r/TastingHistory

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/18/a-roast-chicken-mystery/

B13 To fill a chicken

If you want to fill a chicken, take 3 eggs and boil them hard. Also take parsley and mirren (myrtleberries?) and pound the parsley and mirren and egg well together. Add butter, and also take small grapes that are called rossin (raisins), and fill the chicken. Let it roast, but also add salt to the filling et caetera.

https://preview.redd.it/je1msnixk6kh1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=49dffc95993bedf73a2834723f7643fbd20a21d2

Basically, this is a very familiar recipe. Filling roast chickens with boiled egg is sometimes referred to as ‘the German way’, as opposed to ‘the Italian way’ of using herbs, and it must have been much more widely known than the few recipes that survive suggest given it also shows up in literature. The basic procedure is clear: mash up boiled eggs, add herbs and salt, work in dried fruit, and fill it into the chicken. A similar set of instructions from the Kuchenmaistrey also includes mashed roast apples or pears and raw egg to hold it together, but it envisions filling a meat roast, mentioning poultry only as an afterthought.

This kind of filling would not require cooking, but could absorb meat juices and impart flavour to the bird. I am not convinced of its culinary merits, but it was practical and if you had to stretch your animal protein, it added to the portions as well. The one question that continues to vex me is the second seasoning ingredient mentioned here along with parsley.

The problem with mirren is not its obscurity; it is a common word in Middle High German. The problem is that it cannot possibly mean what it usually does. Mirren, familiar from devotional literature and sermons, is myrrh. Technically, myrrh is edible, but it is bitter and astringent and smells much better than it tastes. I used it in experiments with medieval dental hygiene remedies once and the experience of even a relatively small amount in my mouth is not something I wish to repeat. Admittedly, it is possible that people enjoyed this, of course, and even though this would be the only mention of it in a culinary context in German, the recipe may actually refer to myrrh. It is just extremely unlikely.

The most likely possibility in my opinion is that it means myrtleberry. The German words are close enough to make this confusion fairly common (having brides wear a wreath of myrrh in some poems), and unlike the bitter resin, myrtleberries actually have a history of culinary use. It is still a very uncommon condiment, 1500 is very early for it to show up, and I am not convinced it would work in this recipe. That is something I should try, though.

This leaves the question what else it could be, and at this point I am drawing a blank. It will need looking at herbals and dialect dictionaries to see what other explanations present themselves.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.

Stumbled upon this recipe a while ago, but it only was from a fragment of an article that was never fully published.

The source was a book about winemaking, no public scans were available.

After contacting the Karlsuhe State Library about the specific pages stated to have mead recipes. They told me they are actively working on digitizing the book and will prioritize those. ETA 1-2 weeks.

They kept word and yesterday (after 13 days) i received the high quality scans.

So i transcribed the scans into text, worked through some illegible words. Translated with my local and some online dictionaries. Some hours of research about unclear words and i was done.

A recipe that is massive in scale. Depending on local differences this was up to a one thousand liters (~260 gallons) batch of cherry mead.

1 part honey to 2 parts tart cherry juice. After fermentation in barrel a sachet with a spice mix was added through the bung hole and weighted down for weeks to infuse.

A batch of mead like this was ingredients wise an enterprise of it's own for the time. The honey used was worth a small fortune. The expensive imported ingredients not to mention.

Later i found out (after i had the transcript and already translated the hard way) the recipe was published in a copyrighted print somewhere. But this is the first published version having the original source scan.

Recipe is in German, just use the included google translate button, it should handle everything (i've optimized for it).

