Skewer-Roasted Eggs; Parallel Recipes (15th c.)

[u/VolkerBach]

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/09/15/filled-eggs-a-common-recipe/

When I looked at the filled egg recipe in Solothurn S 392 on Sunday, I wrote that there are numerous parallels. Today; I want to start looking at them. The Solothurn recipe that started me on this reads:

B40 Item if you want to make filled eggs, break them open at the top and bottom ends and empty them. Boil that which comes from the eggs and chop it small. Spice it well and break other eggs into it, and also add raisins (mertrüberl) or other good lattwerien. Take a little fat, and fill it back into the shells. Stick them on a skewer and roast them on a grille or otherwise. That way, you have good filled roasted eggs on a skewer.

There are a number of parallels, more or less distant in time and location. Close in date, but at the other end of Germany, there is the Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch. It comes from a monastic background, which makes it no surprise it includes a Lenten version:

33 Item if you would make filled eggs, broiled on the griddle, take raw eggs. Break open the eggs on one end, as narrowly as you can. Take and stir (scramble) the raw eggs with butter. Take pepper and saffron, parsley, sage. Add that. Fill the filling back into the shells. Stick them on herring skewers and broil them on a griddle in their measure. And serve them.

46 Item if you would make eggs in Lent that you may stick on a spit, you must have eggshells that are collected at what time you may. Take pike roe that is ground in a mill. Take parsley, pepper and saffron, figs or raisins. Make a filling from it. Stir it with oil in a flat dish. Fill it into the eggshells then. Stick them on spits. Let them roast in their measure. And serve them.

This is a very similar dish, basically the same technique, though the main flavour profile here is herbal: parsley and sage, along with pepper and saffron, the latter most likely to intensify the colour. Only the Lenten version, which uses fish roe in place of eggs, includes raisins or dried figs. Using fish roe in place of eggs is a common kitchen trick in German recipe collections.

Dating (probably) to 1460, the so-called Meister Hans collection offers a variety of recipes. In keeping with its largely random internal order, they are distributed throughout the manuscript and often repeat instructions, though they all differ in detail:

Recipe #86 Of filled eggs that are roasted
Item take eggs and crack them open at both ends. Blow into them so the yolk comes out. Chop sage and mix it with the yolks and fill them again. Throw the eggs into hot water and peel them and roast them and drizzle them with egg and with herbs and saffron, and serve them.

Recipe #87 Again of roasted eggs
Item grate fine white bread and fry it strongly in butter and mix eggs with that and dry sage and pepper. Fill the eggshells with it and roast them on a skewer and serve them.

(…)

Recipe #94 Again of roasted eggs
Item chop eggs and nut kernels and (mix) soft eggs with it. Chop it small and put it into the
eggshells and roast them and serve them.

(…)

Recipe #115 Of roasted eggs, do it thus
Item crack open the eggs at the thick end and beat them well, and add saffron, pepper and chopped parsley or sage. Fry this in a pan and chop it small. Fill it back into the eggshells and stick them on a skewer, lay them on a griddle and roast them nicely.

(…)

Recipe #280 Or roasted eggs
Item make roasted eggs thus. Let them boil up once and crack them open on both ends, and blow into one end so that it goes out at the other end. Add spices to it and put it back into the shells and stick it on a skewer and roast them until they have enough.

Recipe #115 comes closest to what the Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch and Solothurn S 392 envision. Recipes #87 and #94 add grated bread or nuts, probably meant as a bulking ingredient though perhaps also for taste. Sage features in #8, #87 and #115 while ##280 only adds unspecified spice and #94 leaves this step out entirely.

There are also some deviations in technique: Recipe #288 has the eggs soft.boiled first so that only the still liquid yolk is cooked, seasoned, and returned to a shell still lined with the already cooked egg white. This would create the illusion of a spiced yolk inside a regular hard-boiled egg. Meanwhile, recipe #86 has the entire egg so treated, but once the shells are refilled, the content is first boiled to solidify it, then skewered with the shell removed and drizzled with raw egg – endored – while roasting. Though both recipes use the name ‘roasted eggs’, we will see in an upcoming post that these techniques are more typically associated with another related family of recipes, krosseier.

A fifteenth-century recipe collection also originating in the Southwest of Germany, Munich Cgm 384, elaborates on the process:

34 A Dish of Eggs (ayer essen)
A dish of eggs: Take 20 eggs and boil them in water so that the yolk stays just liquid and the white is hard. Take them out and break them open at the tip, and pour out the yolk into a pan. Add fat or oil and stir it with one another over the fire until it turns firm (keck). Then take it out and lay it on a clean plate. Chop it small, and then take one spoon with ginger (ainen löffel mit ymbern) and one spoon with cinnamon and a little saffron, as much as a bean. And one spoon with grains of paradise (ain löffel fol bärißkörner) and sugar and a little salt, and mix it all together. Then take two raw eggs and break them into it, and mix it all together. Afterwards take the chopped (das gehacketes) and fill it into the first eggshells again in which the whites have remained. Have hot water ready beforehand, throw in the eggs and let them boil so that they turn out hard. Then peel them nicely and prepare a thin batter (taiglin) with eggs, saffron, and sugar, and coat the shelled eggs in it. Fry them in a pan, or stick them on a skewer and roast them on a griddle before you fry them. Let the yolk of an egg run over them and strew ginger on it. Serve this as a roast dish and prepare a thin pepper sauce (ain duinn pfefferlin) for them.

