The first thing you are likely seeing here is a recipe. I try to translate one recipe from a historical source every day, and here is where I post them. When I have time to experiment, I also post reports on actually trying out the dishes or short articles on other historical questions I find interesting. But mostly, it is recipes. I hope you enjoy them.
This is a short post, because life has been leaving me little time for long ones. I will be very busy for the coming week and a half, and not sure I will be able to post anything, but here at least is a recipe from the Solothurn MS:
B7 A yellow pepper sauce
If you want to make a yellow pepper sauce (to serve) over fish, take bread and grate it on an iron grater. Lay it in warm water to soften it and pass it through a cloth. Then take pepper and saffron and add it, and set it on the coals. Stir it continuously and add a glass of verjuice so it turns sour, or use vinegar.
If we go by surviving recipes and mentions, bread-bound pepper saucewas the ketchupof medieval Germanupper-class cooking. Everybody knew how to make it, and it went with just about anything. There is considerable variety in the recipes though, so we may really be talking about a broad category of sauces. This recipe adds an interesting detail about the preparation process: The bread is first soaked and strained, then added to the other ingredients and boiled. This is likely to improve consistency, removing the gritty feel many modern eaters dislike about bread-bound foods. Other than that, this is as unexcitingly ubiquitous as it gets.
I hope to be back with stories about making fun of Prussian officers when I am back at my keyboard reliably. Until then, I must ask for your patience.
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.
Anyone who mattered agreed that running a large city took personal qualities gained through upbringing and tradition. That was really true of any large polity. A village headman or ship’s captain might be chosen from the common run, but for anything really significant, you needed to call on people from the right families. Yes, there might be disagreements, even violence, but how was that different from what happened among kings and lords? That very likely was the attitude Konstantin von Lyskirchen, head of the faction of ‘friends’ and senior court official of the city of Cologne, took. The patrician families might fight amongst each other, but barely a generation ago, they had come together to bloodily show the uppity weavers’ guild who was in charge. Buoyed by a recent victory against the rival ‘griffin’ faction and this certainty, he may have been a little forceful in dissolving a gathering of Gaffel members, civic associations of the more common kind. But he had a meeting to go to, and this sort of thing needed discouraging.
He was probably quite surprised when, later that day, he and 100 fellow patricians found their gathering disturbed by hundreds of artisans and merchants. They had fetched their arms, brought the city’s war banner, and took the opportunity to lock up most of their natural governing class conveniently assembled in one place. It was 18 June 1396, and for Konstantin and his fellow Geschlechter, nothing would ever be the same again.
Fifteenth-century depiction of the defeat of the Cologne weavers’ guild in 1371, courtesy of wikimedia commons
Germany is a country of innumerable cities, all of them with their own history and distinct traditions. Some are famous for their ancient roots, their ecclesiastical glory, or their association with powerful rulers. Others are known as centres of art or industry, learning or trade, remembered for their artisans’ skill or the acumen of their merchants. With Cologne, it is ‘And’.
Founded by a Roman emperor, the city is roughly a millennium older than Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, or Frankfurt. Its archiepiscopal see was one of the oldest in the Empire and included electoral rank, which meant its holder was one of just seven princes who chose a new emperor. The shrine of the Magi drew pilgrims from all over Christendom to its grand churches. Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas had taught at its cathedral school. As the final port on the Rhine seagoing ships cold reach, it was a major commercial hub, trading wine, timber, and fish, and exporting the famous Cologne grey cloth the thousands of weavers in its oldest guild produced. When its merchants first attended an assembly of the Hanseatic League in 1383, they immediately demanded recognition as its leaders. For most of the medieval period, Cologne was the largest German-speaking city in existence, and it had an ego to match.
That was not to say its rise had been easy of peaceful. Much of its recorded history were dominated by the citizens’ struggle to escape the domineering power of their archbishops, and when they finally achieved this in 1258, urban self-government passed into the hands of the Geschlechter, the grand patrician families. Their club, the Richerzeche (literally ‘guild of the rich’) was treated as a de-facto organ of government. They dominated the economy, monopolised positions of authority, and created a convoluted system of decisionmaking that ensured little cold be done without every family agreeing. As far as it went, this was not an uncommon arrangement in larger cities, and it was very lucrative as long as there was no serious conflict among the Geschlechter.
Of course there was. We are not far off imagining the patrician families as a cross between noble hoses and mafia clans, and without external threats, they descended into internecine squabbles. In the meantime, the great majority of citizens outside this charmed circle were asked to support their decisions and finance the whole thing through their taxes. They, too, had their organisations. Artisans were assembled in craft guilds (called Ämter in Cologne, as in most Hansa towns) which were allowed some limited political role and strictly policed. When the butchers’ guild staged a protest in 1348, the council simply dissolved it.
Another form of organisation that shows up in the record in the 14th century were the Gaffeln. The name means ‘fork’ (Gabel in modern German), and it was a direct reference to their ostensible purpose: Sharing meals. That was not an unusual thing. Eating together – commensality if you are unlucky enough to have to do academic writing – established and strengthened social bonds and entrenched hierarchies. The word lord is etymologically related to bread, as is the word companion. One encapsulates the hierarchical order – the lord gives bread, the servant receives it – the other the egalitarian one – companions share bread. he Gaffeln were of the latter kind.
Named after the carving fork they used to serve portions of meat – forks were not commonly used for eating until the seventeenth century in Germany – these clubs united artisans and merchants, including many who had become wealthy, but were excluded from patrician circles. A Gaffel would establish itself in a given neighbourhood, draw on local people for membership, and effectively become a local community organisations. These were not charities; Members had to fund their meals, after all. But many more could afford to join them than the Richerzeche, and the Gaffel was open to all.
I know of no meal plans for the Gaffeln of the 1390s surviving, but regulations for similar organisations from cities throughout Germany still exist, and the picture is relatively homogenous. The food signalled status, not luxury, but it was never cheap. Often, dishes were defined precisely to ensure members could not compete for leadership by giving more than the rules stipulated. Hosts were elected or determined by rote, and their status was limited to the meal they gave.
The key element in a proper meal was meat or, if the rules of the church did not allow it, fish. In Cologne, there was both locally caught freshwater fish and preserved sea fish like herring, cod, and sole brought in for trade. The market also provided locally butchered beef, pork, and mutton. For both fish and meat, roasted was considered the best, to the point that the word braten came to mean a main dish in general. A roast of meat was also what you used the carving fork on and why it had more symbolic power than a spoon or a bowl. In addition, there was always fine bread and drinks, wine, beer, or both, depending on geography. Cologne had both a brewing tradition and access to wine in large quantities. Butter and salt would accompany every such meal unless it was a strict fast day, and often there was cheese, fruit, and condiments like vinegar, mustard, and other sauces. Side dishes of vegetables are rarely specified, but probably also existed.