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/15/the-booty-dance-of-the-iron-kingdom-feeding-the-revolution-xxxv/

It was said that countries had armies, but Prussia was an army that had a country. Certainly, pride in its military prowess and respect for the martial tradition behind it was a unifying thread that held the ruling classes of the disparate kingdom together. The king’s troops marched with unrivalled precision, drilled to exacting standards, trained in an exacting school to achieve great things with little in material resources, and they showed off their famous parades. It was unthinkable for a soldier to slouch in public, to miss a beat, hold his musket the wrong way around, skip down the street, or wiggle his behind against that of a comrade. But that was what the officers of the Cologne garrison were seeing in 1824. It was brazen mockery of everything Prussia stood for, and much to their regret, it was entirely legal.

https://preview.redd.it/wvy8e7f0ckjh1.jpg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=114ac9a243975f688d5c3e258a90d81026665c43

This may need a bit of explaining. Cologne had, after all, been a proudly independent city state for centuries. It was only after the Napoleonic Wars that the city, along with most of the middle Rhine valley, was summarily given to the king of Prussia as spoils of victory. What had once been a commercial hub was turned into a fortress city guarding the Rhine against the dreaded French, filled with Prussian officers, burdened with new military regulation, and governed by a distant provincial administration under the thumb of Berlin. After years of French occupation, they citizens had imagined liberation to feel a bit – freer.

Not that anyone could do much about this. In theory, Prussia may have been a relatively liberal place, but the government did not react well to dissent in practical matters. Thus, the wealthy families that dominated the city sought accommodation with their new ruler much as they had with Emperor Napoleon before. They styled themselves loyal subjects, haggled over royal demands, and tried to shore up local identity and their own privilege. In this new world, pride of place mattered, and Cologne with its deep religious roots played up its Catholic identity. Aside from finishing a cathedral whose construction had been put on hold around 1560 and reviving the tradition of pilgrimages, a key part of this was Karneval.

The problem with adopting this piece of historic identity was that in real, actual history, the anarchic street festival the people of Cologne traditionally indulged in the week before Ash Wednesday had scared the council to the point of banning it at several points. Thus, with the cooperation of the Prussian authorities, a novel approach was tried in 1823: Formalisation. From now on, a committee of respectable men would organise the celebrations, supported by civic associations, and presided over by a central figure, the Held Carneval (today called the Prinz). If fun had to be had, it would be within reasonable boundaries approved by the wisdom of the Obrigkeit, the governing classes.

Like any proper ruler, Held Carneval had a guard, and in 1823, the Rote Funken constituted themselves to that end. Dressed in the red uniforms of the old municipal military, they paraded in the carnival procession. At least, that was what the Prussian authorities supposed they would do. We do not know exactly how far back the various traditions of the performance go, but from the start, these men put on a display of everything a proper Prussian soldier was not. Their march was a dance, their drill a persiflage, their uniforms comically exaggerated, their commands childish. The high point of the performance since at least the later 19th century, but probably much earlier than that, was the Stippeföttche (literally ‘stick-out-booty’). In this dance performed to marching tunes, two guardsmen stand back to back, arms at mock-present, wiggling their hips and sticking out their behinds until they rub up against each other. This has by now become a central part of Rhenish identity, and membership in such guards clubs is a sought-after social distinction. Back then, it was new and provocative.

We can only imagine how people responded to seeing this. Carnival was the most public place that existed in Cologne, with everyone out in the streets to celebrate, many in outlandish costumes, masked, and using the freedom this anonymity provided for noisy, disrespectful fun. The old way had been characterised by drunkenness and mischief, and the new respectability was hard to enforce. There was still beer, there were disguises, and there were Krapfen.

All over Southern Germany, carnival is associated with deep-fried dough of various kinds. Today, supermarkets and bakery chains tend to serve up standardised Berliner, a kind of jelly doughnut, but even the earliest recipes are more elaborate than that. Cologne had its own Krapfen or Krepfel, but there seems to be no unified recipe tradition. Some descriptions suggest a yeast-leavened dough, others a choux paste, and they may or may not be filled. This could mean nothing more than that some deep-fried confection was expected, but the choice was up to the individual. Henriette Davidis, doyenne of North German (i.e. Prussian-aligned) cuisine, has two recipes for Kröpfel in her Pracktisches Kochbuch, one leavened, the other unleavened:

194: Kröpfeln

One small cup of milk, 4 Loth of butter, 3 Loth of sugar, 3 eggs, some cloves, cinnamon, and cardamom are worked into a dough with 1 pound of flour. This is rolled out thinly, cut into strips 2 fingers long and wide, these cut lengthwise three times so they just hang together, braided loosely, and fried like Mutzen.

