Kuchenmaistrey

By Volker Bach

A translation of the Early Modern German cookbook Kuchenmaistrey. Published in 1485 and copied and adapted for over a century, the Kuchenmaistrey was the first cookbook to be printed in German and one of the most influential ones. Its 196 recipes open a window into the world of 15th-century upper-class German cuisine, often fascinating, sometimes alarming, and occasionally absolutely delicious. An English translation of and commentary on the 1490 edition is made available to food and history enthusiasts for the first time here.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ellipsis Imprints
• Release date: Aug 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781005885960

Book preview

Table of Contents

Translator's Foreword

Commentary

Origin

The Text

Ingredients

Types of Dishes

Cooking Equipment and Techniques

Serving

Medical Aspects

Reading Suggestions

Translation

Mastery of the Kitchen

Book 1: Lenten Food

Book 2: Meat Dishes

Book 3: Egg Dishes

Book 4: Sauces, Mustard, and Electuaries

Book 5: Vinegar and Wine

About the Translator

Kuchenmaistrey, translated by Volker Bach

The frontispiece of the 1490 edition of Kuchenmaistrey.

Image courtesy of Johannes Fischauer, Public Domain,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=360283

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Ellipsis Imprints

2023

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Ellipsis Imprints

Durham, England

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Twitter: @EllipsisImprint

Copyright Volker Bach

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in any sort of retrieval system, without prior written consent, is an infringement of copyright law.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Kuchenmaistrey: A 15th-Century German Cookbook

Print edition ISBN: 978-1-7397414-2-6

Ebook edition ISBN: 978-1-0058859-6-0

Cover design by Sara L. Uckelman. Public domain cover image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, from Hausbuch der Mendelschen Zwölfbrüderstiftung, Band 1. Nürnberg 1426–1549. Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, Amb. 317.2°, http://www.nuernberger-hausbuecher.de/.

First printing 2023

Translator’s Foreword

In 1485, the Nuremberg printer Peter Wagner launched a product that nobody had tried in German-speaking lands yet: a cookbook. His venture, the Kuchenmaistrey or mastery of the kitchen, was an immediate success and became one of the best-selling cookery texts in German for over a century. Many libraries throughout the world still hold more or less complete copies of the small booklet he turned out or of the many copies other printshops produced for many decades afterwards. Like so many sources of the German culinary corpus, though, this book has not yet been translated. Its very ubiquity and the bewildering number of editions have hindered any academic engagement with it.

Having been interested in historic cooking for several decades, the Kuchenmaistrey has always featured in my studies. I engaged with it in more detail writing academically on the foods of late medieval and Renaissance Germany, and again when I produced a cookbook of Landsknecht food. The decision to produce a complete translation of this seminal text was made easier by enforced isolation due to a COVID-19 infection.

I am grateful for the support of many friends and fellow historic cookery enthusiasts in interpreting recipes, ingredients, and instructions. Particular gratitude is due to Sharon Palmer, who allowed me to use the transcription she made of the 1490 edition, Renée Corterier for her unstinting help and advice on all things internet-related, and to Sara L. Uckelman of Ellipsis Imprints for taking the risk of publishing the result as a ‘proper’ book.

This is a commented translation, not an edition and not a cookbook. A full scholarly edition of the Kuchenmaistrey, even in just its early editions until 1500, would be a worthwhile and fascinating project, but it is beyond my means in both the money and time it would take. As to cooking from it, I hope to have given some useful pointers in the commentary. Many of its interesting recipes are also included in the forthcoming English edition of my Landsknecht Cookbook, so they do not need repeating here.

If you have questions, corrections, or suggestions, and especially if you have tried out a recipe and would like to share your results, please contact me through my recipe site at www.culina-vetus.de. This is also where you can find translated recipes from other historical sources and reports of my own experiments with them.

Volker Bach

Bad Oldesloe, late winter of 2022

Commentary

Origin

The Kuchenmaistrey is part of the German-language tradition of recipes, and that is an interesting one. It has neither a founding text like the French Viandier nor a royal capital or court to focus on, as England did. Though there are clearly lines of transmission that produced parallel recipes, its sources come from diverse places and contexts, from courts, monasteries, the residences of noble families, and very often, from cities. That is also where we get the Kuchenmaistrey.

The text was first printed in 1485 and proved successful enough to be reproduced by various printers six times over the coming five years, and many more for over a century after. At that point, printing was still a fairly new technology and the idea of selling a cookbook, though not completely outlandish, was unknown territory. The Italians had done it in 1474 with Platina’s De honesta voluptate, but of course this was the height of the Italian Renaissance and all kind of things were possible there that did not yet fly in other parts of Europe. Nonetheless, the Nuremberg printer Peter Wagner dared to try it. Geographically, he was not placed badly for the attempt.

The German-speaking world of the late fifteenth century had no political or cultural centre as such, but if you had to name a centre of gravity, Nuremberg would be a good candidate. At the time, it was an independent Reichsstadt, a free city subject to nobody but the emperor, with a population of around 40,000 people and a territory that would soon grow to 1,200 square kilometres under its direct control. This, combined with its commercial connections and manufacturing, made it a significant factor in regional politics. It could not compete with the likes of Antwerp or London, but it did not need to. Nuremberg had the power necessary to secure its trade network and defend its territory, and that was all it needed.

