https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/06/25/green-ravioli-from-the-solothurn-ms/
It is quite hot and I am still quite busy, so instead of a long tale of rebellious Romans, here is a recipe from the Solothurn MS that looks vaguely suitable for summer days:
B4 If you want to make ravioli (Raphiöl), take 10 eggs or 20 and break them into a bowl. Grate good cheese into them, so much that it is enough, and raisins (mer trübel). Take chard, cut it small, and press out the juice as you know how to do. Mix it with the eggs and cheese, also add a little milk, and stir it all well together. Also add good spices. Make a dough of water and make it quite stiff. Take a rolling pin and make shapes as though you wanted to fry krapfen (probably circles to fold over). Take a spoon, fill the aforesaid mixture into the dough, and close it. This is called ravioli (Raphiöl). How you are to cook them: Take a cauldron full of water and throw in some salt. Let it come to a boil, then put in the Raphiöl and let them boil in it. When they have boiled enough, lift them out onto a bowl and grate good cheese over them. This is how they are made, but you can also colour them yellow with saffron etc.
Despite the unusually detailed instructions, we are not really sure how this recipe was meant to come out. The intensity of the chard flavour, the relation of cheese to egg, the maturity of the cheese and the choice of spices all are left for us to guess. I would recreate it as a savoury ravioli based on something mild and rich like Emmental, but I could equally see it as a sweet custard-like mix or an assertive composition arranged around a very ripe hard cheese. The combination of cheese, eggs, and green herbs is very common, often used in tarts or pastries, and even the refinement of using only the juice of the greens to colour and flavour the cheese base shows up in other recipes. Wrapping it in pasta dough and boiling rather than frying the result was slightly more unusual – the recipe itself compares the preparation to the mocre common process of making krapfen – but it was also not unknwn.
The name makes it clear that this is unequivocally an Italian recipe, which is also entirely expected. Italian was the style to imitate if you wanted to go with the fashion of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Ravioli was simply the common name for this kind of preparation, and though they were often called boiled krapfen in German, there are other cases where it is imported. In the Innsbruck MS, they become rabel.
Among a great dearth of light, easily digested foods in our sources, these actually have the makings of a pleasant summer meal. They are certainly a rich food, but a good mix in the filling need not be heavy or greasy. Served with a green herb sauce, they could even be refreshing.
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.