195: Kröpfeln in a different manner

Stir one pound of flour with 1/8 Maß of milk and 3 Loth of yeast, let the dough rise, then stir in almost as much milk again, 2 eggs, 4 Loth of sugar, and the zest of one lemon. Beat the dough with a spoon until it detaches (from the bowl), then also work in 12 Loth of butter and enough flour so it can be rolled out as thick as a straw. Once this is done, cut it into pieces of whatever size and shape you please with a pastry wheel. Allow these to rise, and fry them golden brown in clarified butter.

You can also fill the Kröpfel. Roll them out thin, lay fruit between two pieces of dough, and otherwise proceed as above.

These two recipes, while sharing a name, really have very little to do with each other. The second comes close to Berliner or Mutzen as we know them today, depending on the size, while the first reminds me of medieval recipes for ‘dagged’ fritters. Both sound attractive, the first producing a rich, crunchy, spicy fritter that is made ‘short’ by frying in fat while the second, soft, fluffy and fruity, can probably also be baked in an oven. With the amount of butter worked into it, it does not need enriching. Both offer quite a bit of space for interpretation. For orientation in case you intend to duplicate the recipes exactly, Prussian measures defined the pound as 467.7 grammes and a Loth as 14.6 grammes. The Maß at this point was a conventional unit of a little over a litre, no longer part of the new standardised measures. The old Cologne Maß held 1.32 litres, but it is not certain which one Davidis refers to here.

I can imagine either treat would go down well on a cold, often wet day, as Karneval typically is in Cologne. With people lining the streets enjoying the show, street vendors made good money, and in the end, the new, organised celebration caught on, as did the antics of the princely guardsmen. The Prussian administration was in a bind. They had agreed to this, after all, not least in order to strengthen the authority of the city council against revolutionary elements. And it was legal; Technically, the dancers were representing the defunct city military; technically, their uniforms were entirely different from the Prussian ones; and technically, it had nothing to do with the present, but everyone understood who was meant. We must imagine the forced smiles as the garrison’s officers accepted invitations, their troops secured the streets, and military bands played to entertain the people.

Later generations would embrace this as a brave act of resistance. It certainly was not that. Despite the often fraught relationship with Berlin, the city government depended on the Prussian state to uphold the privileges of the rich and titled, and it was ready to submit meekly to any demand in return. Whenever genuine resistance occurred, they clamped down hard. Similarly, the organisers of the Karneval, while defending their social fiefdom vigorously, readily accepted any of the ‘suggestions’ a succession of repressive governments made to them. Still, this was a clear statement of defiance against the government’s will, an assertion of difference in a state that did not tolerate much heterogeneity. Doing small things within the confines of even a very restrictive law can be empowering when you feel little hope otherwise. And of course, the Rote Funken won. Their lampooning show remains part of the Karneval long after the Prussian army has ceased to be.

Colonel Thomas S. Meacham was a New York dairyman with a flair for spectacle. In 1835 he set out to make the largest wheel of cheese the republic had ever seen — roughly 150 cows' worth of milk, four feet across, two feet thick, 1,400 pounds. He paraded it through New York on a flag-draped wagon pulled by two dozen horses, decorated with patriotic mottoes, accompanied by a band representing all twenty-four states, and then shipped it to Washington as a gift to the president.

Meacham had voted for Henry Clay. He didn't like Jackson. The cheese was an advertisement for New York dairy, and it remains one of the more successful pieces of agricultural marketing in American history — for reasons entirely outside its maker's control.

The wheel sat in the White House entrance hall for the better part of two years, aging. By contemporary accounts it could be smelled from blocks away.

What Jackson did with it

The conventional move was available and obvious: serve it at a refined reception for senators and foreign ministers, thank the donor, move on.

Instead, as his second term wound down, Jackson announced an open house on Washington's Birthday in 1837 and invited the entire city to come eat it.