After the meal, people lingered to drink, talk, and nibble on snacks such as fritters, nuts, and fruit. One such dish that is still popular in winter, but really good throughout the year, is roast apples. Today, they are known as Bratapfel. Many surviving recipes are very complex, but there is one from a manuscript produced in the Rhineland in 1444 that resembles the modern version and probably also comes closer to what the non-rich were eating:
65 Take figs, raisins and honey. Chop it together with spices and other good things, fill it into apples and close them again with a wooden skewer. Bake them in a thick-walled container (degel) with wine, that turns out courtly.
We know of similar treats from stories, often made very basically by roasting apples or pears in the ashes. Some surviving recipes tend towards the other extreme with parti-coloured fillings and dough or batter coatings for apples deep-fried whole. Simply filling one with dried fruit, spices, and honey represents a happy medium. It would have been affordable to the Gaffel members and also fit their idea of respectable wealth without excess.
From sharing the food to seating and speaking order, an egalitarian ethos suffused every aspect of such gatherings. This was a place where you could talk among equals, air grievances, and possibly hatch plans. We do not know how far the revolt of 1396 was planned. Later historians claimed it was spontaneous, and that is not impossible; citizens had weapons in their homes to defend the city if needed, and the numbers and spaces were small enough you could communicate by running and shouting. But it seems unlikely nobody ever at least considered the possibility.
In the event, things ended reasonably well for everyone involved. The patricians got to keep their heads, their citizenship, and their property, which was remarkably generous all things considered. The government of the city was re-ordered, the privileges of the Geschlechter revoked, and the new system was based on 22 Gaffeln. Some of them were simply the old craft guilds while others represented neighbourhoods. All citizens were required to enroll in one. The Gaffel organised defence and civic obligations, and elected representatives to the council, as well as an expanded advisory body for special cases because in the old Empire, simple government was just unthinkable. The councillors had term limits of one year and were paid in wine. They elected two mayors and two Rentmeister finance officials, also limited to one year in office. It was designed deliberately to ensure nobody got to monopolise power again.
Success was limited, but real. It turned out that rich and connected people had a way of getting into positions of power more often than statistically likely and would help each other stick to their respective seats. Soon enough, old patricians managed to rotate between terms as mayor and Rentmeister, freezing out the rest. In 1481 and again in 1512, there were violent uprisings against these machinations, and in each case the constitution was amended. But in principle, it worked, and until the end of its independence in the Napoleonic wars, Cologne remained a city governed by civic dinner clubs. There surely were worse ways of doing that.
On 9 June 2026, the state government of North Rhine-Westfalia announced its intention to extend environmental protections to a forested area near Aachen. This administrative act, in itself unremarkable, marks the end of one of the more memorable battles over environmental policy in recent German history – the occupation of the Hambacher Forst (unrelated to the other Hambach). Between 2012 and 2020, this confrontation between mining giant RWE and a disparate band of environmentalists had captured the headlines, embarrassed state politicians, and turned ‘Hambi’ into a living legend well beyond the borders of the state.
To understand how this standoff could take on so much symbolic significance, we need to look to German history and culture. First, Germany’s industrial development largely depended on the country’s rich coal deposits. The Ruhr area especially was shaped by the culture of coal mining with tens of thousands of men employed in the pits at its height. Their mines went deep into the rock, following seams more than a kilometre underground. The coal for which the Hambacher Forst was to be destroyed is a different kind – lignite. It is soft, sulphurous, crumbly stuff known as Braunkohle (brown coal) in German, its seams lying close to the soil, and burning it creates acrid smoke.
Lignite mining near the Hambacher Forst, courtesy of wikimedia commons
Lignite is mined in open-cast pits, and from an engineering perspective, the process is very impressive. Enormous digging machines on tracks chew their way through thick layers, literally remaking the landscape. The process is also enormously destructive, removing the topsoil, leaving deep scars in its wake. East Germany depended on lignite because there was no other coal on its territory. West Germany mined it because it was cheap. Because of its centrality to the country’s economy, mining long enjoyed state protections. Lignite mines displaced entire village communities through forced purchase and relocation. Ignoring the objections of the local people had a long tradition in the business.
That is not to say it was ever easy. At the risk of sounding cynical, Germany has no indigenous people to displace. The people who lived in the villages chewed up by the diggers spoke the same language and looked the same as everyone else. Neither does it have a lot of space to spare. At 233 people per square kilometre, it is less densely populated than the Netherlands or Belgium, but still comparable to Massachusetts, and unlike many other European countries, it has no capital city forming a centre of gravity. Most of the population is distributed across the country in small and medium-sized cities. While there are some relatively empty regions, there is almost nowhere where nobody lives.
Thirdly, the people who live there tend to be very attached to their landscape. Germans love trees. This is so stereotypical that it is almost a joke, but it is true. Forests have had deep symbolic significance since at least the Romantic era, and they still draw millions of people out on walks and bike rides every weekend. German law requires even private woodlands to be accessible to the public for recreation. Foraging for berries and mushrooms is a popular hobby. It was never easy for people who had grown up in that culture to just move somewhere else, leaving behind all their familiar spaces.
By the 2010s, the power to make them move was no longer at the mining companies’ command without question. After an unconscionably long time, Germany had decided releasing unlimited carbon and toxic smoke into the atmosphere was not a good idea. Winding down the coal industry was a long and expensive process, and for reasons that are not entirely logical, lignite mining remained the last kind operational. At the same time, Germany’s environmental movement was galvanised by concern over climate change, leading to some of the largest demonstrations in the history of the country. You could not expect these people to stand by as a coal mining conglomerate set about obliterating a forest that had been in municipal management since the middle ages to produce the dirtiest, most polluting fuel you could legally burn.
Resistance started, as it usually does, locally, with a church community whose service was promptly invaded by miners. However, coal mining had long been on the radar of environmental activist groups and they were ready to join the fight. With legal avenues exhausted, the best way of protecting the forest from destruction was to start living there. This approach has a long local tradition, and activists knew how to make themselves hard to remove. In the end, they had constructed an entire Ewok village of treehouses accessible only via rope ladders to be difficult for the police to reach. For a while, the Hambacher Forst became a destination for young activists from all over Europe. There were different levels of risk, from participating in legal demonstrations and protest camps outside the forest to becoming part of the treehouse community. Some even ran sabotage missions against mining equipment.
