culina vetus (Volker Bach)

Take cinnamon, ginger, pepper, and cloves, as much as you please, and a spoonful of fat. Mix this together. Make a subtle (subtils) dough and boil it in the capon broth. Serve good cheese and fat over the knöpffel (dumplings).

cxl) How to make Krapffen. Take the wings of capons that are well boiled and stick (? steck) them with parsley and chard roots, one as much as the other. Take good cheese and a little grated bread, six eggs, and a few raisins.

Frontispiece of the first (1547) edition of Balthasar Staindl's Künstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch held at the Bayrische Staatsbibliothek. The image shows a woodcut of a richly equipped and busy kitchen. The master cook is standing to the left of the large masonry hearth, tasting the contents of a large cookpot stood next to the fire while a cauldron is suspended above it. Two men in the background seem to be addressing him. In the right foreground, another man is cutting meat on a work surface set up atop a wooden trough on trestles. Carcasses and a large sausage are shown suspended on the wall in the background. Everything about this image - the size, the range of equipment, the exclusively male staff, the amounts of meat on display - signals wealth. This is the kind of kitchen you would expect to find in the house of a rich burgher or landed nobleman. The motif recurs in many German cookbooks of the fifteenth and sixteenth century.

I'm just back from an awesome Burgundian Valois-themed party and ready to crash. Just a short recipe today: Capon ravioli from 1574

www.culina-vetus.de/2025/10/05/c...

#culinaryhistory #foodhistory #earlymodern #dumplings

Ökonom über Javier Milei 5+ »Ich würde ihm bisher eine Eins geben« Javier Milei unterzieht Argentinien einer Rosskur. Taugt der exzentrische Präsident als Vorbild für Deutschland? Metzler-Ökonom Edgar Walk über höhere Exporte, gestiegene Löhne und den Bann der Mietpreisbremse. Ein Interview von Tim Bartz 13.08.2025, 13.00 Uhr • aus DER SPIEGEL 34/2025

Argentiniens Präsident in der Krise = Warum Javier Milei seine Motorsäge jetzt zu Hause lässt Argentiniens wilder Präsident Javier Milei galt als Vorzeigelibertärer, Ökonomen bejubelten seine Reformen. Doch jetzt steckt die Wirtschaft in der Krise und der einstige Heilsbringer in einer Korruptionsaffäre. Aus Buenos Aires berichten Jens Glüsing und Gerald Traufetter

How it started. How it‘s going

Zwischen Milei-Jubel beim Spiegel und der Einsicht, dass er Argentiniens Wirtschaft komplett zerstört hat liegen 4 Wochen. So geht also Qualitätsjournalismus heute.

“I would be happy if we had First World problems. Unfortunately, we have Third Reich problems.”

AUTUMN IN GERMANY. 🖖

"When you slaughter the sows, you must take the neck once it is cut off (beschnitten) and put it onto a table in a cool place. Cover it with snow one span in height and let it lie like that until it becomes hard and grainy (kürnig), roughly over night...."

I am not sure what they thought they were doing - they can't have understood that cold inhibits bacterial growth - but the recipe is clear:

Olden-day pork butchery. This fifteenth-century miniature shows a butcher at work processing a pig. The animal is laid out on a board, ears and forelegs already removed and lads out on a table in the foreground. The butcher is working on the hams with a large knife. Another knife, an axe, and a bucket are displayed in the foreground while sausages can be seen hanging over a pole behind. From the Hausbuch der Mendelschen Zwölfbrüderstiftung, Nuremberg.

Some #oldrecipes make you go "mmmmh.", some elicit a "eeew!". Sometimes it's "WTF?"
Someone was freezing meat in 1547 to keep it fresh.

www.culina-vetus.de/2025/09/30/f...

#culinaryhistory #foodhistory #earlymodern #salting

When you are about to bring it to the table, thrust that down its throat and put in a red apple in front (i.e. into the snout). Have it served this way. When people reach out to touch and eat it, it catches fire from the brandy and the pebble, and green and blue flames emerge.

Take a shallow bowl of brandy (Brantwein) and add ginger to it. Pour half of it down the gullet (of the pig’s head) and sprinkle the other half around the outside. Take a thin piece of bread the size of a nut. Shape small balls of it, and put in a red hot pebble the size of a bean.

clvi) If you want to prepare a pig’s head so that flames emerge from it, first boil the head until it is done. Then put it on a griddle until it turns brown. Cut it in squares (i.e. score the skin) so that it stays in one piece. Sprinkle it with ginger on the outside all around.

Illustration from a 1624 carving manual. The engraving shows a whole roast pig, its legs drawn up close to the body, with an apple in its snout. Lines and numbers on and around the body indicate how it is to be carved.

The same recipe for a booby-trapped flaming pig's head from two separate sources about a century apart. Proof practical jokes don't get old.

www.culina-vetus.de/2025/09/29/f...

#culinaryhistory #foodhistory #earlymodern #medievalsky #flambè

A photograph showing dark, slightly shiny rolls of plum fruit leather arranged on a wooden plate against a wooden work surface.

