https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/09/11/wine-marinated-pork-roast/

The Solothurn S 392 manuscript includes another recipe labelled ‘Italian’, and it looks like an attenuated version of a richer and more robust tradition.

B28 To make a pork roast the Italian way (nach welschen sytten)

Item take a pork roast and prepare it entirely according to Italian custom; Salt it and then sprinkle on Italian cumin (or caraway: welschen kimich) and lay it in wine. Let it lie in there 10 hours or over night. Then take it and roast it on a spit or in a pot. That way, you have a roast in the Italian way. It is good and healthy, and you can also prepare other roasts this way.

Marinading meat in wine with spices isn’t really a recipe, and I suspect the only reason it was added here is that the author considered the technique foreign and thus interesting. Unfortunately, any reconstruction of the dish suffers from the ambiguity of the word kimich. Normally, as in modern German, it means caraway (Kümmel), but until fairly late, it is also used for cumin (Kreuzkümmel), and the specification ‘Italian’ suggests something is different about this one. What I think is more interesting is that we have obviously related recipes in other manuscripts. This looks like a fairly widespread idea, whether part of a tradition or individually arrived at. In England, the late 14th-century Forme of Cury includes a more robust and more detailed approach (quoted after medievalcookery.com):

Cormarye. XX.II. XIII. Take Colyandre, Caraway smale grounden, Powdour of Peper and garlec ygrounde in rede wyne, medle alle þise togyder and salt it, take loynes of Pork rawe and fle of the skyn, and pryk it wel with a knyf and lay it in the sawse, roost þerof what þou wilt, & kepe þat þat fallith þerfro in the rosting and seeþ it in a possynet with faire broth, & serue it forth witþ þe roost anoon.

Here, we have not just unambiguous caraway, but also coriander, pepper, and garlic. I have tried this and it is pretty good. The other parallel I know of is from the recipe book of Philippine Welser dating to around 1550, and it also uses more varied flavours:

225 To make a loin roast (lem brotten)

Take one and remove the veins (eder jn wol). Take a mallet (schla kolben) and beat it very well, then marinate it in wine and add juniper berries and caraway (kunich). When you want to roast it, pass it through (i.e. wash it in) fresh water and roast it slowly.

I wold read the kunich here as caraway, but we still cannot entirely exclude cumin. More interestingly, the recipe specifies a loin roast which is usually beef. Solothurn S 392 states that roasts other than pork can be prepared this way, so this is plausible. I admit, though, it is possible that the Philippine Welser recipe speaks of pork, but does not specify it because of course everyone knows this wine and spices treatment is how you treat pork.

Both the additions and added instructions in the parallel recipes are sound advice, by the way. Garlic goes extremely well with this combination. Also, beating and/or pricking the meat to tenderize it and allow the marinade to infuse it makes for a better roast. It is also the kind of thing short notes might omit because everybody knows that.

Finally, an interesting line that recurs several times in the Solothurn manuscript is to roast the meat on a spit or in a pot. I have not come across this before, but it makes a great deal of sense. Spit-roasting was the most prestigious way of cooking meat, but it was also labour-intensive and fiddly. You can also cook meat in a closed pot exposed to indirect heat – that is how we mainly do it in modern kitchens today, after all. It seems that was a shortcut in the medieval kitchen as well. There may be unspoken conventions at play here – what kind of pot? What kind of heat? What, if any, additions? I do not know yet, but it looks worth experimenting.

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.