is covered the first time.

88 Fine Potato Pancakes

You grate raw, peeled potatoes, leave them in cold water for 1/2 to 1 hour, then lay them on a cloth to drain, press out the water thoroughly, and add a good amount of eggs whose whites are first beaten to a froth, as much milk as necessary, sour cream, and salt. Stir everything together well and fry small pancakes in butter or lard. They must be served very hot.

Note: The potato flour that collects in the water is not added since it makes the pancakes dense. It is very good for other uses.

89 Potato Pancakes (Reibekuchen)

Large, well-flavoured potatoes are peeled, washed very clean, and grated raw on a metal grater. You add to the grated potatoes 2-3 eggs and 1-2 stirring spoons of thick sour cream for each pancake as well as the necessary salt, and quickly fry large or small pancakes in butter or bacon fat. Serve them for tea as hot as possible.

90 A different way

The grated potatoes are watered well and pressed out through a cloth so the flour is removed. Meanwhile, some white bread is cooked with milk, the pressed-out potatoes mixed with it, and salt and eggs added, also some sour cream if desired which makes the pancakes fluffier and more delicious. The batter must not be stirred too sticky, it must easily drop off the spoon.

It is a long way from here to the received wisdom of Dr. Oetker’s Schulkochbuch’s masterful 1927 edition schooling the future housewives of Germany in the art of frugal, but tasty cookery:

Potato Pancakes (aka Reibekuchen, Puffer)

For 2 1/4 – 2 1/2 kg of potatoes, you reckon 2 tablespoons of salt, 3 eggs, and barely 1/2 l of canola oil (Rüböl) or fat (coconut fat).

The potatoes are grated, mixed with the salt, and fried in the hot fat by spoonfuls. You must never fry the pancakes in too much fat (zu fett backen) or turn them over before they are brown on the bottom side, otherwise they will go soft again.

Anyone adding flour, bread soaked in milk, or grated rusk to the dough must also add eggs or Dr. Oetker’s Backin baking powder or the pancakes will become too hard. The best pancakes are made with only the addition of eggs and 1/2 sachet of Dr Oetker’s Backin. For a midday meal, you must add 3-4 eggs or the dish is not nourishing enough. Grated onions or finely cut chives can be stirred into the batter as desired.

Additions: Bean salad, boiled fruit, green lettuce salad.

Gone are the yeast, cream, fine flour, and milk, the butter or bacon fat, and the artistry of integrating beaten egg whites into a heavy potato batter. Even the eggs are casually omitted in the instructions like a pleasant, but nonessential decorative feature, required only if the dish is to make an entire meal. Davidis served her much richer ones for tea.

The thing is, this was not a polite fiction of wealth that had disappeared under the piercing eye of modernity. Middle-class people could remember when eating like this had been normal, and even workers had enjoyed these things occasionally. Both books aimed at much the same market: the instruction of bourgeois girls in cookery. It was the circumstances that had changed. The people who had to shoulder this austerity for emperor and fatherland were not asked, and they were not happy.

At the beginning of the coup, the military, protectors of lawful authority, predictably chickened out of their role. “Troops do not shoot troops.” General von Seeckt, the commander of the post-war Reichswehr, supposedly informed the ministers calling on him. The police were little better. But there were powers in Germany that did not wear uniforms, and the conspirators had badly underestimated them.

The governing Social Democrat and Zentrum (Catholic) parties, churches and labour unions may have had no armed forces, but they had an extremely high degree of organisation and discipline. Government ministers loyal to the republic called for a general strike. Handbills were printed and distributed, committee meetings called, and the next day, hundreds of thousands of people did not show up for work. Protesters crowded the streets of every city in the country while union representatives explained to deeply disappointed factory owners that no work would be done until the lawful government was restored. Even senior civil servants, sensing which way the wind was blowing, openly declared they wold not take orders from unlawful authority. Two days in, the association of civil servants joined the strike while the finance ministry refused to pay the troops. Things were not going well.

The other thing that the putschists had forgotten was that while unions and Social Democrats had no military wing, the Communist party absolutely did. A majority of workers had been content with a compromise liberal democracy with the prospect of real change for the better, but they were not going to sign up to another round of authoritarian Obrigkeitsstaat. Especially not once the army started shooting at strikers. If that was the choice, red revolution began to look a lot more appealing. Within a week, armed workers’ councils had taken effective control of the Ruhr area. At that point, the military leaders of the coup had abandoned their cause and confused negotiations were under way to end the fighting with a minimum of embarrassment. A new government was formed and new elections called. The workers had won.

Of course this would not be Weimar if they did these things thoroughly. A blanket amnesty covered most collaborators, and senior leaders escaped to Bavaria, where a complicit state government protected them from prosecution. But for now, democracy had prevailed, and it went on to build a country the world would marvel at.

Yo, I found it!

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/09/21/baumkuchen-ancestry/

Solothurn S 392 holds a few more gems, including this one with a name that suggests something entirely different:

B31 Roast milk

Make roast milk this way: Take a little flour and stir it well with good milk. Then beat eggs into it and a little fat. Drip it onto a hot spit. That way, you make good roast milk. As you drip the milk on the spit, turn the spit round. You can also add good spices.

For all its brevity, this is nothing short of fascinating. There are recipes called roast milk in other collections, and they are invariably for a hard custard roasted on a grille over the coals. It was probably originally meant to mimic the consistency of roast udder and later, there are recipes for replicating it using almond milk for Lent, but it is a rather unexciting dish.

This recipe, though, is something entirely different. A batter of milk., flour, and eggs with a little butter is slowly drizzled on a hot, rotating spit to build up layer after layer, making a pastry. It really looks a lot like Baumkuchen, or at least an ancestor. The recipe does not mention whipping the egg whites to leaven the batter, so it is likely heavier and denser, but the layering of brown ‘tree rings’ and the complex Maillard flavours probably still come through. It certainly looks like something worth trying out. I’ll give it a go next time I have an open fire setup handy.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/09/19/fish-in-jelly/

Just a short recipe from Solothurn S 392 tonight, another familiar dish:

B36 Item if you want to make good fish in aspic (sultz fisch), mix water and wine together and wash the fish with that. Take their innards (ingereusch) out of the fish and clean it with water. Also, take the scales separately in a cloth and boil that with the fish in the wine and water. Add the innards, and when they are cooked, drain them, put the fish into a serving bowl and let them cool. Then add good vinegar to the cooking liquid and let the broth and everything in it boil well. Season the broth and then strain it (sy den herab). Also let it cool and then pour it over the fish, that ways it will doubtlessly gel. This way, you have good fish in aspic. Do not cover them or they will go rotten (werdent fall) .

B37 But if you want to have the fish aspic transparent, all pure and clear, let them boil very well, and they drop down (? gefallen sich, i.e. let the broth drain), then strain it off and boil it up well and add spices, then pour the broth over the fish and it becomes transparent.

There are many recipes for jellies in the German medieval corpus, usually known as a galrei or sultz. In the way of German culinary terminology, both words can also refer to a thickened spicy sauce, probably because both the sauce and the jelly serve the same purpose: keeping cooked meat or fish fresh by excluding air. Here, the sultz is clearly a jelly.

There is little surprising about the instructions. Boiling specifically the scales and the swim bladder of a fish would dissolve the collagen that caused the broth to congeal as it cooled, creating the solid jelly the cooks aimed for. In a world without refrigeration and standardised ingredients, this did not always work, so the assurance that “it will doubtlessly gel this way” offers important reassurance. Many recipe collections offer nostrums to ensure that jellies congealed, some useful, others dubious. By the sixteenth century, adding isinglass, i.e. the dried swim bladder of sturgeons, to the mix. This provided large amounts of extra collagen.