Thousands showed up. They brought their own crackers. They came in through the windows when the doors jammed. Ragamuffins elbowed diplomats in full court dress. They hacked at the wheel with knives and finished all 1,400 pounds in about two hours, grinding a substantial quantity of it into the carpets, the curtains, and the floorboards of the East Room.

A contemporary wit recorded that the carpet was slippery with cheese and that nothing else was discussed in Washington that day. The incoming Van Buren administration had to strip the drapes, air the rugs for days, and whitewash the walls to get rid of the smell.

Why it worked

The cheese levee enacted the entire Jacksonian creed in dairy form: the government and its houses belong to ordinary people rather than to a refined class, and the spectacle of the crowd taking possession isn't a problem to be managed — it's the point.

Jackson understood something decades before anyone had a word for it, which is that an aristocrat recoiling in disgust at the sight of common people eating in the president's foyer isn't a public relations problem. It's a campaign advertisement. The people who were horrified were horrified in exactly the way that confirmed the thesis, and their horror did more work than any speech could have.

Harry Truman, renovating the place generations later, grumbled about old Andy Jackson's rough backwoodsmen tramping across the carpets in muddy boots and grinding cheese into them — which is precisely the reaction the event was designed to produce in precisely the kind of person who would say it, still landing a century after the man who staged it was dead.

The smell lasted weeks. The symbolism has lasted centuries.

It had a dress rehearsal

Eight years earlier, at his 1829 inauguration, an enormous crowd followed Jackson from the Capitol to the White House and the public reception became something closer to a riot. Thousands jammed the mansion, stood on silk chairs in muddy boots to get a look at Old Hickory, broke thousands of dollars of china and glassware, and pressed in so densely that the new president had to be evacuated out a back door to a hotel. Staff eventually lured the crowd onto the lawn by hauling the tubs of spiked orange punch outside.

A horrified Supreme Court justice called it the reign of King Mob. To Jackson it was the entire idea.

The part the cheese story usually leaves out

The same conviction — that the people's will should sweep aside the genteel restraints of the elite — is not separable from what Jackson did with it when it turned on people who couldn't vote.

He signed the Indian Removal Act on 28 May 1830. When the Cherokee fought removal in court and won at the Supreme Court in Worcester v. Georgia in 1832, the federal government declined to enforce the ruling. The expulsion was carried out under his successor in 1838 but set irreversibly in motion by Jackson: roughly sixteen thousand Cherokee driven from their homes at gunpoint, around four thousand dead of exposure, disease, and starvation on the march. Across all the removed nations the dead numbered well over ten thousand.

He was also one of the largest slaveholders ever to hold the office, with roughly 150 people enslaved at the Hermitage. In 1804 he placed an advertisement for a man who had escaped, offering a fifty-dollar reward and then ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes anyone would lay on him, up to three hundred.

His "people" was a category with violent borders, and the democracy he expanded so dramatically was a democracy for white men built on the land of the expelled and the labour of the enslaved. Both facts are the same man in the same skin, and the cheese party doesn't sit in a separate compartment from the removal order.

Full write-up on Meacham, the cheese levee, the 1829 inaugural riot, the Bank war, and the removal:

https://unteachablecourses.com/andrew-jackson-big-cheese/

The thing I find genuinely interesting as a matter of political technique: the cheese wasn't Jackson's idea, wasn't made by a supporter, and wasn't intended as a political object at all. He inherited a marketing prop from a man who'd voted against him and converted it into the founding set piece of American populism, essentially by choosing a guest list. Are there other cases where a president took an object or event they had no hand in creating and turned it into that durable a piece of political symbolism — or is the cheese unusual precisely because the raw material was so accidental?

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/13/the-rent-was-too-damn-high-feeding-the-revolution-xxxiv/

One of the best investments you could make in early twentieth century Germany was rental properties, and one of the best places to do this was Berlin. The city’s Mietskasernen (literally: barracks-for-rent) were as infamous for their lightless backyards and mouldy apartments as the ever increasing rents owners could charge for any kind of living space in the growing capital. In better neighbourhoods, the quality of the housing was higher, but the relentless rise in rent applied everywhere. Even in good times, working-class people found it difficult to afford a home, and the early 1930s were not good times.