Treehouse village in the Hambacher Forst, courtesy of wikimedia commons
Feeding such heterogenous groups of often very committed environmentalists is a challenge, but there are actually dedicated groups of volunteers who do exactly that. Many of them come from the Volxküche movement. Named after the 19th-century Volksküchencatering to the urban working class, these organisations are a fascinating example of mutual aid in practice. They use cheap ingredients, often rescued from destruction as food waste, to make cheap or free food they distribute to homeless and poor, fellow activists, and anyone else who is interested. They often make vegan foods both for ethical reasons and to ensure everyone can share. One of the older ones, the Hannebambel in Aschaffenburg, actually published its Volxküche de luxe bulk cooking cookbook in 2011. The recipes are organised into vegan, vegetarian, and meat dishes to minimise environmental footprint. One favourite is spinach lasagna:
Lasagna: 2 kg lasagna sheets, 5 kg chopped frozen spinach, 2-3 litres cream, 500g ricotta, 1 kg grated gouda, 1 kg parmesan, 3 usuallylarge onions (Metzgerzwiebeln), 2 cloves garlic, salt, pepper, nutmeg, starch to bind the sauce, cooking oil.
Preheat oven to 180°C. Peel and finely cube onions and garlic, sautée in a pot with oil. Add spinach and briefly sautée along with the onions. Add the cream and ricotta and bring to a boil while stirring continually. Season assertively, and bind lightly with starch. Layer the spinach sauce with the lasagna sheets on baking sheets three layers deep, sprinkle with cheese and bake for about 40 minutes.
Peel and finely chop the garlic and onions and sautée in a pot with oil until they turn glassy. Add peeled tomatoes, tomato paste, and a little water. Season and simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Serve separately along with the lasagna.
Making it vegan: Omit gouda and parmesan on the lasagna. Replace cream and ricotta with 4 litres unsweetened soy milk or cream from the Reformhaus. Cover the top layer of lasagna sheets with an extra laver of soy cream to prevent it from hardening as it bakes.
This is actually delicious and adapts to even larger larger quantities easily. There are two interesting points to it. The first is the Metzgerzwiebel, literally a butcher’s onion. These are large onions that, u8nlike the more common large Gemüsezwiebel, are intensely flavourful. They used to be mainly added to sausages and meatballs, which is where they get their name from, and are sadly more widespread in South Germany than where I live. The second is the Reformhaus, in 2011 the most plausible source of soy milk. These are a loose association of shops dedicated to conscious, healthy, environmentally attuned living in the tradition of the Lebensreform movement. Along with organic, vegetarian and vegan foods and nutritional supplements, they typically carry cosmetics, household products, and often also various esoteric nostrums. Of course, by now soy milk is a supermarket staple which just goes to show that the crunchier kind of counterculture often has a pretty good handle on solutions for the future that take the mainstream much longer to embrace.
The Hambacher Forst did not have an easy resolution. By 2017, the rhetoric on both sides was heating up and violent confrontations with police increased. Mining executives called the occupants terrorists, and the police made exaggerated claims about explosives and plans for deadly traps, and some activists stepped up sabotage and violent confrontations. In 2018, a court seized on one of those clever legal wheezes that authorities like to resort to when they cannot simply use force: Instead of deciding on the legality of the occupation, they declared the treehouses buildings. This meant that, regardless of the legality of their presence, they were subject to the building code which they, of course, violated in all kinds of ways. They were condemned and their demolition ordered. The police and fire services thus moved into the forest not for an eviction, which still had not been permitted, but on an extended rescue mission to evacuate the occupiers from their unsafe environment.
It did not reduce the violence of the following confrontations. Over weeks, one treehouse after another was invaded, emptied, and destroyed. In the course of these operations, a journalist fell to his death from a rope bridge, but this was not directly due to police action. The authorities were genuinely trying to avoid injuries and largely succeeded. By October, the forest camps had been destroyed. It was just in time for a court order stopping the intended clear-cutting over environmental concerns. Shares in RWE plummeted, and the company effectively gave up its plans for the Hambacher Forst. The woodlands remained accessible to the public and on 6 October, about 50,000 protesters gathered to listen to speeches and see bands perform.
The confrontation did not end so much as peter out. RWE organised a demonstration of miners that threatened known local activists in their homes on 17 October. Environmentalists occupied some empty houses in a nearby evacuated village to set up a new protest camp. In the end, RWE quietly shelved the idea of eradicating the forest and announced this to the public in early 2019.
The story of the Hambacher Forst has a strong sense of inevitability about it in retrospect. Everybody must have known that coal simply had no future. On the ground at the time, though, there was no such feeling. The activists in their tents and treehouses were facing an overwhelming force of police and corporate security ready to do violence whenever the courts would permit it. RWE had far greater resources both to litigate and campaign. Much of the conservative press was eager to see the forest go, even as polls showed 70% of conservative voters opposed the destruction. When victory came, it was unexpected. This often happens; Powerful opponents dominate the playing field until, suddenly, they don’t. Certainties evaporate, new rules apply almost overnight, and what seemed the terrifying anger of giants looks more like the tantrum of a living fossil.
It was July 1917, in the middle of the First World War, and SMS Prinzregent Luitpold, the newest of the German navy’s Kaiser-class battleships, lay immobile in the middle of the Kiel canal. Germany’s most strategic waterway was blocked, and the stokers were adamant: They were going nowhere until they received decent rations – specifically with no maggots.
For all the great expectations it had started out with, the German navy had had a lousy war. Bottled up in the North Sea and Baltic by the Royal Navy, it was unable to break the blockade that starved Germany of critical overseas imports or assist its allies in the Mediterranean. Though it claimed the sole major battle it fought in 1916 as a victory based on the fact that it had sunk more British ships than they had German ones, the situation was unchanged. Ships were sitting in port, crews growing frustrated, and the only glory, such as it was, accrued to the submarine service.
Meanwhile, the blockade that the navy was unable to break choked off Germany’s economy, leading to massive food shortages in 1916/17. The word Steckrübenwinter (turnip winter) is a remarkably cutesy name for a famine that killed an estimated 800,000 civilians. The effort of the state to enforce price limits, rationing, and adequate supplies were piecemeal and often counterproductive, leading to widespread disgust with the authorities and the wealthy. A host of off-ration goods and a flourishing black market ensured that especially the owners of arms businesses, whose profits were barely taxed, could continue to live in their accustomed comfort while working-class children starved in droves.
Post-revolutionary postcard honouring the mutineers. The caption reads: “The world belongs to the brave”, the rising sun is labelled “Kiel” and “Liberty”. Image courtesy of wikimedia commons.
The situation in the fleet was less dramatic, but equally infuriating. Rations were short and increasingly of poor quality, and though officers were required to taste the food issued to the ratings, they were not required to share it. Daily, then, the sailors would watch their first officer make a show of enjoying their fare, then disappearing into the wardroom where meat, coffee, and alcohol – strictly forbidden on board otherwise – were served.
