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.

Wrapping chicken bones in meat dumpling mince to make them look like drumsticks? Why, yes, #sixteenth-century German cooks did.

www.culina-vetus.de/2025/10/14/r...

#culinaryhistory #foodhistory #earlymodern #medievalsky #illusionfood

Gathering eggs. This illumination is from the Tacuinum Sanitatis Casanatense, a late fourteenth century copy of a popular dietetic text. It shows a highly stylised and improbably elegant chicken coop. A woman in a long red dress is leaving the coop, carrying a basket of eggs. She is holding up one egg to inspect it. To the left, two chickens are visible in the open door to the coop, the wooden door itself has round holes all over to admit air. A child is standing in the garden outside the door, looking towards the woman. Stylised vegetation indicates outdoor space to the right.

A recipe for faux chitterlings: egg pancakes in a spicy onion sauce to be served on fast days. #Renaissance German cooks definitely liked to play with their food.

www.culina-vetus.de/2025/07/09/f...

#foodhistory #culinaryhistory #earlymodern #illusionfood

A famous woodcut by Albrecht Dürter titled 'The Cook and his Wife'. The image shows a couple standing side by side. The man on the left is obese and dressed in a slovenly fashion. He holds a pan and a wooden spoon in his left hand. The woman on the right is fashionably dressed and conventionally attractive by late fifteenth-century standards. On the man's tattered and gaping jerkin, several lacing points of the kind imitated in the recipe are shown.

Today's recipe is an example of medieval food humour - lacing points in aspic. Our ancestors certainly enjoyed playing with food.

#culinaryhistory #foodhistory #medievalsky #illusionfood #foodart

www.culina-vetus.de/2025/04/03/l...

An almond cheese prepared for a small gathering a few years ago. The white mound of jelly, surrounded by sweetened milk, is served on a white porcelain plate. It is stuck all over with blanched whole almonds. For a more opulent display, these could be gilded.

Today, I have a #15th-century recipe for an almond #jelly from the Dorotheenkloster MS

#culinaryhistory #illusionfood #Lent #almondmilk #medieval #history #Vienna #oldrecipes #middleages #reenactment

www.culina-vetus.de/2025/01/06/m...

19th-century colour print illustratiopn of a pike, the fish used for larding faux 'roasts' in this recipe

Today's recipes are again from the fifteenth-century Dorotheenkloster MS: Making fake partridges and venison from fish.

#culinaryhistory #foodhistory #oldrecipes #history #illusionfood #Vienna #medieval

www.culina-vetus.de/2024/12/05/m...