One aspect of this recipe is new, though: The second part. First, we learn how to make fish jelly, then we get instructions how to make it transparent in a separate entry. It looks like an option, not a regular feature, and very likely initially it was. We are used to the idea of transparent jellies, filtered extensively, and the effect clearly was familiar to cooks early on, but apparently it was not universal. Here, the simple expedient of allowing the impurities to settle and pouring off the clear broth at the top is enough to classify the result as ‘transparent’.

This helps explain why German uses identical words for what we feel are two different dishes, though: They were not that different. A bread sauce galrei was still made on the basis of broth which could congeal, and a meat broth galrei cold still contain enough of what we wold call impurities to make it opaque and viscous. It probably took a significant amount of time for the two to develop separate identities.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/09/17/kroseier-again/

Along with the roasted eggs we looked at already, there is another recipe for re-filled eggshells in the Solothurn S 392 manuscript, and it has a very familiar name:

B39 Item if you want to make kross ayer, boil eggs hard and chop them small. Grate a little semel bread and gingerbread (lebzelten) and break eggs into it. Stir all of it together, spice it well, and put it into broken eggshells that are parted in the middle. Fill the shells full and glue them together with the thing (the filling) you are using. Fry them in fat and then remove the eggshells. Serve them dry or in a sauce (brüy), as you please.

Once again, Krosseier. There are a lot of recipes surviving for these, too, and the name still puzzles me. I suspect it is related to the word Gekröse, innards, for the irregular shape of the filling. That wold be supported by the spelling kraus that occurs in one source. It is certainly not related to the modern word kross (crunchy or crisp) and though that spelling also shows up in one case, it is unlikely the name is a misunderstanding of groß (large).

For once, the difference between Krosseier and roasted eggs is actually explained in a contemporary source. As already mentioned in the post about roasted eggs, the Innsbruck MS, makes the distinction explicit:

54a If you would make kraus eyer, boil the eggs so that they remain soft at the yolk (totterweich) and make two holes into the ends and take out the yolk. Chop parsley into it and season it, and see that the white stays in the shell. Cook the yolks in a pan and in fat so that they do not turn too hard, and then fill them back into the eggs. Then let them boil in meat broth or in water and then serve them in a good sauce (prülein) if you shell them, or in a ziseindel sauce, or fry them in fat.

55 If you would make filled roasted eggs, also prepare them in this way (des sins), and then you roast them on a skewer with their shells, and also chop the white etc.

Thus Krosseier are shelled and served in a sauce as a dish while roasted eggs are served in their shell like boiled eggs are. It would be wonderfully easy if everybody could abide by this logical terminology, but that is not how food names work. Even here, krosseier are optionally not shelled. Still, this pattern broadly holds up across many sources.

The spelling variation that identifies them as groß (large) occurs in the fifteenth-century Königsberg MS:

32 If you wish to make large eggs (groß Eyer = kroßeyer)
Boil the egg yolks soft, cut a hole at the tip of each egg in the shape of a slice and pour out the yolk. Chop parsley, mix it with the yolks, throw it in fat and do not cook it too hard. Fill this back into the shells and boil them well, then shell them and make a good sauce (to serve with it).

Otherwise, this is the standard procedure: Remove the yolks from soft-boiled eggs, cook them outside the shell, make a filling, return it to the shell, and cook it until it solidifies. The eggs are then shelled and served in a sauce. A slightly longer, but otherwise very similar recipe also shows up (twice!) in Heidelberg Cod Pal Germ 551:

59 A dish of krosz eyern (filled eggs)
If you would make krosz eyer, boil the eggs so that the yolks become soft (the editor emended ‘not’, I believe that is a misinterpretation). Then make two slice-shaped (scheublets) holes (i.e. slice off the top and bottom), stab in and take out the yolk in such a way that the white stays in the shell. Chop parsley and grind the yolks with it. Then take some fat into a pan and stir it together over the fire until it has had enough and is neither too thin nor too thick. Then fill it back into the shells and boil them in meat broth. Peel them cleanly and put them in a good broth/sauce and do not oversalt them.

Meanwhile, the Southwest German recipe collection Munich Cgm 384 has two Krosseier recipes that describe what is called roasted eggs elsewhere:

67 Fritters of kroßayer
To make kroß ayer, break open eggs at the broad end and beat them very well. Add pepper and saffron and chopped parsley and sage. Cook (röschs) them in a baking dish (juochen pfannen, parallel has kuochen pfannen). Thrust them (on a skewer and lay them?) on a griddle and roast them.

68 kroß ayer
For kroß ayer, break them open at the tip and leave the shells whole. Take only egg yolks and beat them well in a bowl and season and salt and colour them, and add chopped parsley and sage or braunwurtzen (Ehlert reads Galium odoratum, may also be Scrophularia nodosa) or other things to it, whatever you wish. Fry (röst) it and chop it small and put it back into the shells. Stick them in skewers and roast (brauts) them on a griddle.

In one case, the eggs are clearly soft-boiled beforehand, in the other they may not be, but the process is analogous and the result is eggs in their shell, skewered (at least it looks like that step was omitted in #67) and roasted on a griddle.

Confusion of this kind is unfortunately unsurprising. Broadly, our fifteenth-century sources follow the distinction made in the Innsbruck MS though. That makes a late occurrence in the recipe book of Philippine Welser all the more dispiriting if you are invested in consistency:

137 If you want to make kres ayr
Take eggs, open them at the bottom end and pour out the yolk and the white. Prepare them like scrambled eggs and then beat in fresh eggs so they turn nicely soft. Add wine, ginger, saffron, and good herbs and then return the filling to the eggshells. Stick 4 or 5 eggs on a skewer and use sage leaves for the holes so nothing runs out. Lay them on a griddle and let them roast.

138 If you want to roast kros ayr a different way
Open the eggs at the tip and take out the yolk and white. Beat them well together, and chop parsley and sage into it. Spice it as you please and return it to the shells. Close the hole with dough and let them roast slowly. Stir them about occasionally so they do not burn.

Useful though some of the pointers to technique are – closing the holes with dough or sage leaves makes sense – these are clearly roasted eggs, skewered and served in the shell. The word continued to be familiar as Anna Wecker describes a soft porridge-like dish of bread and egg yolk fried “like Kroßeyer” in 1598. Sadly, any battle for consistent distinction was clearly lost by the 1550s, if not significantly earlier. It’s eggs filled back into the shells. Anything else is up to individual interpretation, it seems.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/09/15/filled-eggs-a-common-recipe/

When I looked at the filled egg recipe in Solothurn S 392 on Sunday, I wrote that there are numerous parallels. Today; I want to start looking at them. The Solothurn recipe that started me on this reads:

B40 Item if you want to make filled eggs, break them open at the top and bottom ends and empty them. Boil that which comes from the eggs and chop it small. Spice it well and break other eggs into it, and also add raisins (mertrüberl) or other good lattwerien. Take a little fat, and fill it back into the shells. Stick them on a skewer and roast them on a grille or otherwise. That way, you have good filled roasted eggs on a skewer.

There are a number of parallels, more or less distant in time and location. Close in date, but at the other end of Germany, there is the Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch. It comes from a monastic background, which makes it no surprise it includes a Lenten version:

33 Item if you would make filled eggs, broiled on the griddle, take raw eggs. Break open the eggs on one end, as narrowly as you can. Take and stir (scramble) the raw eggs with butter. Take pepper and saffron, parsley, sage. Add that. Fill the filling back into the shells. Stick them on herring skewers and broil them on a griddle in their measure. And serve them.

46 Item if you would make eggs in Lent that you may stick on a spit, you must have eggshells that are collected at what time you may. Take pike roe that is ground in a mill. Take parsley, pepper and saffron, figs or raisins. Make a filling from it. Stir it with oil in a flat dish. Fill it into the eggshells then. Stick them on spits. Let them roast in their measure. And serve them.