The difference this could make even at the best of times is illustrated by the fate of a North German staple, pickled herring. Both the North Sea and the Baltic had thriving herring fisheries which made that fish an affordable staple anywhere near the coast. At least since the 1500s, there was a tradition of pickling it in vinegar to produce a salty, acidic snack that could be served with bread or potatoes to satisfy the appetite and stimulate thirst. The pre-war Rendsburger Kochbuch (c. 1900) instructs us:
22. Marinated herring, to be prepared from fresh as well as salt herring. You gut them, first washing the salt off the salted ones, set aside the milt, and place the herrings in a deep bowl. If using salt herrings, you leave them and the milt to steep in fresh cow milk for at least 24 hours before.
The milt is chopped finely and stirred to a thick sauce with good wine vinegar. To the herrings, laid in a deep porcelain bowl or stoneware pot, you add finely diced sour apples, slices of salt- or vinegar-pickled cucumbers, many finely sliced onions, a few capers, a little bay leaf, peppercorns, and a few slices of lemons. You pour the milt mixture over it, cover it tightly, and leave it to steep in a cool place. Fresh herring are ready to serve after 36 hours, salt ones after 2-3 days. Before serving, a teaspoonful of Provencal olive oil can be added to the sauce for a pleasant, mild flavour. They are served with buttered bread or with hot boiled potatoes with the skin on.
2-3 herrings, 1/8 litre of vinegar, some mustard, 1 large onion, pepper, some salt
The herrings are skinned, washed, and cut in pieces. The sliced onion is boiled in the vinegar together with the spices and cooled. The milt is stirred thoroughly with the mustard and spices, mixed into the vinegar, and poured over the herring.
In case this still sounds too appealing as a meal for a family, it needs to be said that even the economical recipes of 1915 were largely fiction by 1916. If people remembered the Wilhelmine era with undeserved nostalgia for a long time, it was because the gute alte Zeit had offered modest culinary delights beyond the reach of rationing bureaucrats and industrial adulteration. It would be many years before most people would again have what the Rendsburger Kochbuch lists after its recipe for plain marinated herring:
23. Salt herring marinated. The herrings are prepared as above, but it is better to cut them open along the back and remove the heads. They must not be cut entirely through, but stay connected by the skin along the thin side (i.e. the belly side). You now spread them open, brush the flesh side with fine salad oil, sprinkle them with mustardseeds, best white ones, cover them with long, very thinly sliced strips of onion, strips of vinegar-pickled gherkins, and capers, sprinkle some pepper over them, and roll them up tightly. In order to prevent anything from falling out, tie them shut with thread. – These herrings are better yet if you first brush them with fine salad oil and roast then to golden brown on a griddle. A pan can be used if it is unavoidable, but you must prevent them from sticking with a pancake knife. Then, the herrings are spread thinly with mustard, but no mustardseed is used. Otherwise proceed as above.
Once all rolls are complete, you prepare a pickle as for marinated herring No. 22, but add neither apples nor cucumbers. Instead, add a little tarragon and stir in a few spoonfuls of sour cream.
The rolls must steep in this marinade for several days before they are ready to serve.
This is colloquially known as Rollmops and is still extremely popular up and down the coast (there is even a song about it). Most modern recipes are extremely simplified by comparison, though. Back in the days of Vorkriegsqualität, a sailor could get one of these at a waterfront restaurant and wash it down with good beer. The memory was fresh enough to rankle in 1917.
However understandable to us, going effectively on strike was an extremely risky thing to do. The sailors were subject to the infamously strict military discipline of the Kaiserreich, after all, and their officers were not the forgiving kind. Still, the initial response was remarkably restrained. The crew was even allowed a voice in managing their rations through a joint Menagekommission of officers and men. Their complaints were, after all, understandable and, that dreaded German word, unpolitisch.
This needs to be understood in the context of its time: The German high command was terrified of losing control. There had been strikes in factories all over the country earlier in the year. As yet, the military was unaffected, but across the borders they could see the French army dealing with widespread mutinies while the Russian one was effectively dissolving in an epidemic of insubordination. That was why, when they could not bring the protests in the fleet under control with disciplinary measures quickly, the navy high command turned to brutal repression. They feared – not without reason – that Socialist and democratic ideas were spreading among the men and demands for better food and service conditions could turn into calls for peace and political reform. The question how to end the war was controversial, and the left wing of the Social Democratic party gained support for its peace policy.
The crackdown was brutal and targeted. Men who had participated in strikes and walkouts were arrested by army reserve troops and put on trial. Those deemed ringleaders were sentenced to death, two sentences carried out by the army in Cologne, far from the navy base. Others were imprisoned or demoted and sent to the front as naval infantry. The admiralty further mandated vaterländische Erziehung throughout the fleet; Officers would school the men in patriotic thinking to counter Socialist subversion. There were further attempts to organise protests, but whenever they were caught, punishments were severe.
As far as the navy’s leadership was concerned, that was it, and they could get on with the business of winning the war. Had they managed that, it might have been. That was not how history went, though. The German battlefleet turned out for one more successful operation against Russia before rotting in port again. It was not until October of 1918 that the prospect of action returned. The admiralty wanted to sabotage peace negotiations with a final suicide mission to force a decisive battle against the Royal Navy. The crews refused, and the commanders transferred the mutinous ships away from the North Sea ports to Kiel, where they felt secure enough to arrest ringleaders and basically replay the successful procedure of 1917. On 1 November, 150 men were taken off the ships by the army. Their comrades protested, marching into town to call for their release. On 3 November, they were joined by workers from the dockyards and factories. That day, shots were fired by a shore patrol.
On 4 November, the navy base was under the control of a revolutionary sailors’ and workers’ council.
By 9 November, the emperor abdicated.
Nobody had actually prepared for this. There had been no deep conspiracy, no foreign interference like there had been in Russia., There are just limits beyond which you push people at your own risk. Few sailors and workers had been democrats or Socialists before the war, but now they found that the Socialists were talking sense. In improvised meetings, the voted on demands, elected spokespeople, and sent out delegates to other military bases where similar organisations mushroomed. The apparatus of repression – officers, military police, prosecutors and courts-martial – watched helplessly as it turned out there was nobody they could trust to follow their orders. The revolution took a week, and when it was over, there were no kings or princes left in the country.
We know there was no happy end to this. Germany had still lost a war, and the price of defeat would be steep. The blockade continued until 1919, putting the country through another Hungerwinter as the economy collapsed. Discontent with the democratic government that ultimately had to shoulder the burden of territorial losses and reparations undermined the republic from the start. But none of this was foreordained. What happened in 1918 stands as a lesson to autocrats in what can happen once they lose the trust of their people. Not every regime goes down in the flaming ruin of their capital. Often, they simply disappear because people no longer believe in them.