Nuremberg lies on the river Pegnitz, a tributary of the Main that tied into the Rhine valley trade networks, with its back to the hills of the Frankish Jura, looking out over a fertile plateau. A trade route to Amberg crossed the mountain chain to link to the Danube valley. The rivers are not considered navigable today, but were used by boatmen in the fifteenth century. Without a major river or port, the city depended heavily on overland trade, with the transalpine roads to Italy accounting for a large part of its profit. These connections also ensured a cultural transfer that made it a centre of the German Renaissance. The painter Albrecht Dürer and the sculptor Veit Stoß were just the most famous of many of its protagonists. It was also in Nuremberg that Martin Behaim produced the first globe in 1492 (just early enough to still miss America). The city was culturally and economically dynamic, and its government had a reputation for efficiency that attracted foreign visitors eager to learn. This was the kind of place that could and did produce innovations.

We do not know who wrote the Kuchenmaistrey, but it was likely produced at the request of its printer and specifically for publication. At least there is no sign of it, or parts of it, in the previous culinary sources while it shows up practically everywhere almost immediately after it was printed. Without copyright law and centralised markets, Germany had hundreds of mostly small printing businesses, many of which were more than happy to copy something they knew would sell. The Kuchenmaistrey recipes were popular pirating material and quickly came to circulate both under a false attribution to Platina (whose popular book on dietetics ironically may well have inspired its production) and as the expanded Koch- und Kellermeisterei (the Mastery of the Cook and Cellarer) which would see reprints and translations for over a century. It was one of the most successful cookbooks in Early Modern Germany.

Geographically as well as culturally, the Kuchenmaistrey fits into its natural environment. Franconia, as the region was and is known, is part of Bavaria today, but until 1806 it was a patchwork of small independent statelets. It is a land of steep, forested hills and fertile valleys, well-watered and temperate in climate. Though not as favoured by summer heat as the upper Rhine valley, it is still one of Germany’s most pleasant spots with long, warm summers, ample rainfall, and cold but relatively short winters. In the late middle ages, it was densely populated, a country full of towns surrounded by fields, vineyards and orchards, with woodlands covering the heights.

This was no bucolic idyll. The forests were protected by strict laws that denied people access to the firewood, timber, fish and game they would have direly needed. Population pressure was considerable, landholdings often divided each generation until they could no longer support a family. Small states, often little more than a few villages overlooked by a castle or monastery, meant rulers had to squeeze their peasants hard for taxes. Most towns were dominated by a small group of wealthy families while most inhabitants scrambled for enough money to pay rent and feed themselves. But that was broadly no different from anywhere else at the time. Franconia was a land where, in good years, everyone ate, and where you could eat well.

Agriculture in the villages mostly focused on cereals—wheat, spelt, rye, oats and millet to eat, barley to brew beer. Both villagers and townspeople tended vegetable gardens that produced cabbages, root vegetables, greens, onions and legumes along with herbs, fruit, and flowers. Commercial market gardening was an emerging industry around larger towns, and horticulture was beginning to establish itself as a respectable elite interest. Forest areas were most important for timber, but they were also central to beekeeping—a major industry around Nuremberg—birdcatching, and foraging. Many berries, hazelnuts and culinary herbs were foraged rather than grown. Fish were caught in every river and lake, and the multitude of millponds, moats, and fishponds that dotted the countryside were stocked with carp, pike, and eels, but in this business, demand always outstripped supply. Trade meanwhile brought foreign foods into the country. The transalpine routes to Venice and the Po valley were the main entry point for spices and sugar, rice, almonds, and other luxuries as well as for cultural influences as traders returned with impressions of Italian fashions in dress, food, and art. The recipes in the Kuchenmaistrey fit remarkably well into this landscape. There is no reason to think they come from anywhere else.

The Text

The Kuchenmaistrey is not a large book by the lights of its time, but it is a book that can stand on its own and was published as such. It is structured into five major sections, each of which is further divided into numbered entries. Though the text does not call it by those names, this is the classical book-and-chapter structure familiar to anyone who ever worked with the Bible or any work of ancient literature. It was very common for Renaissance writers to structure their work. Platina’s De honesta voluptate follows it, as do many German cookbooks published after the Kuchenmaistrey, including the influential works of Balthasar Staindl and Marx Rumpolt. That does not mean that either copied it from the other; it was simply the way most books were organised. Early print editions of the Kuchenmaistrey have no page numbers. Entries are referred to by identifying first the book they are in (1–5), then their chapter. Thus, 3.xx is the twentieth entry in the third book.

Though the author of the Kuchenmaistrey does not use these terms, I will refer to the five parts of the work as ‘books’ (they are called teil, i.e., part or share) and to the individual entries as recipes. In fact, some entries contain no recipes, just pieces of dietary advice, while a few combine more than one, but it is, on the whole, close enough.

Altogether, the Kuchenmaistrey consists of a brief introduction and five books of 196 recipes in total. There is a effort at a logical internal structure, though it is not always followed through:

Book I