Feuerprobe: Recipes from Rumpolt for Trial by Fire 2019

The Festival of Elvegast 2019 included an A&S cooking competition called Prova del Fuoco — Trial by Fire — across four ingredient categories. I cooked four dishes for the entry, all from Rumpolt’s Ein new Kochbuch (1581), with each dish addressing a different category of the competition. The conceit of the competition was that everything had to be cooked onsite, over open fire – I enlisted my friend Hannah, who has much more fire cooking experience (and gear!) for the day of cooking.

Rumpolt is a late-16th-century German source — almost more Renaissance than medieval at this point — and the recipes show it: turkey appears regularly, what may be potatoes show up (though probably aren’t), flour-thickened sauces, rather than breadcrumb thickened, make an early appearance. The book runs to over a thousand recipes across every food category. All translations below are by Sharon Palmer (Ranvaig Weaver).

The Four Categories

Category One — Meat

• Schweinen en Zwibelgescharb (Roast Pork in Onion Sauce): A back roast of pork finished in a deeply browned-onion sauce thickened with browned flour (einbrenn) and finished with raisins, beef broth, pepper, saffron, and a small amount of vinegar. Composed from multiple Rumpolt recipes for gescharb sauce, since the original meat recipe leaves the sauce details to recipes elsewhere in the book.

Category Two — Vegetable

• Lungenmuß von Maurachen (Lung Pottage of Mushrooms): Rehydrated porcini sautéed in butter with parsley and chives, finished with saffron cream and beaten eggs stirred in to make a soft creamy scramble. Rumpolt’s Zugemüß 138 — a fast-day “lung pottage” substitution, with mushrooms standing in for organ meats.

Category Three — Grain

• Spinach Ravioli: Pasta filled with spinach, parmesan, breadcrumbs, butter, herbs, ginger, and mace; simmered in pea broth (substituted with chicken broth on-site); finished either in broth or dry, dressed with parmesan and brown butter. Rumpolt’s Zugemüß 200 — much closer to a modern ravioli than you might expect, except for the ginger-and-mace seasoning.

Category Four — Dessert

• Apple Fritters (Strauben): Apple chunks bound in a yeasted wine batter, deep-fried in clarified butter, dusted with sugar. Composed from Rumpolt’s Zugemüß 38 and 42 — the “Strauben” name signals a yeasted dough, so I added sourdough starter to push toward a true yeast-doughnut effect rather than a modern apple fritter.

On Cooking Outdoors

The competition was cooked on-site with charcoal braziers, a grill/smoker for the pork, and limited prep space. The whole sequence ran on a tight schedule — see the schedule appendix below — with overlapping work across four stations and two cooks coordinating timing and hands-on prep. The constraint that mattered most was heat management: with charcoal as the only heat source for most of the day, holding the pork at simmering temperature in the gescharb sauce while also frying apple fritters at temperature was a choreographic challenge.

Schedule

Before 1:00 PM: Set up work area. Lay fires across all four heat stations (Brazier 1, Brazier 2, Clay Brazier, Grill/Smoker).

1:00 PM: Trim and skewer pork roast. Light all fires.

1:30 PM: Chop onions, start pasta dough. Heat mushroom water. Brown flour. Begin roasting meat on the grill/smoker.

2:00 PM: Heat spinach water. Continue with previous tasks.

2:30 PM: Roll pasta. Blanch spinach. Cook onions.

3:00 PM: Fill pasta. Heat pasta water.

3:30 PM: Cook pasta. Finish pork gravy.

4:00 PM: Slice and batter apples. Heat butter for frying.

4:15 PM: Crack eggs. Finish pork.

4:30 PM: Fry apple fritters. Cook mushrooms. Pasta topping.

4:45 PM: Cook eggs into mushroom pottage. Keep pasta warm.

5:00 PM: Plate and serve.

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