On the second day of being stuck at home sick instead of in Paris with a dearly beloved person (boo to food poisoning), at least there is the upside of time to dedicate to my hobby. I found a modern rendering of this fourteenth-century poem a while ago, and now I was able to track down the original and translate it.
Dining, from the fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter. Image courtesy of wikimedia commons.
The Rossauer Tischzucht survives in three copies, so it clearly was a modestly popular piece of literature. It is named after Rossau in Vienna, where it was recorded in a monastery. The manuscript is in the Nationalbibliothek today (Cod. ser. Nova 2584). The rules as such are not unusual – much the same is repeated in every Tischzucht poem – but there are some interesting bits, and it makes a good foil to compare the König vom Odenwald or the feasting scenes from Wittenwiler with. Also, it clearly depends on the thirteenth-century Tischzucht attributed to Tannhäuser for some of its rhymes, but is not derivative.
Those who have such knowledge That they already mastered honourable conduct (zuht und ere) I ask them on my behalf That they not be angry When I now admonish young children That are about seven years of age And do not yet have that knowledge Nor understand proper manners. But whoever wishes to hear of proper manners Should now abandon impropriety (unzuht).
Remember that when you go to the table You must not leave your hands unwashed. Cut the nails on your hands closely If they are long, it dishonours you.
If you do not want to sit like an unmannerly person (gouch) Loosen the belt around your belly.
If you want to cut bread mannerly You must avoid doing this: Do not brace it against your chest As weak women will do Who are obliged to do this because of their weakness At court, this will be greatly mocked.
Nobody should together sup From one spoon, this is clear. It is not proper to drink from bowls And whoever improperly takes those And drinks up as though he was mad (als er tobe – prob. Noisily) Though many praise this bad behaviour (unfuor) I cannot think but that these are As bare of honour as an empty cask. (er ist der ern ein itel vaz)
Those who bend over the bowl And smack uncleanly With their mouth like a pig Should be eating with other animals (bi anderm vihe).
Some bite off their bread slices (sniten) After the manner of peasants And dip them back into the bowl; Courtly people abandon this impropriety.
Some even eat so greedily They no longer feel what their mouth is doing And bite their own hand Courtly people will avoid this gluttony (gitikheit).
Those who snort like a seal (wasserdahs) Or smack their lips like a salmon (lahs) And eat this way, as many do, How badly they reject proper manners (sich der zuht verwigt).
Those who clear their throats (wiphitzt) when they are supposed to eat And blow their nose in the tablecloth Those two things are unmannerly As far as I can recall.
No mannerly man will do these things: Lying down on the table Or leaning back It is not well received when that happens. Do not lean on your elbows Sit upright, not bent over (gesmogen) And do not touch yourself with your bare hand But cover it with your clothes If you must touch yourself.
Do not put your fingers on the blade of the knife When you cut thick bread slices To empty out your bowl, You must not forget these manners.
Wipe your moth before you drink This courtliness is always proper And only in proper measure (i.e. not too deeply) Should your mouth enter the cup.
Some blow into their drink I am not sure they will be thanked for that.
When your companion drinks You should not be eating.
And count this for an evil deed (mizzetat): If someone has food in their mouth And drinks with that, like an animal. If I see this poor behaviour (unzuht) with anyone I advise them honestly To stop doing it immediately.
I also think it is not well regarded That if you have eaten meat off a bone To put it back into the bowl Courtliness must be guarded from this.
Whoever wants to eat and speak at the same time Or even speaks in his sleep Whoever wants to to both at once Will have little rest.
Those who like to eat mustard and sauces Should do without the impropriety Of sticking their fingers into it They should be accustomed to (not doing) this.
Nobody should reach for salt with their bare hand Be reminded of this courtesy.
When you want to eat eggs, Well enkentzet (chosen?) and shelled Beforehand you must wisely Shape the bread into points with your fingers So that you are never obliged To shape it with your mouth later. Also do not use your finger To reach into eggshells, as often happens And do not practice such ill manners To put the shell back into the bowl.
Also, dear comrades of mine, Do not poke around your mouth with the tongue that is poorly regarded When you leave the table.
Here ends this poem of table manners May God protect us from all misfortune. Amen.
This is interesting in all kinds of ways and illustrates some of the rules and realities of medieval upper-class dining.
One interesting aspect is the rules for cutting bread. We know from many sources that the proper way to cut bread at the table was to hold the loaf in one hand and the knife in the other. Especially if your loaf was large and dense, as medieval bread often was, bracing it against your body would be far easier, and we know this was how people did it frequently. I used to assume doing it differently just because was sufficient explanation for the upper-class rule, and the smaller loaves of semmel or schönroggen made this practical, but the suggestion here is that it also was a test of strength and dexterity. Cutting loaves without bracing them and thick slices without putting pressure on the blade with your finger can be challenging. This ableist aspect is part of many rules of propriety, as anyone who has been instructed in manners can attest, and it makes sense in the context. Chivalric society was still a warrior aristocracy, every secular man at the table a trained cavalryman. They would show off that sort of thing.
The second observation is the rule that underlies the entire principle: Food moves one way. Anything that was in your mouth should never be in contact with the food on the table. This was made challenging by the fact that bowls and drinking cups were shared. Typically, diners shared one bowl and cup between two, using the hand facing away from their companion to eat with to avoid jostling each other’s elbows. Your bodily fluids had no business in the shared bowl. Thus wash your hands before eating, wipe your mouth before drinking, do not drink with your mouth full, do not touch shared condiments with your fingers, generally keep them clean, and never put bread or food that was in your mouth back in the bowl. Spoons were never shared and the bowl would not touch your moth, so you had to spoon or sop up any liquid in it. The mere suggestion of saliva touching the food – bending over the bowl, smacking your lips, or talking with your mouth full – is prohibited. None of this is unfamiliar to modern eaters, but many do not realise how consistent this system is and how much individual plates and cutlery helped defuse its tension points.
This is also where the rules for eating eggs are interesting. The egg is soft-boiled, eaten in the shell. You prepare a sufficient number of small bread wedges to sop up the egg first. Then you hold the egg in one hand, crack it open at the pointy end, and use the bread held in your other hand to eat it. If you lacked the forethought to prepare enough bread, you only have one hand free – there are no eggcups – so you will be forced to shape the bread with the mouth. This is unmannerly and disgusting for the reasons outlined above. Any well-mannered diner would understand how many wedges to cut and be dextrous enough to do it.