A backyard in Berlin during the rent strike. The graffiti on the wall in the background reads “Food first, rent next!” Swastikas have been covered up due to overzealous social media censorship. Courtesy of wikimedia commons (original with Nazi flags)

The Great Depression hit Germany harder than most European countries, and its government response was about as hapless as any in the world. A state scarred by memories of runaway inflation and steeped in market ideology pursued cuts across the board in an effort to balance its books, reducing already meagre unemployment and welfare payments the moment millions more people needed them, often for the first time in their lives. As the crisis burned its way through the working classes well into the middle class, previously respectable people in what used to be secure occupations faced a stark choice – homelessness or hunger.

Failing to pay rent meant eviction, but often enough, doing so simply left no money for anything else. Welfare cuts inflicted this on the families many unemployed workers immediately while it crept up inexorably on working and middle class renters, but all knew it was coming. Violence in response was not new – in fact, there had been massive riots two generations before – but the organised response that it met with this time was.

Germany, of course, is infamous for being organised, but in the early twentieth century, the reputation was entirely justified. The Berlin rent crunch was met by a concerted effort by Communist and anarchist organisations, to the shock of the landlords. Most of our records come from party papers which are unfortunately untrustworthy, but police reports agree that attempting an eviction in working-class areas often drew large, threatening crowds immediately. Being unemployed, many men had little else to do, and even if you had police on hand, throwing a family out on the street in front of hundreds of angry, silent observers carrying sticks and bricks would take more courage than most Gerichtsvollzieher (bailiffs) had. The vocal anger in the landlords’ paper suggests this put significant pressure on their profits; One article described the situation as “untenable” as “…so-called tenants’ councils (Mieterräte) and housing protection squadrons (Hausschutzstaffeln) threatened property owners, forcing them to abandon an eviction even under the very eyes of the police…” which they saw as failing “…in a downright embarrassing manner.”

Even if the evictions were carried out, the crowd frequently proceeded to break the police seals on the door and take the evictees’ furniture back inside, daring anyone to stop them. Legally, neither had any standing, of course, but in practice, these confrontations often ended in compromises where outstanding debts were cancelled, rents lowered, or overdue repairs promised.

Of course, this kind of thing was not easily arranged in the greener, less crowded middle-class neighbourhoods new to the experience. Here, a different approach was often taken: tenants, either singly or, more effectively, as a group, withheld part or all of their rent. This Mietstreik (rent strike) put pressure on the landlord to negotiate. A respectable approach was to place the withheld funds in an escrow account pending an agreement. In an age when even well-off people often did all their business in cash, this called for organisation and support that often came from cooperative savings banks and activist lawyers. The effort was considerable, and the networks involved in it often successful at least in the short term.

To many middle-class Kleinbürger, this was an entirely new experience. Germany’s shopkeepers, artisans and clerks had enjoyed a protected status in return for their political support to the Wilhelmine order that ended with the economic shocks of the war and depression. Many blamed the new democratic institutions, but socialists and anarchists were now hoping to make inroads in a class that had been almost impossible to recruit by fostering grassroots self-help efforts.

They certainly had reason to hope. Middle-class Germans had seen the lifestyle they traditionally aspired to disappear out of reach. Servants, homeownership, investments, respectable clothing and food all became unaffordable on a workshop’s profits or an office salary. If the working-class missed a time when their wages bought small pleasures, these people had lost a lifestyle and the respect that went with it. A meal in a petit bourgeois home had been a ritual, three or maybe four courses, with a meat dish at its centre, and usually prepared by, or at least with the assistance of, a maidservant. By the early 1930s, when the Berlin electric company BEWAG published its famous ‘blue book’ Das elektrische Kochen to instruct urban housewives in the use of the new electric stoves, the recipes included main dishes such as this:

371. Spinach Casserole (Spinatauflauf)

750g spinach

1 tbsp butter, some onions, chives, salt, 1 tbsp flour

3-4 pancakes

1/4 litre sour milk or cream, 1 entire egg, 1 tbsp grated cheese, salt

2 tsp grated white bread, 2 tsp grated cheese, butter dabs

Wilt the spinach in an open pot without water, but do not boil it. Pass it through (a grinder opr foodmill – durchdrehen) and sautée it in the butter with onions and flour. Season to taste with salt and chives. + Prepare pancakes from the stated ingredients. You may stack them in the casserole layered with spinach or or you can roll them up, spread thickly with spinach, cut them in slices, and arrange them in the dish. + Pour the sour cream beaten with egg, cheese, and salt over it, sprinkle it with grated bread and cheese, and dab it with butter. This casserole can also be prepared from leftover spinach combined with other leftovers.

Setting: Place on a grille at middle level

Bake: 1.2kW oven, 25-30 min. 3/3, 10 min 0/0; 1.4-12.5 kW oven: 20-25 min 3/3, 15 min 0/0

To be observed: If the spinach is too thin, stir in some grated bread

The pancakes required are described elsewhere:

263 Pancakes

4 tbsp flour, 1 pinch baking powder, 1 pinch salt, 2 eggs, 1/8 litre milk, 1/8 litre water

Sift the flour into a bowl with the baking powder, beat the eggs with the milk, water, and salt, and gradually stir the liquid into the flour, ideally with a whisk, to produce a smooth batter. Preheat the pan at setting 3, then fry thin pancakes at setting 2, the final one with no further electricity + These can be rolled up filled with jam, meat, or vegetables. This batter will yield five.

For the expense of three eggs and some assorted dairy, a meal for the family is created from what more comfortable times considered side dishes. Such recipes had existed before, of course, but they were not celebrated in public. This was the reality of a lifestyle that desperately clung to the final shreds of respectability – a proper home-cooked meal, a housewife not having to work for wages, clean shirts and a three-piece suit – to stave off the slide into proletarianism. Every piece of effort that went into processing and adorning the meal, carefully binding the spinach into a roux-stabilised filling, rolling it up in pancakes arranged in a decorative pattern, and topping it with a crust of cheese and breadcrumbs, showed the disposable labour of a Hausfrau, and we can only hope that both the budget and her culinary skill extended to the nutmeg this recipe really needs.

Nutmeg, like many other imported spices, disappeared from many cookbooks because they cost hard currency which the Reich could ill afford. The futility of this gesture is hard to overstate given the scale of other imports, but it was considered patriotic. Spicing was a private pleasure, not mentioned in polite company.

These people needed organisation and self-help to save themselves. We will probably never know how many homes the rent strikes of the early 1930s saved, but the number was not zero. Each instance helped. Unfortunately, the project ultimately failed. Germany in 1930, though technically a Republic, was already run by an authoritarian cabal deeply suspicious of all forms of self-organisation. The majority of the petit bourgeois shared their outlook and were happy to blame outsiders – foreign powers, women voters, jazz musicians, Marxists, and Jews – for the loss of the status and comfort they considered their due. The Nazi party was happy to accommodate this view. Many were leery of limiting landlords’ rights because in a properly run world, they would be owning rather than renting property, and they hoped that once Hitler was in power, that happy state could return. The Nazis quickly shut down any form of tenant organisation as well as any reporting of a housing crisis, so everything was clearly fine from that point onwards.

In the end, you could say this led to the tenant organisations achieving their goals: Postwar German governments imposed draconian housing regulation on the burned-out ruins of their cities and launched a vast public building programme. The result was a brief phase during which housing ceased to be a problem, home ownership expanded to unprecedented level, and affordable apartments were easily found. This experience continues to distort an older generations’ perception while a generation of neoliberal policy has ensured the actual urban housing market looks more like the 1870s than the 1970s today. Berlin today has no organised housing protection squadrons or rent strike committees, but its citizens voted in a 2021 referendum to expropriate housing held by large private equity investors. As of today, this has yet to be implemented or even attempted.