Honeyed Pear Puree (15th c.)
Today’s recipe is not very interesting culinary terms, but for technique. From the Dorotheenkloster MS:
78 A müs of pears
Take a clean, dry pot and put pears in it. Remove the stems and the flowers (the remnants of the flower at the bottom). The pot must not be greasy. Lay the pears in it and shut the pot well with wooden pieces (verspetl) so the cannot fall out. You must have a pot of water ready that is boiling. Set the pears atop (oben auf) the pot with water that is boiling, that way they cook (praten) in the steam. Take them down when they are soft. Let them cool, pound them small and pass them through a cloth. And you must have honey ready, let that boil until it turns brown. This will give the dish a brown colour. If you want it to be yellow, add saffron. You can serve it hot or cold. When you serve it, sprinkle on (spice) powder on it. You may use ginger, sugar (and?) cloves for that. Also put that on it.
Combining pears with caramelised honey and spices is bound to be good. This is not an exciting recipe in that sense, and you can do more interesting things with the fruit than mash them. What is interesting is the technique of steaming them: secured with several wooden skewers or just branches across the opening of a pot that is then inverted over another pot with boiling water. This is a method described in more detail by Walter Ryff in the mid-sixteenth century, but was already known well enough to be casually mentioned over a century earlier. This is important to remember: We may find it hard to see how the equipment of a medieval kitchen would allow for anything but the simplest dishes, but our forebears were resourceful, creative people.
The Dorotheenkloster MS is a collection of 268 recipes that is currently held at the Austrian national library as Cod. 2897. It is bound together with other practical texts including a dietetic treatise by Albertus Magnus. The codex was rebound improperly in the 19th century which means the original order of pages is not certain, but the scripts used suggest that part of it dates to the late 14th century, the remainder to the early 15th century.
The Augustine Canons established the monastery of St Dorothea, the Dorotheenkloster, in Vienna in 1414 and we know the codex was held there until its dissolution in 1786, when it passed to the imperial library. Since part of the book appears to be older than 1414, it was probably purchased or brought there by a brother from elsewhere, not created in the monastery.
The text was edited and translated into modern German by Doris Aichholzer in „wildu machen ayn guet essen…“Drei mittelhochdeutsche Kochbücher: Erstedition Übersetzung, Kommentar, Peter Lang Verlag, Berne et al. 1999 on pp. 245-379.