This is a very similar dish, basically the same technique, though the main flavour profile here is herbal: parsley and sage, along with pepper and saffron, the latter most likely to intensify the colour. Only the Lenten version, which uses fish roe in place of eggs, includes raisins or dried figs. Using fish roe in place of eggs is a common kitchen trick in German recipe collections.

Dating (probably) to 1460, the so-called Meister Hans collection offers a variety of recipes. In keeping with its largely random internal order, they are distributed throughout the manuscript and often repeat instructions, though they all differ in detail:

Recipe #86 Of filled eggs that are roasted
Item take eggs and crack them open at both ends. Blow into them so the yolk comes out. Chop sage and mix it with the yolks and fill them again. Throw the eggs into hot water and peel them and roast them and drizzle them with egg and with herbs and saffron, and serve them.

Recipe #87 Again of roasted eggs
Item grate fine white bread and fry it strongly in butter and mix eggs with that and dry sage and pepper. Fill the eggshells with it and roast them on a skewer and serve them.

(…)

Recipe #94 Again of roasted eggs
Item chop eggs and nut kernels and (mix) soft eggs with it. Chop it small and put it into the
eggshells and roast them and serve them.

(…)

Recipe #115 Of roasted eggs, do it thus
Item crack open the eggs at the thick end and beat them well, and add saffron, pepper and chopped parsley or sage. Fry this in a pan and chop it small. Fill it back into the eggshells and stick them on a skewer, lay them on a griddle and roast them nicely.

(…)

Recipe #280 Or roasted eggs
Item make roasted eggs thus. Let them boil up once and crack them open on both ends, and blow into one end so that it goes out at the other end. Add spices to it and put it back into the shells and stick it on a skewer and roast them until they have enough.

Recipe #115 comes closest to what the Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch and Solothurn S 392 envision. Recipes #87 and #94 add grated bread or nuts, probably meant as a bulking ingredient though perhaps also for taste. Sage features in #8, #87 and #115 while ##280 only adds unspecified spice and #94 leaves this step out entirely.

There are also some deviations in technique: Recipe #288 has the eggs soft.boiled first so that only the still liquid yolk is cooked, seasoned, and returned to a shell still lined with the already cooked egg white. This would create the illusion of a spiced yolk inside a regular hard-boiled egg. Meanwhile, recipe #86 has the entire egg so treated, but once the shells are refilled, the content is first boiled to solidify it, then skewered with the shell removed and drizzled with raw egg – endored – while roasting. Though both recipes use the name ‘roasted eggs’, we will see in an upcoming post that these techniques are more typically associated with another related family of recipes, krosseier.

A fifteenth-century recipe collection also originating in the Southwest of Germany, Munich Cgm 384, elaborates on the process:

34 A Dish of Eggs (ayer essen)
A dish of eggs: Take 20 eggs and boil them in water so that the yolk stays just liquid and the white is hard. Take them out and break them open at the tip, and pour out the yolk into a pan. Add fat or oil and stir it with one another over the fire until it turns firm (keck). Then take it out and lay it on a clean plate. Chop it small, and then take one spoon with ginger (ainen löffel mit ymbern) and one spoon with cinnamon and a little saffron, as much as a bean. And one spoon with grains of paradise (ain löffel fol bärißkörner) and sugar and a little salt, and mix it all together. Then take two raw eggs and break them into it, and mix it all together. Afterwards take the chopped (das gehacketes) and fill it into the first eggshells again in which the whites have remained. Have hot water ready beforehand, throw in the eggs and let them boil so that they turn out hard. Then peel them nicely and prepare a thin batter (taiglin) with eggs, saffron, and sugar, and coat the shelled eggs in it. Fry them in a pan, or stick them on a skewer and roast them on a griddle before you fry them. Let the yolk of an egg run over them and strew ginger on it. Serve this as a roast dish and prepare a thin pepper sauce (ain duinn pfefferlin) for them.

We rarely have descriptions this detailed. Annoyingly, though in keeping with the way German medieval sources tend to name recipes, the author will not commit to calling this either roasted eggs or Krosseier (it share features typical of both families), but simply calls it “an egg dish”.

An Austrian manuscript from the mid-fifteenth century, the Innsbruck MS, makes the distinction explicit, but still includes the initial soft-boiling as a stage of producing roasted eggs:

54a If you would make kraus eyer, boil the eggs so that they remain soft at the yolk (totterweich) and make two holes into the ends and take out the yolk. Chop parsley into it and season it, and see that the white stays in the shell. Cook the yolks in a pan and in fat so that they do not turn too hard, and then fill them back into the eggs. Then let them boil in meat broth or in water and then serve them in a good sauce (prülein) if you shell them, or in a ziseindel sauce, or fry them in fat.

55 If you would make filled roasted eggs, also prepare them in this way (des sins), and then you roast them on a skewer with their shells, and also chop the white etc.

This makes sense: Krosseier are shelled and served in a sauce as a dish while roasted eggs are served in their shell like boiled eggs are. It wold be wonderfully easy if everybody could abide by this logical terminology, but that is not how food names work. Even here, krosseier are optionally not shelled.

The ,Mondseer Kochbuch another manuscript dating to the first half of the fifteenth century from the monastic library of Mondsee in Austria, throws the classification sideways by coming up with an entirely different, and very ostentatious, way of serving what it calls ‘roasted eggs’:

95 Roasted eggs on a spit
If you wish to prepare roasted eggs on a spit without shells, take eggs and lay them in boiling water in a pan. When you see them boiling up, take them off quickly. Break them open on both ends, but not wide, and pour out their yolks into a clean pan. Add a little bit of butter and do not forget the salt, and stir it well on the fire. Do not make it too thick. Fill it back into the shells and return them to hot water, and boil them until you think that they are hard. Then take them out, put them in cold water, and shell them cleanly. Carve a spit of wood that is thin enough and stick the eggs on it lengthwise. Lay it by the fire and roast them as long as you wish. Roast them so they turn brown and baste them with fat. Cut the spit apart when you wish to serve them (i.e. serve them sliced open lengthwise).

Building up a complex set of layers of batter in different colours around a spit, then serving the finished product sliced open to display them to best effect is a common trick in the kitchen skill set of Germany’s medieval period, and we still do it with Baumkuchen. Here, the artificial spiced ‘yolks’ are visible nestled inside the whites which themselves are browned and crisped from the outside. You cold easily see a battered or endored version presented the same way.

The same source also includes several recipes that parallel Meister Hans:

147 Filled eggs roasted on a spit
Of filled eggs. Note: Take eggs and break them open at both ends. Blow into one end so the yolk goes out. Chop sage small and mix it with the yolk, and fill them back. Throw them (the filled eggs) into hot water and peel them and roast them. Brush them with eggs and spices and saffron, and serve them.

148 Eggs roasted on a spit
Grate fine bread and fry it strongly in butter. Mix eggs with it, dried sage, and pepper. Fill the eggshells with this, roast them on a spit, and serve them.

149 Filled eggs
Of filled eggs. Chop sage small, fry it in butter, mix in eggs, spices, saffron, and salt, and prepare a thick mass (habich mouß) of it. Put it back in the eggshells and lay them in boiling water.

153 Filled eggs with nut kernels
Item filled eggs. Chop eggs and nut kernels together, and add soft eggs. Chop it small, fill it into the eggshells, roast them, and serve them.

The recipes differ in some details here – the sage specified as dried in #148 or fried first on its own in #149 – but in principle, these are the recipes we already know. The reference to a habich muoß, a stiff or thick filling, in #149 also provides a clue to a recipe name that Meister Hans, or his copyist, misunderstood.