Making plum fruit leather as described in the c. 1600 Oeconomia ruralis et domestica, a #peasantfood from Silesia. I'd serve it with millet porridge.

www.culina-vetus.de/2025/09/28/a...

#culinaryhistory #foodhistory #earlymodern

Studie von Ökonomin Claudia Kemfert: Klimaschutz zahlt sich richtig aus Jeder Euro, der in Schritte gegen die Klimakrise fließt, bringt der Volkswirtschaft zwischen 1,8 und 4,8 Euro. Das zeigt eine Studie des DIW Berlin.

Studie von Ökonomin Claudia Kemfert: Klimaschutz zahlt sich richtig aus
#ParentsForFuture

You can also preserve plums and medlars as is described above.

Quinces with honey: Boil the honey very nicely, scum it thoroughly, and pour it onto the quinces. Let it cool, leave it to stand for several days, and try it. If it is watery, drain it off, boil it again with a little more honey, and that way it will congeal.

You also preserve tart cherries (Weychsel) that way. Pick them ripe and brown, and pour on clarified sugar.

Pour clarified sugar over the quinces in a clean, glazed pot or pitcher and let it stand for eight days. If the sugar turns sour, drain it off, boil it again, add only more sugar to it, and pour it on again. As often as it (still) turns sour, you must drain it off and pour it back onto the quinces.

cccxxxi) (printing error, should be ccxxxi) You should also make them this way: Peel the quinces and cut them in quarters. Place them in a baking oven so they steam until they are soft (sich waich duensten). Then take them out, stick them with cloves, cinnamon sticks, mace and ginger.

Out-of-focus photo of a bowl heaped with quinces standing on a wooden work surface. The fruit are irregular and fuzzy (it's not just the lens). They were picked today from fruit trees in a public park and are destined to become historic sweets.

Today's recipe from 1547 is for spiced quinces preserved in sugar or honey. #earlymodern cooking doesn't get much more decadent. I picked quinces from #publictrees to try it out.

www.culina-vetus.de/2025/09/24/s...

#culinaryhistory #foodhistory #medievalsky #ediblecity

Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny - Blood Knife The human body has become a strange contradiction at the heart of the modern blockbuster. Sexy, yes. But sexual? No.

What I find gross about it is there is no similar outcry for depictions of gruesome and pornographic depictions of murder and violence. All of this is downwind of a culture that fetishizes violence and uses sex as purely a culture war vehicle at every turn now. I'm always brought back to this.

To a great degree we’re dealing with the fallout from a generation of men who got lucky once during a specific moment in tech evolution, made to feel as gods, but are all now suffering their mid-life crises having accomplished nothing else of note.

These men have made nothing other than money.

They aren't terrible.

The older recipes are here: www.culina-vetus.de/2025/01/08/f...

A baked dish in Lent

cxxiii) Take roe and chop it, then pound it in a mortar. Take the livers of fish and also their fat and small raisins and chop it all together. Prepare a sheet of dough for it, put the chopped filling on it, bake it in a pan, and serve it warm.

Frontispiece of the first (1547) edition of Balthasar Staindl's Künstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch held at the Bayrische Staatsbibliothek. The image shows a woodcut of a richly equipped and busy kitchen. The master cook is standing to the left of the large masonry hearth, tasting the contents of a large cookpot stood next to the fire while a cauldron is suspended above it. Two men in the background seem to be addressing him. In the right foreground, another man is cutting meat on a work surface set up atop a wooden trough on trestles. Carcasses and a large sausage are shown suspended on the wall in the background. Everything about this image - the size, the range of equipment, the exclusively male staff, the amounts of meat on display - signals wealth. This is the kind of kitchen you would expect to find in the house of a rich burgher or landed nobleman. The motif recurs in many German cookbooks of the fifteenth and sixteenth century.

Today, a recipe for #Lent: Balthasar Staindl describes a fladen topped with fish roe, liver, and raisins. This dates to 1547, similar recipes survive from the 1460s.

www.culina-vetus.de/2025/09/21/a...

#culinaryhistory #foodhistory #earlymodern #medievalsky

A photograph of stockfish arranged for sale in a market. The dried, whole fish (minus their heads) are laid out in a basket, tails upwards. The top of a price tag is just visible at the bottom of the picture.

Today, I have four recipes for #stockfish from Staindl's 1547 cookbook. I'm not sure the fourth is feasible,

www.culina-vetus.de/2025/09/15/s...

#culinaryhistory #foodhistory #earlymodern #medievalsky

A lithograph book illustration c. 1900 showing a pike out of water, with elements of a river bank and weir depicted in the background.

Today, a 1547 recipe that fills the whole #medieval food bingo card: Saffron-coloured pike blancmanger in a pastry.
And apologies for fewer posts, I'm unexpectedly busy.

www.culina-vetus.de/2025/09/14/a...

#culinaryhistory #foodhistory #earlymodern