Die Fabrikation feiner Fleisch- und Wurstwaren

[Laripu]

In my thread on medieval German sausage recipes, I've included the Sabina Welserin bratwurst recipe.

That's where I saw the name and recipes, which made me look up the source. So thank you!

[vagreys]

Thomas Gloning's transcriptions and translations have been very useful. He has links to many resources on his website.

[vagreys]

So, I downloaded and installed FreeOCR, an open source OCR front end that uses the open source Tesseract OCR engine, and have configured it for recognizing German text in Fraktur script. Tesseract is one of the best OCR engines out there, certainly in the open source arena, and the OCR I'm getting on pages from Die Fabrikation are nearly error free. This is going to speed transcription and translation. Very pleased with the results I'm seeing.

[wheels]

Blimey Tom, that's amazing. Do I read you correctly? The OCR software reads the (ancient) German type face?

As we say over here: "I'll go to the foot of our stairs!"

Phil

[vagreys]

Blimey Tom, that's amazing. Do I read you correctly? The OCR software reads the (ancient) German type face?

Yep. I was amazed. Thought it was going to be likely impossible to find an open source solution, and commercial solutions run several hundred dollars, but FreeOCR has a standard German language file, and another called "deu-fraktur" that reads Fraktur typefaces for German and Dutch, and some other Gothic scripts with a lower degree of accuracy. So far, the only errors are on pages where the quality of the original type is degraded, anyway, so 'E' may be read as 'G', or ' ü ' read as ' ii ', etc. Mostly, the recognition is error-free. I'm very impressed. The Tesseract OCR engine has a wide selection of language datafiles available.

[DanMcG]

That's amazing! So we'll be seeing some new "old" recipes posted soon?

[wheels]

Thanks for posting this Tom, I've been wanting some decent OCR software for a while.

Phil

[JerBear]

that's amazing, looking forward to seeing some of the older recipes...

[vagreys]

I have a German friend who was born between the world wars and was taught to read using Fraktur script before it was banned. She also grew up eating these kinds of sausages, before formulations changed after WW2. She will be helping with the translation process, but I was hoping that some folks, here, would be interested in giving it a go, too. Regardless, the results will be posted here in the historical recipe forums. As well, I will be compiling the collection for use down the road.

[JerBear]

I would love to try them out... I'm always dubious about outcomes when looking at older recipes considering that the base ingredients may have changed over time.. should be fun though!

[wheels]

I'll willingly help, if and when I can.

Phil

[Laripu]

Regardless, the results will be posted here in the historical recipe forums. As well, I will be compiling the collection for use down the road.

Thank you for that. It's a lot of work, and this is very nice of you.

This is us:

[JerBear]

vagreys - I'm a little out of the loop these days, did you ever end up posting some of the recipes?

[vagreys]

Not yet. My friend had to sell their farm, relocate, was hospitalized for awhile...things have drawn out, but we are working on it, as time permits.

[divani]

Hi all,
I have an old version of the book too, cannot recall now which edition but it is pre WWI. The thing that amazes me is the amount of salt in all the recipes, more than double of what I usually use. Have you noticed that Tom?
Best Regards,
Alfredo