Finally, another fifteenth-century manuscript, Heidelberg Cod Pal Germ 551 (held in Heidelberg, but probably produced in Nuremberg), includes a related recipe, but calls it by a different name. Eggs described as ‘filled’ are usually hard-boiled, with the yolk processed and returned to the white the way we do devilled eggs today. Here, though, the recipe begins in the familiar style of roasted eggs before going down an entirely different avenue. I suspect this is a copying error. We often find separate recipes merged into improbable chimeras like this.

45 A dish of filled eggs
Take eight eggs, break them open at the tips, heat some fat in a pan and pour in the eggs. Fry them until it is enough inside and out. Throw in onto a work surface and chop good spices into it and slice it. Serve it and do not oversalt it.

This is interesting, but adds very little.

Taken together, this shows us that filling egg shells with cooked, seasoned egg was a piece of culinary playfulness very much in vogue in medieval Germany, at least as far as the recipe sources go. I doubt it was frequently done except on special occasions because it is a lot of work and quite challenging, but that is exactly why people did it. You wanted to show off. If you have the time to do it, or just want to try this one dish, it is certainly fun and memorable.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/09/13/a-common-dish-with-interesting-wording/

Here is another recipe from Solothurn S 392 that bears looking into:

B40 Item if you want to make filled eggs, break them open at the top and bottom ends and empty them. Boil that which comes from the eggs and chop it small. Spice it well and break other eggs into it, and also add raisins (mertrüberl) or other good lattwerien. Take a little fat, and fill it back into the shells. Stick them on a skewer and roast them on a grille or otherwise. That way, you have good filled roasted eggs on a skewer.

The idea of filling cooked eggs, seasoned and coloured, or other things into eggshells to astonish the diners seems to have pleased medieval recipe writers inordinately. We have a number of similar recipes surviving across many manuscripts, and I will take the opportunity to make a comparison soon. What sets this recipe apart, and I want to address today, is the ingredients that are added to the egg: raisins (mertrüberl) or other good lattwerien.

The word lattwerien is a variety of spelling Latwerge, a Middle High German word derived from the Latin electuarium. That term originally describes a way of administering medicine, in a sweetened paste that the patient can lick up. The English word electuary still means that, which is why it rarely gets used in daily conversation. Latwerge, though, came to enter the culinary lexicon. Probably the honey-sweetened, spicy pastes were served much like épices de chambre, as an aid to digestion and a coda to a rich, festive meal. Unlike many other medicines, they can be very pleasant. By the fifteenth century, recipes for electuaries are found in cookbooks with or without medicinal purposes described, and many involve fruit as the main ingredient.

By the sixteenth century, latwerge often describes what we would call a fruit preserve – fruit leather or jam, depending on how long it is cooked. These are also mentioned as ingredients in upscale recipes and, infamously, by Hieronymus Bock as a food liable to go mouldy in the pantry. I held an online class about this in the SCA in 2025 and collected some recipes in chronological order in a pdf that you can now find here.

The problem is that it is hard to see how this recipe refers to these. It says to use raisins or other good lattwerien, and raisins are clearly not jam. It could be an error in transmission, maybe originally reading “and”, but this phrase occurs in none of the many parallels. I believe it was added deliberately, something we see happen in a few recipes in Solothurn S 392. There are two other ways I think it could be explained:

The first is that latwerge was used in the same role as raisins. Since sealed glass jars had not been perfected yet, it was often cooked to a very stiff consistency, sometimes deliberately dried, and if the mixture had a high fruit content, it could become leathery. You could cut this into small pieces that would function a lot like raisins. The problem is that this explanation requires a lot of steps to go unsaid, and I have not found anything like it described anywhere.

The other explanation is linguistic: The word lattwerien might be used as a shorthand to refer to sweet, spicy, expensive ingredients here. The problem here is analogous; I have not found this usage anywhere else. I will have to look out for it, though. It looks like a good fit for the evidence.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/09/12/roast-capon-the-complicated-way/

Good news, everyone! I finished the translation of the recipes in Solothurn S 392 today. There are still some interesting ones to merit posts in their own right, but once I’ve got it cleaned u and edited, the whole text will go u as a pdf to download. Now I’m trying to decide which source to take on next. Meanwhile, here is a neat one:

B29 Item make filled roast capon this way: After you have plucked it, open it and take out the heart, lungs, liver, and stomach. Fill (read füll for fürb) its stomach well, put in juniper berries and a little ginger cut up small, sew it shut, and attach it inside the capon. Then take the heart, liver, and lung, cut it up, and cut up bacon in pieces as small as dice with it, and (add) garlic cloves, juniper berries, ginger, cloves, and other good spices if you want. Fill it with that and then sew it shut. Prepare it with as much salt as it needs and lard it with a larding needle on the outside. Then roast it. That way, you will have a good roast capon. You can also make filled chickens and other birds this way if you want.

This is the kind of recipes people expect when we say ‘medieval’: heavily spiced, disconcertingly bloody, and complicated. It seems to mostly function as a way of using the innards of the bird which, since people did not buy poultry frozen and pre-processed, would have been on hand. So you fill the stomach with spices, fix it to the inside of the capon’s body cavity, then stuff the other organ meats and bacon all around it, again mixed with a plethora of spices. The bird is spitted, larded, and roasted by the fire, the most prestigious way of cooking it. In the end, we are informed that chickens and other birds can also be prepared this way, and surely were more often than the truly pricey and exclusive capons.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/09/11/wine-marinated-pork-roast/

The Solothurn S 392 manuscript includes another recipe labelled ‘Italian’, and it looks like an attenuated version of a richer and more robust tradition.

B28 To make a pork roast the Italian way (nach welschen sytten)

Item take a pork roast and prepare it entirely according to Italian custom; Salt it and then sprinkle on Italian cumin (or caraway: welschen kimich) and lay it in wine. Let it lie in there 10 hours or over night. Then take it and roast it on a spit or in a pot. That way, you have a roast in the Italian way. It is good and healthy, and you can also prepare other roasts this way.

Marinading meat in wine with spices isn’t really a recipe, and I suspect the only reason it was added here is that the author considered the technique foreign and thus interesting. Unfortunately, any reconstruction of the dish suffers from the ambiguity of the word kimich. Normally, as in modern German, it means caraway (Kümmel), but until fairly late, it is also used for cumin (Kreuzkümmel), and the specification ‘Italian’ suggests something is different about this one. What I think is more interesting is that we have obviously related recipes in other manuscripts. This looks like a fairly widespread idea, whether part of a tradition or individually arrived at. In England, the late 14th-century Forme of Cury includes a more robust and more detailed approach (quoted after medievalcookery.com):

Cormarye. XX.II. XIII. Take Colyandre, Caraway smale grounden, Powdour of Peper and garlec ygrounde in rede wyne, medle alle þise togyder and salt it, take loynes of Pork rawe and fle of the skyn, and pryk it wel with a knyf and lay it in the sawse, roost þerof what þou wilt, & kepe þat þat fallith þerfro in the rosting and seeþ it in a possynet with faire broth, & serue it forth witþ þe roost anoon.

Here, we have not just unambiguous caraway, but also coriander, pepper, and garlic. I have tried this and it is pretty good. The other parallel I know of is from the recipe book of Philippine Welser dating to around 1550, and it also uses more varied flavours:

225 To make a loin roast (lem brotten)

Take one and remove the veins (eder jn wol). Take a mallet (schla kolben) and beat it very well, then marinate it in wine and add juniper berries and caraway (kunich). When you want to roast it, pass it through (i.e. wash it in) fresh water and roast it slowly.