Another interesting point touched on briefly is the rule that you should not eat – that is, have food in your mouth – while your companion is drinking. In other Tischzucht poems, this is expanded to the rule nobody should be eating while the host drinks. It may be something to do with displaying self-control and reassuring the other you are not gobbling up the best bits while they are busy, but it also underscores an important aspect of commensality: Drinking is the more important social activity. Most symbolic actions center on drink, not food.
The final question is why a salmon is particularly notable for smacking its lips. there might be no more to it than that lahs (salmon) rhymes with wasserdahs (seal), but there is a parallel to consider. In Tannhäusers Tischzucht from the 13th century, the respective lines are:
He who snorts like a seal (wazzerdachs) And smacks his lips like a Bavarian Saxon (payr sachs) When he eats, like many do; How very much he forgets his manners!
Clearly, the earlier poem provided the influence here. I have no idea why a Bavarian Saxon (geographically difficult to imagine in itself) was particularly known for lip-smacking, but I suspect there is a political background to this. It seems the anonymous author – or someone before them – liked the couplet, but also could not understand that word and substituted a different rhyme. It is a common phenomenon in folk music to this day.
Hamburg has lately become a popular tourism destination, and one of the things many visitors do is take the ferry line 62 down the Elbe for a scenic ride. As it glides past the 1912 tunnel entrance building towards the old fish market hall with its impressive 19th-century cast iron windows, the ferry passes a beach club, a firefighting ship’s mooring, a retired Tango-class Soviet submarine, and a set of houses painted in bright colours and usually festooned with banners. These are the Hafenstraße houses, one of Germany’s most famous anarchist squatter communes, and the story of its emergence is one of street fighting, skulduggery, and deep embarrassment.
It all started in a way that is drably familiar to anyone from any Western European city. The houses were owned by SAGA, a municipal housing corporation, and they were old. Around 1900, they had been state-of-the-art, but by 1980, age and neglect had taken a severe toll. Apartments stood empty, no repairs were made, and the corporation was looking to demolish them and get an investor to build an office block. This kind of modernisation had already swallowed up entire neighbourhoods, much of it technically illegal, but carried out by connected landlords with impunity.
By late 1981, the last tenants, including a left-wing youth organisation, were facing eviction. The final New Year’s Eve party drew a crowd, including many anarchist activists and punks who played music, ate, drank, greeted 1982 – and stayed put. Under the eyes of the management, a squatter community had popped up. In the ensuing standoff, the squatters defied several attempts to evict them until SAGA’s management sent in a contractors under police protection to brick up the ground floor doors and windows.
The next day, they found someone had bricked up their main office’s entrance overnight.
The fight was on.
Though conservative media framed this as an assault on lawful society, the activists had a solid legal case. Under West German law, you could not, in fact, do with your property as you saw fit. Property carries the obligation to use it in a socially responsible manner – it is in the constitution (§14.2). Though squatting as such was illegal, the SAGA could not just evict them or destroy the houses. Not to mention that, despite all efforts to paint them as terrorist sympathisers, drug dealers, and a Communist fifth column, the occupants enjoyed significant support expressed in practical aid, demonstrations, and votes.
There was, in fact, something to the accusations; The people who occupied the Hafenstraße houses were an eclectic leftist community embracing anarchist principles of self-organisation. Most of them were opposed to drug criminalisation, proudly internationalist, and critical of capitalism, though it is amusing to imagine how a 1980s Soviet functionary would have responded to these comrades. Fifth columnists, they were not. But neither were they pacifist. Nonviolent resistance was not a realistic option in the face of riot police.
Internally, they were well organised and effective. One reason they enjoyed support was that they organised repairs and improvements to the houses that the owner had neglected. They organised a communal kitchen that fed them and a large number of visitors as well as local homeless. Cultural events and solidarity concerts drew crowds. The occasional violent demonstrations and police raids made headlines, but most days were filled with a quiet activism working patiently towards an eventual resolution.
This was a consciously egalitarian, internationalist group, often dismissive of traditional patterns and willing to try new things, including new foods. Today, the anarchist scene in Germany has gone almost completely vegetarian or vegan both for ecology and inclusiveness, but by all accounts, this was still uncommon in the 1980s. One of the most popular cookbooks emerging from this scene, Peter Fischer’s Schlaraffenland, nimm’s in die Hand, which we already quoted on the issue of ‘authentic’ pizza, gives us a large number of recipes from distant countries, including many that are suitable for cooking in quantity. One of them is for stir-fried pork with soybean sprouts, then a great novelty:
Pork with Soybean Sprouts heo xao gia
Cut 400g pork shoulder into thin slices and sautée in olive oil with two split onions. Stir well continually. Salt and pepper, add a pinch of glutamate and 1 glass of water and simmer for 10 minutes. Then add 500g fresh sprouts along with 10g of black mushrooms and again simmer 10 minutes on low heat.
If no fresh sprouts can be had, use tinned ones. In that case, use the water from the tin for cooking.
Better variant: Use loin in place of shoulder. In that case, first brown the onions, then sautée the meat.
(…)
Consider: With Vietnamese as with all East Asian meals, there is always a large bowl of rice on the table to serve yourself. Rice means: Rice without any other ingredients, plain boiled. It is eaten from a rice bowl next to the bowl for the main or other course.
Prepared nuoc-mam also accompanies all meals. It is the axis of Vietnamese cuisine. You either season a dish with it or dip salad herbs in it. Salad eaten this way is incredibly delicious, only Italian salads can compete. At any rate – if you have tried nuoc-mam, which tastes just as good based on Hong Kong fish gravy, three times, it will never be out of your kitchen again.
Further: Whenever adding a glass of water is mentioned, it means warm water. But a collective cook will already know these things anyway.
Of course, the author has things to say about preparing nuoc mam in the introduction to the chapter:
… Not the pure extract, but a mixture made according to individual preference is used (at the table). I have adopted the following formula:
Keep in a well-stoppered small pitcher to be stored in the refrigerator if the sauce is not used up entirely during the meal. First, put 5 tbsp lukewarm water into the pitcher. Then cut the flesh of 1/2 a lemon into pieces, lightly squeeze them between the fingers, and add them to the water. Follow with 2 tbsp (good) wine vinegar, 2 crushed garlic cloves, 1 shredded small hot red pepper. Finally, top up with nuoc man to taste and add sugar to balance the saltiness. This tastes best if it is allowed to steep overnight.