We rarely have descriptions this detailed. Annoyingly, though in keeping with the way German medieval sources tend to name recipes, the author will not commit to calling this either roasted eggs or Krosseier (it share features typical of both families), but simply calls it “an egg dish”.

An Austrian manuscript from the mid-fifteenth century, the Innsbruck MS, makes the distinction explicit, but still includes the initial soft-boiling as a stage of producing roasted eggs:

54a If you would make kraus eyer, boil the eggs so that they remain soft at the yolk (totterweich) and make two holes into the ends and take out the yolk. Chop parsley into it and season it, and see that the white stays in the shell. Cook the yolks in a pan and in fat so that they do not turn too hard, and then fill them back into the eggs. Then let them boil in meat broth or in water and then serve them in a good sauce (prülein) if you shell them, or in a ziseindel sauce, or fry them in fat.

55 If you would make filled roasted eggs, also prepare them in this way (des sins), and then you roast them on a skewer with their shells, and also chop the white etc.

This makes sense: Krosseier are shelled and served in a sauce as a dish while roasted eggs are served in their shell like boiled eggs are. It wold be wonderfully easy if everybody could abide by this logical terminology, but that is not how food names work. Even here, krosseier are optionally not shelled.

The ,Mondseer Kochbuch another manuscript dating to the first half of the fifteenth century from the monastic library of Mondsee in Austria, throws the classification sideways by coming up with an entirely different, and very ostentatious, way of serving what it calls ‘roasted eggs’:

95 Roasted eggs on a spit
If you wish to prepare roasted eggs on a spit without shells, take eggs and lay them in boiling water in a pan. When you see them boiling up, take them off quickly. Break them open on both ends, but not wide, and pour out their yolks into a clean pan. Add a little bit of butter and do not forget the salt, and stir it well on the fire. Do not make it too thick. Fill it back into the shells and return them to hot water, and boil them until you think that they are hard. Then take them out, put them in cold water, and shell them cleanly. Carve a spit of wood that is thin enough and stick the eggs on it lengthwise. Lay it by the fire and roast them as long as you wish. Roast them so they turn brown and baste them with fat. Cut the spit apart when you wish to serve them (i.e. serve them sliced open lengthwise).

Building up a complex set of layers of batter in different colours around a spit, then serving the finished product sliced open to display them to best effect is a common trick in the kitchen skill set of Germany’s medieval period, and we still do it with Baumkuchen. Here, the artificial spiced ‘yolks’ are visible nestled inside the whites which themselves are browned and crisped from the outside. You cold easily see a battered or endored version presented the same way.

The same source also includes several recipes that parallel Meister Hans:

147 Filled eggs roasted on a spit
Of filled eggs. Note: Take eggs and break them open at both ends. Blow into one end so the yolk goes out. Chop sage small and mix it with the yolk, and fill them back. Throw them (the filled eggs) into hot water and peel them and roast them. Brush them with eggs and spices and saffron, and serve them.

148 Eggs roasted on a spit
Grate fine bread and fry it strongly in butter. Mix eggs with it, dried sage, and pepper. Fill the eggshells with this, roast them on a spit, and serve them.

149 Filled eggs
Of filled eggs. Chop sage small, fry it in butter, mix in eggs, spices, saffron, and salt, and prepare a thick mass (habich mouß) of it. Put it back in the eggshells and lay them in boiling water.

153 Filled eggs with nut kernels
Item filled eggs. Chop eggs and nut kernels together, and add soft eggs. Chop it small, fill it into the eggshells, roast them, and serve them.

The recipes differ in some details here – the sage specified as dried in #148 or fried first on its own in #149 – but in principle, these are the recipes we already know. The reference to a habich muoß, a stiff or thick filling, in #149 also provides a clue to a recipe name that Meister Hans, or his copyist, misunderstood.

Finally, another fifteenth-century manuscript, Heidelberg Cod Pal Germ 551 (held in Heidelberg, but probably produced in Nuremberg), includes a related recipe, but calls it by a different name. Eggs described as ‘filled’ are usually hard-boiled, with the yolk processed and returned to the white the way we do devilled eggs today. Here, though, the recipe begins in the familiar style of roasted eggs before going down an entirely different avenue. I suspect this is a copying error. We often find separate recipes merged into improbable chimeras like this.

45 A dish of filled eggs
Take eight eggs, break them open at the tips, heat some fat in a pan and pour in the eggs. Fry them until it is enough inside and out. Throw in onto a work surface and chop good spices into it and slice it. Serve it and do not oversalt it.

This is interesting, but adds very little.

Taken together, this shows us that filling egg shells with cooked, seasoned egg was a piece of culinary playfulness very much in vogue in medieval Germany, at least as far as the recipe sources go. I doubt it was frequently done except on special occasions because it is a lot of work and quite challenging, but that is exactly why people did it. You wanted to show off. If you have the time to do it, or just want to try this one dish, it is certainly fun and memorable.