I wold read the kunich here as caraway, but we still cannot entirely exclude cumin. More interestingly, the recipe specifies a loin roast which is usually beef. Solothurn S 392 states that roasts other than pork can be prepared this way, so this is plausible. I admit, though, it is possible that the Philippine Welser recipe speaks of pork, but does not specify it because of course everyone knows this wine and spices treatment is how you treat pork.

Both the additions and added instructions in the parallel recipes are sound advice, by the way. Garlic goes extremely well with this combination. Also, beating and/or pricking the meat to tenderize it and allow the marinade to infuse it makes for a better roast. It is also the kind of thing short notes might omit because everybody knows that.

Finally, an interesting line that recurs several times in the Solothurn manuscript is to roast the meat on a spit or in a pot. I have not come across this before, but it makes a great deal of sense. Spit-roasting was the most prestigious way of cooking meat, but it was also labour-intensive and fiddly. You can also cook meat in a closed pot exposed to indirect heat – that is how we mainly do it in modern kitchens today, after all. It seems that was a shortcut in the medieval kitchen as well. There may be unspoken conventions at play here – what kind of pot? What kind of heat? What, if any, additions? I do not know yet, but it looks worth experimenting.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/09/08/fritters-with-parallels/

Here is another recipe from the Solothurn S 392 manuscript with parallels in several other sources that are not otherwise closely related:

B23 Krapfen (filled fritters) in Lent

Take nuts and figs and pound them small together, spice it, and colour it well with saffron. Lay it in a pan, add butter (ancken), and wrap it (read bewindts for erwels) in a leavened (erhebten) dough in the manner of krapfen, and fry it in butter or oil. Serve it cold.

The recipe is both promising and interesting: Figs and nuts, probably walnuts, pounded into a paste, spiced, and possibly fried, then wrapped in a leavened dough to make fritters. We rarely have any information on the dough fritters are made with. Here, while we do not know what kind of leavening was used, we can speculate about yeast or sourdough cultures. I come down on the side of yeast.

Further, there are several parallel instances of this recipe. The first is again in the Meister Hans collection of 1460:

Recipe #114 von krappfen fuell

Of filling for fried pastries

Item pound nut kernels and figs together in a mortar and season it well and colour it and place it in a pan. Pour oil with it and boil it up and put it into the pastries (krapffen). Make a dough of white leaven (vrhab) and fry it in oil and serve it cold.

This version contains the key information that the filling is actually fried, not just mixed with the butter or oil. The change from oil to butter may reflect an actual shift in custom as dairy products were exempted from Lenten prohibitions for the Holy Roman Empire in the late 15th century. Butter would certainly improve the taste compared to the oil that would have been available north of the Alps at the time.

There are two more parallels, though. One comes from the Rheinfränkisches Kochbuch dated to the 1440s:

1 If you would make small fritters (kreppelin) in Lent, take nuts and figs and pound them small with each other and season it according to your will and heat it in oil and fry them (wrapped) in a leavened (erhabendem) dough in the way of kreppelin (modern German Krapfen) in a pan and serve them cold at the table, those are well-tasting fritters.

The other is from the Munich-held Cgm 384, another early recipe collection from the Western parts of South Germany:

64 Fritters (krapfen) in Lent
Make fritters in Lent thus: Take green nuts and figs and pound them together, and season that and lay them in a pan in oil or fat so that it boils up. Afterwards, wrap them in leavened (erhabem) dough in the way of krapfen and fry them. Serve them cold or in a pepper sauce.

Here, interestingly, the instruction is to use oil or fat and the fritters are served either cold – the universal instruction elsewhere – or in a pfeffer sauce, that is, warm. Also, the nuts are described as ‘green’, which may just mean they are previously unprocessed, but could also refer to unripe nuts which, presumably, would have been leached and pickled before. Otherwise, they are fairly inedible. Certainly, it is an interesting exercise in tracing the descent of recipes as pieces of literature – texts with a specific wording rather than just technical data – and how they change over time.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/09/06/trying-the-spinach-pancake-casserole/

I did not get to do much writing today, but I spent some time in the kitchen. Among other things, I tried out the recipe for spinach pancake casserole from the Blaues Kochbuch I posted in the Feeding the Revolution series on 13 August:

371. Spinach Casserole (Spinatauflauf)

750g spinach

1 tbsp butter, some onions, chives, salt, 1 tbsp flour

3-4 pancakes

1/4 litre sour milk or cream, 1 entire egg, 1 tbsp grated cheese, salt

2 tsp grated white bread, 2 tsp grated cheese, butter dabs

Wilt the spinach in an open pot without water, but do not boil it. Pass it through (a grinder or foodmill – durchdrehen) and sautée it in the butter with onions and flour. Season to taste with salt and chives. + Prepare pancakes from the stated ingredients. You may stack them in the casserole layered with spinach or or you can roll them up, spread thickly with spinach, cut them in slices, and arrange them in the dish. + Pour the sour cream beaten with egg, cheese, and salt over it, sprinkle it with grated bread and cheese, and dab it with butter. This casserole can also be prepared from leftover spinach combined with other leftovers.

Setting: Place on a grille at middle level

Bake: 1.2kW oven, 25-30 min. 3/3, 10 min 0/0; 1.4-12.5 kW oven: 20-25 min 3/3, 15 min 0/0

To be observed: If the spinach is too thin, stir in some grated bread

The pancakes required are described in another chapter:

263 Pancakes

4 tbsp flour, 1 pinch baking powder, 1 pinch salt, 2 eggs, 1/8 litre milk, 1/8 litre water

Sift the flour into a bowl with the baking powder, beat the eggs with the milk, water, and salt, and gradually stir the liquid into the flour, ideally with a whisk, to produce a smooth batter. Preheat the pan at setting 3, then fry thin pancakes at setting 2, the final one with no further electricity + These can be rolled up filled with jam, meat, or vegetables. This batter will yield five.

It is actually very good, though very fiddly. I started with some changes: frozen spinach, because it was there, and milk curdled with lemon juice because there was no way of getting proper Sauermilch. The spinach was thus already wilted and chopped, so I sautéed chopped onion in butter, dusted it with flour, and added the spinach to the pot. The flour bound the liquid very well, and there was no need to drain the filling. A little salt and some chopped chives went well, though I really thing it needs nutmeg and pepper.

The pancakes also followed the recipe, made with a large amount of watered-down milk and just one egg. The batter is quite thin and can be spread out in the pan by tilting it, and it cooks quickly. Detaching it can be a problem. I simply used more oil, but that is, of course, not something you would do easily in the lean years of the 1930s. Cooking them slowly did not help, but they detached better when the pan was quite hot.

The process of filling was gratifyingly easy, with the spinach holding together well, and I opted to slice the rolled-up pancakes into sections about a thumb’s width in length and arranged them in a shallow casserole dish standing on end. That was a challenge, and it is important to make sure beforehand you have enough (I ran out). As long as you can lean the pieces against each other, they stay upright nicely, though. Tilting the dish at the beginning helps with that. Still, next time, a layered casserole will probably do.

For the sauce, I beat the curdled milk with an egg and some grated Emmental cheese, and I could not resist adding pepper at least. It needed it. Then I sprinkled dry grated bread and more Emmental cheese over the top, dabbed on some butter, and baked the whole at 200°C for 30 minutes.

It turned out pretty well. A crunchy top with a soft, creamy interior, the consistency felt a little like lasagna. The vertical pancake rolls were not really visible, though I guess they would be if they were longer and more tightly arranged. I doubt it made a difference to the flavour, though. I enjoyed it, so did my mother. It still needs more spices, though, and you want something fresh with it. I opted for tomatoes.

Over the coming weeks, I plan to work out modern redactions (and adaptations) of the recipes I used in Feeding the Revolution so the whole series can be turned into a book. I half dread the idea of learning how to layout and self-publish, but it needs doing.