This recipe may not sound like anything special to us today (neither would it have to me, as I grew up around people like that), but it is hard to overstate how much of a break with tradition it was for Germany in the mid-20th century. Vietnamese cuisine had a special status as a left-wing identity marker, with the war barely ended and visiting the country still viewed as close to treason by conservatives, but even beyond this, Germany was not a place where culinary adventurism held much sway. Its own culinary tradition had been devastated by war, displacement, and austerity, and for a generation, eating well had mostly meant getting enough calories and then, enough status-bearing ingredients to make a ‘proper’ meal. Interest in ‘foreign’ foods never died, of course, and immigrant communities helped the spread of Italian, Greek, and Yugoslav foods through the country. Going to less familiar worlds represented a vast leap, though. In 1981, spaghetti was still adventurous to many.
Contrast this with the conscious internationalism of a cookbook that has room for Italian and Spanish, Maghrebi, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indonesian recipes. The author prides himself on his knowledge of flavours and places that German backpack tourists visited when that was still uncommon and is solicitous of authenticity in a way that we recognise as typical ‘foodie’ behaviour, but that was still a novelty then. Getting your hands on nuoc mam, or even decent olive oil, was not easy in 1981 Germany, though you stood a better chance in Hamburg than just about anywhere else. Soybean sprouts were often cultivated at home because they were equally hard to find. In the end, you had to make compromises, and what passed under the name of ‘curry’ or ‘nasi goreng’ at the time was often wildly improvisational.
A compromise was also what ended the standoff at the Hafenstraße. Though conservative hardliners in and out of government longed to crack heads and tried violent solutions several times, in the end the mayor Klaus von Dohnanyi decided to deescalate. At this point, the inhabitants had used their renovations to fortify the buildings with razorwire and steel doors, and the police estimated 5000 officers would be needed to clear them out. Support from other German states would have provided the numbers, but the confrontation was averted in a dramatic last-minute round of negotiations in 1987. The squatters were offered a rental agreement, the fortifications were removed, the police stood down, and an uneasy peace began.
Things did not wind down easily on either side. Radicals resented being tenants to the state as much as the right-wing press did the ‘surrender’. It was not until 1995 that a cooperative of inhabitants and supporters was able to buy the houses outright. The city sold at a steep loss, and many resented that violent radicals could have prime living space while many law-abiding citizens nearby were turfed out of their apartments by gentrifying real estate investors. Ironically, the anarchist commune turned out to be a better investment than either 1980s office space or 1990s luxury condos in the long run. It proved a draw for artists, musicians, and activists, providing alternative tourist cachet close to the city’s preeminent drunk party location and its most overpriced souvenir shops, and it cost less than two embarrassing failures to convince the people they really wanted an Olympic bid. It may not have been what the first occupants of the houses envisioned when they set up their revolutionary commune, but this really is a happy end, to the extent we get these in history.
This morning, I read a comment on a culinary writing group that people preferred printed cookbooks to online recipes because they did not cram ads into their pages and – well – they often used to. Just this weekend, I managed to pick up a remarkably late example of the type at a flea market. But to start at the beginning…
In the early 20th century, there was a great deal of concern over the fact that modern women could not properly cook or run a household, were refusing to have enough babies, and generally were not in line with their biological destiny. This was generally a very strange time, and especially so in Germany, so we should probably not be surprised if odd things cropped up even in very mainstream places. One such place was the Standesamt, the registry office where marriages and births were officially recorded. Starting in the 1920s, it became customary for every newlywed woman to be given a book on how to be a proper housewife – the Hausbuch für die Deutsche Familie.
Hausbuch is one of those terms that hard to translate adequately. Noble families had books that Hausbücher served as chronicles, collections of essential texts, and family heirlooms. But this was just a cheaply mass-produced collection of texts commissioned from experts on marriage, housekeeping, childrearing, and, centrally, cookery. It had been produced on the initiative of the association of registry officials to educate the regrettably modern women of their time, but of course actually giving away a copy to each bride was not something the state was going to afford. Tnere were more important things to spend money on, like war reparations, war debts, and preparations for the next war. The Standesbeamten thus came up with a different way of funding the production: advertising.
1936, 1950, 2013 – a long tradition of educating the female sex
In each of these books, a number of pages were set aside for ads that local businesses could purchase. Since the intellectual property was free, the income from these funded the printing and the books could be given to every newlywed couple in the district, making sure the ads hit them just as they were facing the major expense of setting up a household together. It was a winning formula – so much so that it continued for almost a century, at least in West Germany, and in some more traditional places still does. I own three such books – two editions of the Hausbuch from 1936 and 1950 respectively, both from Kiel, and a less obtrusive Goldenes Kochbuch from 2013 produced in Hamburg.
Reading these is alternately fascinating and horrifying (in case you ever wanted to know what the Nazis thought was proper infant care), and it quickly makes it clear that family life was very much a political issue. But they are also an interesting resource for tracing the development of German cookery over the past 100-odd years. Frequent changes in marital law and less frequent ones in government outlook meant thy were regularly revised, and the opportunity always served to also update the recipe section. After the 1970s, the legal aspects vanished, leaving only tracts on housekeeping and cookery funded more or less lavishly by local businesses. With the rise of online ads, this source of funding is drying up and the last of Standesamtskochbücher are disappearing. This may be the last we see of them.
Front page of the 1936 edition: Where to buy fine tableware, rent cars, and learn to drive. Life promised to be good (unless you were Jewish or a Socialist, or both)
As an exercise in this, here are three recipes for Gulasch, a staple of 20th-century German cuisine that people here insist is as Hungarian as spaghetti bolognese is Italian (and they are probably right about that). In 1936, the Hausbuch had fairly terse instructions:
Gulasch
1 1/2 pounds of beef, 2 tablespoons fat, onion, salt, a little paprika, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 1/2 pounds potatoes
Quickly sautée the cubed meat together with the chopped onions in the fat. Dust with a little flour, deglaze, salt, add paprika, and then add the raw, cubed potatoes to the meat. Steam in a covered pot for 1/2 hour, season, serve.
I am, fairly sure this dish would have carried a prison sentence in Hungary, but the style is quite fitting for a political movement whose major publication arm gave us the memorable word Kochvorschrift for recipe. In 1950, the new edition gave:
Front page of the 1950 edition: Where to buy furniture, kitchen appliances, and ironmongery for all the small apartments they were rebuilding in the flattened cities. Also, please drink milk.
Gulasch
1/2 – 3/4 kg beef, ample onions, a little fat, salt, paprika, 1/2 – 3/4 kg raw potatoes
Free the meat of skin and sinews, wash it, drain it well, and cube it coarsely. Sautée it well with a large quantity of onions, deglaze with a small amount of liquid, salt, add the paprika, and steam it very slowly in a covered pot. About 1/2 hour before serving, add the coarsely cubed potatoes and continue steaming. If you wish, you can bind the sauce (Tunke) with 1 spoonful of flour, but raw potatoes serve the same purpose.
