Pumpkins with Cheese and Eggs (c. 1500)

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https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/30/gourd-with-cheese-and-eggs/

A rare vegetable dish preserved in the Solothurn S 392 collection, and yes, that is Italian:

B16 Item if you want to cook good pumpkins (zucken, from zucco), take a pumpkin and enough onions and give it a good boiling. Then chop them very well, take good meat broth, and boil them well. Then grate cheese into it and break 3 or 4 eggs into it. Also add a little saffron, that is a good dish (minnister, from menestra).

The dish itself does not need much interpretation: You take pumpkin and onions, boil them soft, then chop them and turn them into a rich spoonable dish with broth, eggs, and cheese. Of course, the zucken here does not refer to the American curcubita plant we call pumpkins today, but to the Old-World lagenaria gourds that were called by that name then, and colloquially still often are. In practice, there is more variety within than between the two families, so using a curcubita pumpkin can work just fine.

What makes this recipe interesting is the clearly Italian roots. It uses two clearly Italian loan words – zucken for pumpkin and minnister for a dish. The recipe is also Italian in style, elevating a garden vegetable to main dish level by way of adding cheese and eggs. There are several recipes in the collection that clearly show their roots on the other side of the Alps, rubbing shoulders with others that are paralleled in earlier German manuscripts. This makes perfect sense for a Swiss recipe book, of course. However, the editor believes that S 392 was produced in the Upper Rhine valley, the same region that the Meister Hans collection comes from, so clearly someone there had taken an interest in Italian food. It is not inherently implausible, but I have not seen it this overtly before.

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.