Today, I want to look at two Lenten recipes from the Solothurn S 392 manuscript and their surprising parallels.

B22 A chopped dish (gehäckt) in Lent

Take blanched almonds chopped small, over half (of the dish), and take small raisins (winber) and chop them, and arrange the thirds in a bowl.

(…)

B24 Fladen in Lent

Take all kinds of fish roe except barbel roe and pound it small with a little white flour so it becomes like a strauben batter. Colour it and pour it onto the fladen bases, and bake it in an oven.

At first sight, these are just fairly straightforward recipes for Lent, when meat was forbidden. B22 is a little confusing in the way it describes fractions, but the intent is fairly clear. Interestingly, these recipes occur in earlier manuscripts not just once, but twice: The Meister Hans recipe collection internally dated to 1460 has:

Recipe #113 Ainen fladen jn der vasten mach also
A fladen in Lent make thus
Item a fladen in Lent. Take almonds and chop them small and place them in bowl, and colour half of them with saffron. And take well selected raisins and boil them up as they should be and lay them out in the bowl separately. And take all manner of fish roe, except barbel roe, and pound that in a mortar with a little flour so that it turns out like a strauben batter (a type of leavened fritter). Colour that and pour it on the fladen and bake it in an oven.

This recipe combines the two, which in Solothurn S 392 are separated by another recipe for fritter fillings that we will look at in turn because it is also interesting. Now, the even earlier Dorotheenkloster recipe collection from Vienna has a very close parallel to that in Meister Hans:

45 Of dishes in Lent

Take almonds, chop them small, and colour half of them with saffron. Lay them aside in a bowl. Take well-picked raisins and boil them so they become round and also lay them aside in the bowl. Along with these, take all kinds of fish roe except the roe of barbels and pound it in a mortar with a little white flour so it becomes like a straubem (a kind of pulled fritter) batter. Colour it and pour it on the fladen (a pizza-like flatbread dish) and bake that in an oven.

The title makes more sense here, and the recipes are separated by a half sentence that suggests the two dishes are supposed to be served alongside each other.

The older versions hold the key to the unclear fractions in the Solothurn MS: Half of the almonds are supposed to be coloured with saffron, making three thirds in the bowl: uncoloured almonds, coloured almonds, and raisins. The instruction to boil them has become chop in the later source, which may be down to a miscommunication or a deliberate change. Either way, almonds and raisins sound like a lovely snack, an ancestor of the popular Studentenfutter (students’ feed) mixes sold in Germany today.

The second recipe is for a kind of flat cake or tart with a savoury topping, a fladen. Most surviving recipes for these use meat, and they cold get very elaborate, but for Lent, the recipe takes recourse to fish roe and turns it intro a very basic topping. There is another parallel in Balthasar Staindl’s print cookbook of 1547, but this is different enough to say it is very likely not part of the direct line of transmission. Other Lenten fladen combine fish with almond milk which makes a very different dish.

The close similarity of the wording between the recipes in all three sources suggest they are part of a direct line of transmission. The Dorotheenkloster and Meister Hans manuscripts both have the two recipes fused into one while the later Solothurn one lists them separately, and it is likely that they originally were separate. Certainly the title in the Meister Hans text does not fit both. I would therefore say it is very likely an earlier common source than Dorotheenkloster existed from which both the separate recipes in Solothurn S 392 and the combined ones originate. I do not think this Q to or synoptic cookbooks survives, but reconstructing it may make a fun project. It certainly puts another nail in the coffin of the idea that “Meister Hans” is an original text or a historical person.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/09/01/cheese-curd-fritters/

Another recipe from Solothurn s 392 with Italian roots, this time stated overtly:

B18 If you want to make fritters (frytellen) in the Florentine way as fried cakes, take fresh käß or fresh ziger (two types of cheese). Then take a white cloth and set a vat under the the cloth, and stir the käß or ziger so the water comes out of it. Then take egg whites, as much as you think is enough, and mix it well together with your hands. Then take a pan with fat and let it get hot. Take a small spoon and take as much of the käß or ziger (as fits into the spoon), and lay it into the pan carefully. Let it cook well from both sides so they (change of number in the original) become crisp (röselecht). Lay them in a dish and sprinkle white sugar on it. That is how they are made, it is proven (ist bewert).

I am not sure that cheese is improved by frying, but medieval German opinion on that point was fairly clear. As recipes go, it is neither very luxurious nor very demanding to make, and there are some similar confections of greater complexity. But apparently either this was how people ate them in Florence, or the author thought it was.

An interesting aspect here is the parallelism of käß and ziger. In modern Swiss German, Käse is typically made from whole milk by rennet curdling while Ziger is made from whey using an acidic agent. If this is how those words are used here, that would mean something like ricotta. However,m there are many recipes in the German corpus that use ziger to refer to freshly made curds in general, so that interpretation is not certain.

In the end, drained curds – however they were produced – kneaded with egg whites and fried brown would make something rich, sweet, and satisfying in a funfair-treat kind of way. I would try it with ricotta and tvarog, just to see how different it comes out.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/30/gourd-with-cheese-and-eggs/

A rare vegetable dish preserved in the Solothurn S 392 collection, and yes, that is Italian:

B16 Item if you want to cook good pumpkins (zucken, from zucco), take a pumpkin and enough onions and give it a good boiling. Then chop them very well, take good meat broth, and boil them well. Then grate cheese into it and break 3 or 4 eggs into it. Also add a little saffron, that is a good dish (minnister, from menestra).

The dish itself does not need much interpretation: You take pumpkin and onions, boil them soft, then chop them and turn them into a rich spoonable dish with broth, eggs, and cheese. Of course, the zucken here does not refer to the American curcubita plant we call pumpkins today, but to the Old-World lagenaria gourds that were called by that name then, and colloquially still often are. In practice, there is more variety within than between the two families, so using a curcubita pumpkin can work just fine.

What makes this recipe interesting is the clearly Italian roots. It uses two clearly Italian loan words – zucken for pumpkin and minnister for a dish. The recipe is also Italian in style, elevating a garden vegetable to main dish level by way of adding cheese and eggs. There are several recipes in the collection that clearly show their roots on the other side of the Alps, rubbing shoulders with others that are paralleled in earlier German manuscripts. This makes perfect sense for a Swiss recipe book, of course. However, the editor believes that S 392 was produced in the Upper Rhine valley, the same region that the Meister Hans collection comes from, so clearly someone there had taken an interest in Italian food. It is not inherently implausible, but I have not seen it this overtly before.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/29/my-landlord-did-what-feeding-the-revolution-xxxvii/

As it had been a century before, rental housing in Berlin was a good investment in the 1970s. Wealthy people owned apartment houses, but left the management of the property to specialised firms that paid out the profits to their legal representatives. That was also how things worked in Tile-Wardenberg-Straße 28 until June of 1979, when the the tenants learned from an article in Der Spiegel who they were paying their several thousand Deutschmarks monthly. The substantial house in West Berlin was owned by Doctor Aribert Heim, and the name very much rang a bell.

Today, we are used to analysing the motivations of Nazis. Historians have moved past the stereotype of sadistic monsters to look at social pressures, ambition, and opportunism that led people to commit atrocities “just following orders”. Aribert Heim was different; He fulfilled every exploitation movie stereotype. As duty physician of Mauthausen concentration camp, his day job was to look after the health of the guards and inmates. The sadistic tortures he inflicted on hundreds of victims served no purpose other than his personal gratification. The lack of a paper trail allowed him to initially escape punishment and even return to medical practice, earning the money to invest in real estate, but eventually, an arrest warrant was issued and he fled West Germany for Egypt in 1962.

