Aliens in This World

In honor of the Holy Father, here’s a few recipe links!

First, what we could have had on Shrove Tuesday (Fastnacht): donuts called Fastnachts! There’s also potato donuts, known as Fastnacht krapfen. (Scroll down.)

Bock, Doppelbock, Starkbier, and Fastbier are the strong beers traditionally drunk during Lent. Like Guinness, it’s good for you. And liquids don’t break the fast, so a nice chewy beer kept those hardworking monks and farmers going.

Pretzels (bracellae) are a classic Lenten food.

Some yummy trout recipes. Mmmm, sauerkraut….

On Holy Thursday (Gründonnerstag), people eat Seven Herb Soup (Sieben Kräuter Suppe), made from spinach, parsley, leek, chives, chervil, dandelions, and sorrel. (The first edible spring greens to sprout.)

What? You want the recipe in English? Here you go!

There’s tons on German customs here, including a recipe (in English!) to use up all those hard-boiled eggs, come Easter.

23 medieval German recipes utilizing mushrooms. Apparently, the medieval Germans liked morels as much as folks around here do. This one sounds good, healthy, and Lenten:

Separate the biggest whole Morels from the small ones. Squeeze out and chop up the small ones.
Take eggs and beat well. Add finely chopped herbs (in German recipes these are often parsley and sage, although others are possible) to the beaten eggs, and the chopped small mushrooms to the beaten eggs.
Put butter in a pan, heat until melted, and add the mixed morels and eggs.
Cook as for scrambled eggs. Put on a sack [to drain out the liquid - since mushrooms are often rather moist].
Then chop well. Add pepper and saffron and salt to them and fill the large Morel caps with the herbed egg mix.
Put then in a tin-lined fish kettle with fresh butter and a little pepper
Pour in a little pea broth (but not enough to submerge the caps), salt, and green herbs that have been chopped finely.
Set on the fire and simmer until the moisture comes out of the mushroom caps and a concentrated broth remains. Thus it is good and well-tasting.
And Morels prepared this way one can also roast or bake in Pastry.
You can also cook them with Beef broth on a Flesh day
Thus are they also good and well-tasting.

Old Bavarian recipes from the Inn river valley, including medieval recipes for mock udder, boiled antler (no, really!), and crayfish pudding. Heh! The cheesy egg fritters, fish ball soup, and almond milk pudding sound pretty good. Pike sausages, too. The almond dish shaped like a hedgehog sounds yummy and showy, too. All in all, some very interesting subtleties (dishes that are shaped and decorated). But the deep fried cherries sound a bit much.

Fried eggs during Lent
Take blanched almonds, grind them up and pass through a cloth with water. Boil in a pan like a /mus/ [porridge, pudding, mousse] until it thickens. Take fat /Hausen/ [a freshwater fish of the sturgeon variety, now almost unobtainable], cut it into cubes and fry it in a pan like fat bacon, remove the fried bits and put the almond puree into the fat. Spread it out with a spoon and colour spots (lit. ‘eyes’) on it like yolks. Press the fried bits of fish into the white part between the yolks, sprinkle it with sugar, and keep it warm until you serve it.

Also, there’s a Teutonic Order cookbook. No wonder those fightin’ monks fell through the ice!

Stuffed pikes
Take /gefuge/ pikes and leave the skin on (?) up to the ears. Then take any kind of fish, whatever they are, boil them and leave the bones (out), chop them with sage, pepper, caraway, and saffron. Fill (?) the pike with this, salt it on the outside and place it on a griddle to roast it well and not too hot.

If you want to make halved apples
Take stirred (scrambled?) egg of four colours. Then cut an apple into quarters and remove the seeds and the shells that surround them from each part. Fill the hollow with each color and stick the apples back together with wooden splints. [Toothpicks?] Dip them in a thin batter and and when you have baked them, cut them open and sprinkle them with sugar.

If you want to make a good /weyschen/ cake
[paralleled in Meister Eberhard as /meyschen/ (May) cake]
Take up to ten eggs, break them well, add parsley and stir it all together. And take a mortar and place it on the embers, and put therein a spoonful of lard and let it heat. Pour the eggs into it and let it coolly (gently) bake and serve it, not oversalted.

Redaction:

10-12 eggs
1 small bunch fresh parseley (or 3 tsp dried)
1 tsp lard or butter
salt and pepper to taste

Place lard in a metal or ceramic bowl. Put into in an oven heated to c. 150ƒC (350ƒF) until the lard has melted and the bowl is hot.
Meanwhile, beat the eggs with the parsley.
When the bowl is ready, open the oven door and our the egg batter into the hot bowl quickly.
Return to the oven immediately and bake 20-35 minutes (test doneness by inserting a stick or knifeblade).
Remove from oven, cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes and turn out onto a plate.
Serve sliced for breakfast.

This is also a good way of providing pseudo-scrambled eggs for more people than you have pans or time to make.

If you want to make breaded sausages during Lent
Take good figs and blanch them, cut them small and grind them up. Place the mass on a board, add ground gingerbread (/Lebkuchen/) and roll it out as long as a breaded sausage. Make a thick batter with wine, dip the sausage in it and bake it. Serve with sugar.

If you wish to make large eggs
Boil the egg yolks soft, cut off the tip of each egg and pour out the yolk. Chop parsley, mix it with the yolks, throw it in lard and do not cook it too hard. Fill this back into the shells and boil them well, then shell them and make a good broth (to serve with it).

Sabrina Welserin wrote a cookbook way back when, and it’s wonderful. Cheese buns! Also, she’s got a colored chicken recipe which probably explains the colored egg/apple recipe above.