Leipziger Allerlei

Leipzig

Illustration

Researched: Researched from 1 source in the brief

The fair city's plate, in a 1745 cookbook and not a Napoleonic trick. The vegetables are peas, carrots, asparagus, cauliflower and kohlrabi, each cooked on its own; the crayfish became scarce after the plague and the vegetable only version is a necessity and not a corruption. The vegetables and crayfish are weighed from the Slow Food Leipzig recipe for five and the city's tourism paper; the stock, the yolk and the dumplings keep no weight in either.

by Leipzig

Leipzig's fairs made it a city that ate imports. The Arabischer Coffe Baum claims coffee service since 1711, with a legend that Augustus the Strong took his first cup there in 1694; the city's history museum cites a coffee house regulation of 1697, and the museum is the better source. Saxons were Kaffeesachsen, coffee Saxons, and the thin brew called Bliemchenkaffee, flower coffee, is coffee so weak that the painted flowers in the bottom of the cup show through; the "seven beans to fourteen cups" is a joke, not a measure. Leipziger Allerlei, the spring vegetable plate with crayfish and morels, is in Susanna Eger's Leipzig cookbook of 1745. The legend that it was invented after the Napoleonic Wars to hide the city's wealth from beggars and tax collectors is sixty years too late for the recipe that cites it, and the legend's own logic, a poor plate made of crayfish and morels, does not hold. Crayfish grew scarce after the crayfish plague, which a regional source dates to 1876 and which should be checked. Leipziger Lerchen were larks, trapped and sold in extraordinary numbers, over 400,000 brought into the city in October 1720 by one account; Saxony banned the catching in 1876, and the marzipan and jam pastry sold today under the name is the substitute, shaped to recall the pastry the bird was baked in.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves a table. The stock is made beforehand.

Ingredients

The tradition's method, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them.

200g young peas, shelled
375g young carrots
300g young asparagus
250g young cauliflower
250g young kohlrabi
70g morels
20 crayfish, tails and shells
150g butter
veal stock
egg yolk
small bread dumplings, Semmelklößchen
to taste salt

Method

Cook each vegetable, the peas, carrots, asparagus, cauliflower and kohlrabi, separately in water with salt until just tender, and keep them warm.
Cook the crayfish, shell the tails, and crush the shells; cook the shells in butter until the butter is red, and strain it.
Lengthen the crayfish butter with veal stock, warm it, and bind it with egg yolk off the heat.
Toss the vegetables in butter, arrange them with the morels and the crayfish tails, pour the sauce over, and serve with the bread dumplings.

What a modern chef changes

Each vegetable at its own point, the sauce held

Rung 3

Method

Blanch each vegetable to its own time in heavily salted water and shock it, then warm them all together in a little stock and butter at the end; the tradition's separate pans are this with a timer.
Make the crayfish butter from the shells roasted first, and clarify it, so the sauce is red and clear before the stock goes in.
Hold the yolk bound sauce at 70 degrees in a bain marie; it splits above 80 and the whole plate is lost.
The crayfish in Britain is the invasive signal crayfish, a different animal from the noble crayfish of 1745, and legal to catch only under licence; a fishmonger's tails are the route.

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