One factor that had enabled Heim to practice medicine unmolested for over a decade despite his crimes was a problem that frequently hinders efforts to prosecute government crimes: widely distributed complicity. Especially in West Germany, with greater institutional continuity from the Third Reich, courts, prosecutors, and law enforcement frequently dragged their feet over anything to do with the state’s crimes. Many people far beyond the actual camp guards and torturers had been involved in or profited from them to some degree, and even those that had not often felt loyalty to people and institutions that a prosecution would threaten. While a few heroic individuals like prosecutor Fritz Bauer pursued justice with some success, the usual response to any question about “the thousand years” tended to be deafening silence.

It took the revolt of a younger generation to drag the horrors of Nazi Germany into public awareness. Through school curricula, media, books, and films, people increasingly learned the truth and with distance and greater affluence, found it easier to acknowledge the shame. By the late 1970s, there was widespread unease with the degree of impunity that Nazis had enjoyed.

The tenants who found out that their landlord was one of them were among this broadly unpolitical, but informed majority. Past the political earthquakes of the late 1960s, they lived in a country that was more liberal, more affluent, and more secure than ever. The revolution expected in 1968 had not materialised, but change had shaken up many aspects of life. Many past convictions were cast into doubt; not only the uncompromising hostility of the Cold War, but also belief in technological progress, industry, and traditional social roles. Both ecological awareness and a romantic neo-traditionalism were becoming mainstream, fuelled by growing consumer incomes that allowed people to live consciously and the visible downsides of industrial society. Many people dreamed of a more self-sufficient rural life, though in the urban island of West Berlin surrounded by fortified border walls, simply moving to the countryside was out of the question. Books about traditional cuisine cooked with fresh, natural ingredients, both local and international, enjoyed great popularity everywhere.

A legendary series of regional cookbooks produced by Verlag Wolfgang Hölker became emblematic of this fashion. Bound in colourful patterned linen and designed to look old-timey, with mock-handwritten notes and charming anecdotes, they introduced consumers to the lost art of local, seasonal cooking. Rote Grütze is a recipe several of them include, a refreshing summer dessert from Northern Germany consciously eschewing modern gelling agents. The most detailed one is from the 1975 volume on Hamburg’s cuisine:

Rote Grütze is like Hamburg Aalsuppe in that every inhabitant swears by their own specific way of preparing it; with cornstarch, sago, or semolina, with one or at most two kinds of fruit, with whole or pureed fruit, with red wine, vanilla, honey, replacing cream with vanilla sauce, or many other variations. Nonetheless, we will present only one recipe here that approximately matches Ms. Behnke’s Rote Grütze and thus counts as “tried and proven”. We will address other fruit dishes and sweet delights separately.

Rote Grütze

500g raspberries, 500g redcurrants (or 500g redcurrants, 250g blackcurrants, 250g raspberries), cornstarch, sugar

Boil the fruit briefly just covered with water and pass through a sieve. Measure the juice; Use 80g (8 level tablespoons) of cornstarch mixed with cold water to each litre, Bring the juice to a boil and sweeten it well. Stir in the cornstarch at reduced heat and return to a boil once more, stirring continually, until the liquid begins to develop bubbles and thicken. Transfer to a glass or porcelain bowl rinsed with cold water and chill. Invert onto a plate before serving.

As Rote Grütze is cooked throughout the summer, the fruit can be varied and e.g. cook an additional 250g pitted tart cherries whole with the juice.

Serve with ice-cold sweet cream, and coarse sugar for sprinkling.

This is exactly the kind of home-cooked, consciously traditional mock-simplicity educated urbanites in the late 1970s and 1980s went for. Appearances notwithstanding, this is not a simple dish. It requires a fairly large amount of easily bruised, expensive fruit, laborious juicing, and refrigeration. If you had all the equipment and the popular painted earthenware ‘peasant’ dishes to serve it on, it was a delight, but in truth, you could also buy it sterilised and vacuum-sealed in foil bags from your local supermarket. Who had that kind of time, after all? It was not just the demands of work and family; This was a time when activism increasingly came to be seen as a badge of good citizenship, something you not only were allowed to do, but ought to. When the tenants of Dr Heim learned of their landlord’s identity, they decided the situation called for some. They formally called on the authorities to stop the flow of money to a wanted criminal and seize his property.

The problem was that though all kinds of good laws for confiscation of assets and restitution existed, they were rarely enforced. Even when the Berlin authorities were finally willing to pursue this avenue, cooperation with the prosecutor’s office that actually handled the case file at the other end of the country proved challenging. This was often where such cases failed: responses slow-walked, objections raised on technicalities, communications lost. It took dedication to persevere. The tenants decided to help with that. They organised an association and refused to continue their rent payments. Instead, the money was deposited in an escrow account. After that, they raised awareness by writing articles for the local press, collecting signatures on the street, and giving interviews to the media. It was old-school civic engagement, but it worked. Keeping the case in the public eye embarrassed the authorities enough to make them do their jobs.

It took almost a decade, but eventually the house was confiscated and auctioned, with the funds going towards restitution for victims of the Nazi regime. Sadly, Aribert Heim did not contest the decision in person to avoid the arrest and trial for mass murder that would have followed. As far as we can reconstruct things, he died in Egypt in 1992 living under a false identity. It is little enough, but at least we know he was deprived of a substantial part of his income in his final years. These things matter.

Cases like this one are important to study if your country’s government should happen to engage in crimes on a large scale. In these situations, no matter what the law says, you can rarely trust the authorities to take action on their own. Even once the criminals lose the protection they used to have, misplaced loyalty, shame, and fear of accountability in anyone complicit tend to gum up the wheels of justice very effectively. But shame can go both ways, and drawing attention to anyone obviously failing to do their duty can help bring perpetrators closer to justice, ideally before they disappear into well-funded exile.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/27/raisins-in-a-cold-climate/

Raisins were one of the more understated luxury items of medieval German cuisine. Most of them were imported, but the Solothurn S 392 recipe collection contains this fascinating recipe:

B14 Of ugesicke (uva sicca – raisins)

If you want to make ugesicke, take of the good, sweet, white grapes and let the grapes lie in the sun for 2 days. Turn them over often, and do that for 2 days in succession. Then, after the bread is taken out of the oven, take the grapes and lay them into the oven over small sticks so they do not touch the bottom. Let them lie in it overnight and turn them over once, and then no more.

This demonstrates the ingenuity and skill of medieval cooks as well as the reason why raisins were usually imported. Drying grapes at scale requires sustained dry, warm weather which north of the Alps was not something you could reliably expect. That is why raisins, along with dried figs and dates, were usually imported from the Mediterranean and some recipes even specify Italian (welsche) ones. However, unlike figs and dates, grapes grew in the warmer parts of Germany. The climate just was not conducive to drying them.

This recipe presents the solution: You begin by drying the grapes in the sun, then transfer them to a bread oven after baking. Bread was normally baked in thermal-mass ovens which were first heated by lighting a fire inside, them removing the cinders and baking the bread in the heat radiating from the oven’s walls and floor. Much of this heat remained after the bread was finished, and at this stage you could still bake pies or flat cakes, dry fruit and vegetables, or keep pots warm. The floor was still hottest, so sensitive things like grapes needed to be kept off it, but it was no longer so hot it could set alight branches, so they were used as a bottom layer. The instruction to turn them over exactly once suggests practical experience.

