Abstract The starting point of the present article is the usage of mass nouns with indefinite articles, known from modern Bavarian and neighbouring dialects. Our analysis is dedicated to the use of the indefinite article varying with bare nouns in a historical perspective, based on a cookbook handwritten in 1556 in the East Swabian variety of Augsburg, containing about 900 instances of mass nouns with and without articles. Like in modern Bavarian, the readings OBJECT and QUALITY can be distinguished. A comparison with the de-nominals in Old Spanish recipes shows that the indefinite articles appear in equivalent positions with mass nouns mostly denoting non-specific regular objects as instantiations of the kind. The discussion of quantifiers and measuring expressions shows a special syntactic and semantic behaviour of ain wenig ‘a little’. The final discussion leads to the assumption that the indefinite article does not formally express a partitive relation, but, at most, produces partitive effects.