Month: December 2010

From Medieval Bavaria: Wild Game and Peppersauce

medieval depiction of town life in Germany

The small Bavarian town of Abensberg sits on the banks of the Abens river, a tributary of the Danube. Flanked by thirty-two round and square turrets, the town was formerly the residence of the counts of Abensberg, whose castle still overshadows the town’s turreted walls.

This castle was the site of a peculiar scene. When Heinrich II, the fifth and last Holy Roman Emperor of the Ottonian dynasty, made his journey through Germany after his coronation in 1002, courtiers lavished him with offerings of gold and other treasures in order to demonstrate their fealty. When Heinrich stopped in Abensberg, he was presented with a gift of a different nature. For the Count of Abensberg brought forward thirty-two of his thirty-seven children and offered them body and soul to the new monarch. The count avowed that they were “the most valuable offering he could make to his king and country.”

How the count — or Heinrich, for that matter — managed to feed this brood of Bavarian princelings is left to historical imagination, but it is easy to picture a long table groaning with dishes of wild game prepared in a manner similar to this dish from Sabina Welserin, a sixteenth-century compiler one of the oldest German cookbooks.

Wild Game Marinated in Peppersauce

Boil fresh game in two parts water and one part wine, and when it is done, then cut it into pieces and lay it in a peppersauce. Let it simmer a while therein. Make [the sauce] so: Take rye bread, cut off the hard crust and cut the bread into pieces, as thick as a finger and as long as the loaf of bread is. Brown it over the fire, until it begins to blacken on both sides. Put it right away into cold water. Do not allow it to remain long therein. After that put it into a kettle, pour into it the broth in which the game was boiled, strain it through a cloth, finely chop onions and bacon, let it cook together, do not put too little in the peppersauce, season it well, let it simmer and put vinegar into it, then you have a good peppersauce.

 
Why Fast and Fermented Foods by Christine Baumgarthuber

Would you rather receive The Austerity Kitchen by email? Then sign up for my Substack.

And, if you’d like to help the Kitchen keep cookin’, please consider picking up copies of my books, Why Fast? and Fermented Foods.

Posted on by theausteritykitchen 0

Swedish Codfish

poultry and game


“We fly to Jemteland, where the rocky mountains are high and blue; where the Foss roars and rushes; where the torches are lighted as budstikke, to announce that the ferryman is expected. Up to the deep, cold, running waters, where the midsummer sun does not set; where the rosy hue of eve is that of morn.”

“That is the birds’ song,” writes Hans Christian Andersen in his 1871 travel memoir Pictures of Travel in Sweden, “Shall we lay it to heart? Shall we accompany them — at least a part of the way?” He did follow those birds, and his travels led him through the “glorious land” of Sweden, “home of the limpid elves, where the wild swans sing in the gleam of the Northern Lights.”

Andersen’s meanderings through the land of endless forests eventually brought him to Kinnakulla, Sweden’s hanging gardens. “The travellers go from the forest road up to the top of Kinnakulla,” he writes, “where a stone is raised as the goal of their wanderings.” From this vantage point, where black clouds of crows and ravens scream across a pale blue sky, Anderson writes that he can survey “Wener, to Lockö’s old palace, to the town of Lindkjöping.”

Perhaps Andersen visited an inn in the town of Lindkjöping–unfortunately he does not say if he did or not–and enjoyed a humble meal of stewed codfish, like this one from the 1897 Fullständigaste Svensk-Ameritansk kokbok: Swedish-English Cookbook.

Stewed Codfish

Pound the fish and soak 36 hours; take up, remove the bones and pick it to pieces, boil until tender. Melt in a pan a piece of butter together with a handful flour and add milk enough to make a somewhat thick sauce. Boil it and put the fish into it. Potatoes or cut carrots might be added. Season with pepper and salt.

 
Baumgarthuber, Christine. Fermented Foods: The History and Science of a Microbiological Wonder. Reaktion Books, 2021.

Would you rather receive The Austerity Kitchen by email? Then sign up for my Substack.

And, if you’d like to help the Kitchen keep cookin’, please consider picking up a copy of my book, which you may find on one of the sites listed here.

Posted on by theausteritykitchen 0