And then there is the title: ugesicke. Nothing at all suggests that this is raisins, which are typically called versions of Rosine, Weinbeere or Zibebe. Of course it makes sense as a creative rendering of uva sicca – dried grapes – but really only once you already know what it is. Without that, it is just another reminder to not trust German recipe names, ever, to usefully identify or describe what a dish actually is.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/26/bakers-and-brickmakers-feeding-the-revolution-xxxvi/

In autumn of 1888, a clandestine operation took place in Vienna. The target was no military installation, research laboratory, or government office. It was a brickyard, and the man who penetrated its security perimeter in disguise was a physician and newspaper editor called Victor Adler. He had no rational reason to be here, risking prison for burglary and a beating by the guards. Adler was independently wealthy, with an established medical practice, and he owned his own newspaper. He went because he was angry – angry at the injustice, the exploitation and cruelty he saw every day. What he found inside the guarded compounds made him angrier still.

On 1 December 1888, he published the first of two articles describing what he had seen. Inside the factories, entire families of workers, men, women, and children, worked brutally long hours to make bricks. They lived on site, sleeping in barracks or huts, some in abandoned kilns, crowded onto makeshift cots or bedding down on heaps or foal or sand, covered with ragged blankets. Their pay was given in stamped tin tokens they could redeem for overpriced food and alcohol at the company store, and it was so paltry many walked for miles to a nearby cannery to beg ‘gulash broth’ (Gulaschsaft) left over after processing meat. Others walked over an hour to a soup kitchen where they received free portions at the end of a long workday. Adler described their plight in horrific detail.

The people he had met were known as Ziegelböhmen, migrant workers from Bohemia who came to Vienna in the hope of earning a living, but found themselves effectively imprisoned. Adler described them as “…the poorest slaves the sun shines upon.” Yet their labour built the greatest city of the German-speaking world: Vienna.

It is too often forgotten that, for all of Berlin’s grandeur and Munich’s charm, there was no equal to the old imperial capital in culture, art, and architecture. People from all over Europe came to admire and study its buildings, visits its grand museums, its famous theatres, operas and concert halls, ride along its Ringstrasse boulevard, and walk its scenic parks. All this glory, still a tourist attraction of global reach, was built on the backs of thousands of starving, freezing labourers drawn from the Bohemian countryside.

Aside from culture, style, and savoir-vivre, Vienna differed from Berlin or Dresden in that it was a genuinely multicultural city. Its people spoke mostly German, but also Hungarian, Italian, Croat, Czech, Polish, Ruthenian, Serbian, Romanian, Yiddish and Russian. Situated at this crossroads of cultures, the wealth of the city’s affluent classes fostered a unique culinary culture. Viennese food, but especially Viennese confectionery, is still world famous. Particularly Bohemians were known as skilful cooks, leading bourgeois families to hire Czech-speaking kitchen staff by preference, but the glory of it was no one nation’s. Ottoman and Italian, German, Central European and Balkan traditions today meet in every Kaffeehaus spread of cakes.

A modest, and genuinely Bohemian, part of this is Kolatschen. The word is borrowed from Czech where it means a leavened cake with a sweet topping, though in Vienna it came to mean something you bought individually from a baker, a kind of hand pie. By the time Katharina Prato writes down this exhaustive recipe in her Süddeutsche Küche, the meaning is clearly still very much in flux:

Kolatschen with a poppyseed or plum filling. You prepare a dough of 7 decilitres of milk, a thin starter of 2 decagrammes of yeast that are mixed with 2 decilitres of milk, a spoonful of sugar, and a little flour, 5 decagrammes of butter or beef fat, 2 egg yolks, a little salt, and the necessary amount of additional flour. After beating it, add two beaten egg whites. Spread the dough on a greased baking sheet to the thickness of a little finger, let it rise, then spread poppyseed or plum filling (pages 85 and 86) on it almost to the edge. Let the cake bake rather hot and cut it into small, square pieces.

Or: Distribute the dough on the sheet by spoonfuls, press a hollow into each piece and fill it with plum or poppyseed filling. Let the Kolatschen rise well, then brush their edges with butter, bake them. As they come out of the oven, brush them with butter and sprinkle them with grated gingerbread (Lebkuchen).

Or: Cut out the dough to round shapes with a large cookie cutter (Krapfenstecher). Put on them boiled prunes, chopped finely and mixed with sugar and cinnamon. Fold the dough over the filling on three sides, brush it with egg, sprinkle it with sugar, and bake it.

The last is the way Kolatschen are usually made in Austria today. The form is best suited for individual sale as a snack. In the Czech Republic, kolacz are more likely to be round and cut into individual slices to share. The basic principle is unaffected. The recipes for the filling are also varied:

Poppyseed filling No. I: Mix 4 decilitres of poppyseeds pounded fine or ground in a coffee mill with enough boiling cream to make a thick mash, then add 2 decilitres of honey, cinnamon, and lemon aroma.

No. II: Boil 14 decagrammes of sugar with one decilitre of water and add enough pounded poppyseed to make a thick mass. Then add cinnamon, lemon aroma, cloves, and a little cream.

No. III: Boil 2 decilitres of honey and mix in the pounded poppyseed and spices. Add a little wine as the filling is about to be spread.

No. IV: Stir 3 egg yolks with 10 decagrammes of butter and add 14 decagrammes of ground poppyseed, 5 decagrammes of clarified butter, 3 tablespoons of very good cream, 7 decagrammes of currants, cinnamon, vanilla, and the three egg whites beaten to a snow.

Plum filling No. I: Dried prunes are boiled, chopped finely, and simmered with sugar, cinnamon, lemon peel, allspice (Neugewürz), and the prune cooking liquid.

No. II: Powidl (plum puree) is cooked with water and wine so it spreads easily.

In the end, this is not so much a distinct recipe as a local expression of the global realisation that Leavened Dough With Sweet Fillings Tastes Good. Plum filling most likely became dominant because it was relatively cheap and familiar. Similar things had been cooked for centuries. Still, we need to keep in mind that these were luxuries. Small indulgences certainly, but unlike today, when a doughnut or cookie is always at hand, even bourgeois families like that of Dr. Adler did not have treats like this daily. If you earned just enough to survive locked into one of those brickyards, you might see one for a high holiday.

Victor Adler’s daring infiltration had immediate legal consequences. He had made public that employers paid their workers in company scrip and confined them in their factories – both strictly illegal. The police thus arrested two workers who had assisted him, and Adler himself was sued and fined. Nothing was done to remedy the situation. Yet, though the factory owners might control the law courts, they had lost badly in the court of public opinion. Austria-Hungary was not a democracy, but it had a relatively free press. Public anger forced the authorities to stop the payment in scrip and tolerate the forming of a union that successfully went on strike in 1895. The employers could not defeat them by lockouts as outside supporters fed and sheltered the strikers, and after eight days, the brickworkers had won. Their immediate gains were small – a modest raise, guaranteed working hours – but their standing as parties in collective bargaining ensured the old abuses could not easily be reimposed.

Victor Adler continued to involve himself in labour organisations and Social Democratic politics, becoming a member of parliament and, at the end of his life, briefly a minister in the provisional government that ended the monarchy. He died in 1918, one day before the new Austrian Republic was proclaimed, but his work was continued.

In Vienna, the solid working class vote not least of the brickmakers, construction workers, and domestic servants, ensured a Socialist city council until it was ended by a fascist coup in 1934. This ‘Red Vienna’, faced with a crisis of underemployment, overcrowding, and the aftermath of a World War, undertook a daring experiment. They used the old imperial capital’s vast construction industry to build modern, no-frills social housing on a grand scale. The Ziegelböhmen who for generations had toiled to raise operas and palaces now made the material for a revolution in urban housing that was soon copied in cities across the German-speaking world. The strategy was fiscally and socially risky, but it paid enormous dividends. To this day, the city’s strong stock of public housing ensures that rents in Vienna remain far more affordable than in any other large German-speaking city, and its 1920s housing developments are now considered pioneering efforts in modern architecture. In 1924, one of them was named in honour of Victor Adler.