All honour to domestic economy, but deciding raw potatoes will do just as well as flour to bind a sauce is one of those “tell me you lost a world war without telling me you lost a world war” moments. West Germany in 1950 may have ended food rationing (prematurely, many economists believed), but it was still a desperately poor country where many working families could barely afford meat and any serviceable thing was made to last. What a change from here to 2013, where both ingredients and instructions are available in abundance:
Front page of the 2013 Goldenes Kochbuch. A wedding is once in a lifetime (ok, maybe two or three), so splurge
Beef Gulasch
Working time: 20 minutes. Cooking time: 90 minutes
1 kg beef, 500g onions, 120g pork lard, 40-50g sweet paprika, vinegar, meat broth or water, salt, 1 tbsp tomato concentrate, 1 tbsp Gulasch spice mixture (2 tsp marjoram, 1/4 tsp caraway, 1 small garlic clove, some lemon peel, all finely minced), 20g flour
Cut the meat into bite-sized cubes. Sautée the sliced onions in hot fat until they are golden brown, stirring continually. Add a heaping tablespoon of paprika and immediately deglaze with a small amount of meat broth or water that had a dash of vinegar added. Add the cubed meat, some salt, the tomato paste, and the Gulasch spices. Slowly simmer in a covered pot, stirring occasionally and adding hot liquid (meat broth or water) as needed. Once the meat is tender, add a little liquid, bring to a full boil, and season to taste. This Gulasch in its own juices (Natursaftgulasch) should be rusty brown. To produce a thicker sauce, dust the meat with flour before the final boiling, only then add the liquid and boil quickly.
This is still industrial cuisine, but there is art to it – and wealth. Note the absence of potatoes. You get to choose what, if any, carb you want with this Gulasch. I remember it being served with the kind of spiral noodles that have become visual shorthand for poverty, but it also goes with knödel, spaetzle, or indeed, potatoes. At this point in history, economising food is no longer a concern. Relearning the skill will not be easy for the next generation of Germans.
This has nothing to do with any of my current projects, but it just came across my feed again and I think it may warrant a post of its own. The rule dates to 1084 and comes from a document everyone who studies Jewish history is surely familiar with already, though many who are interested in culinary history may not: The charter by Bishop Rüdiger Houzmann of Speyer codifying the status of the Jewish community. Among many other, more important aspects, it stipulates:
Slaughtered meat which they may not eat according to their law they may lawfully sell to Christians, and Christians may lawfully buy it.
Why did the bishop say this? It has to do with Jewish religious rules, Catholic canon law, the economic reality of medieval town life, and practicality. Firstly, Jewish religious rules.
Remains of the old synagogue of Speyer
If you know anything about Judaism, you know it has dietary rules. Certain animal foods and combinations of food are forbidden, others are permitted (kosher). The best known of those rules is that pork is absolutely forbidden, but once you start looking into the detail, you learn there is a variety of rules that apply particularly to meat. Even an animal of a permitted species slaughtered in the prescribed manner can only be eaten if it meets specific requirements. Any deformity, including internal ones that only become visible after slaughter, can lead to it being condemned. In addition, certain parts of an animal that are edible (most prominently the blood) are also not permitted. As a result, you could expect there to be meat that Jews could not eat whenever animals were slaughtered.
Christians, on the other hand, were not bound by these rules. The medieval Roman Catholic church interpreted the New Testament dictum that people became unclean not by what went into their mouths, but by what came out (Matthew 15.11) as ending all food prohibitions for Christians (except for, oddly enough, eating domestic horses). Medieval German Christians happily ate pork, they consumed the meat of hunted animals, cooked with blood, and would generally have made the perfect customers for whatever meat Jewish dietary law forbade.
In addition, it looks as though meat was always coveted. It was not rare in the sense that people suffered for lack of it, but our sources suggest medieval Germans almost always and everywhere would have liked more than they could have. In the close confines of a medieval town where life happened mostly in view of other people, throwing away meat that, by the lights of their Christian neighbours, was perfectly fine would have been very problematic for Jews. Selling it to non-Jews is traditionally the preferred solution. There is nothing derogatory about it; non-kosher meat is not considered inferior, Jews just cannot eat it.
Given this is so obvious, you might wonder why the bishop felt the need to permit it. Basically, because at that point the church had not yet decided how, or whether, Christians were allowed to socialise with Jews at all. By the eleventh century, Jews were the only non-Christians you would meet in most of Germany. The Empire defined itself as a Christian state and its subjects as Christians. Being anything else excluded you from that community. The consequences this should have were contentious. Some Christian theologians argued that it meant complete exclusion, even expulsion. Bishop Rüdiger, on the other hand, took a much less extreme stance. In 1084, this was possible. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Councilembraced radical positions and decreed social separation in every sphere, paving the way to ghettos, stigmatisation, and expulsion.
The mikveh of Speyer
The arrangement we see in the decree of 1084 reflects a very different reality. Bishop Rüdiger envisioned a peaceful and productive coexistence, and he was far from alone in this. Speyer, after all, was not just anywhere. Though a minor industrial town in the Rhine valley today, it was an imperial power centre of the Salian dynasty with a grand new cathedral where several members of the dynasty were buried. Its bishops were important figures in the imperial government and their city operated under the eyes of the emperor. Having a thriving Jewish community was a policy goal. In 1096, when the First Crusade passed through the Rhineland, massacring Jews and looting their property wherever they found them, the bishop of Speyer intervened with troops and sheltered the town’s Jewish community in his palace. Anyone violating this protection was threatened with severe punishment.
The flourishing of Jewish culture in Speyer has left tangible traces in the town’s architecture and archeology as well as in the theological legacy of the SHUM synods (the cities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, centres of Judaism in the Empire) and the prevalence of the name Shapiro. A study of architectural elements in the remnants of the old synagogue and headstones of the Jewish cemetery suggest that they were made in the same workshops as the stones used to build the cathedral. Whether it was Christian stonemasons working for Jewish clients or (less likely) Jewish artisans building a Christian church is unknown, people clearly did not object to the arrangement.
Of course we all know it was not going to last. Speyer’s Jews lost their protection, their synagogue was closed, their rights curtailed, and their community dwindled to almost nothing. But we should not lose sight of the fact that ghettos and massacres were not inevitable. Germany was home to many traditions, and while all too often the regrettable ones won out historically, this was also a country where Christian stonemasons would buy beef or mutton from a kosher butcher with money they earned making a window frame for the new mikveh.
Continuing the list of roast recipes from Franz de Rontzier begun yesterday, here is the section on pork. Note the author makes no distinction between domestic pig and wild boar. The two were much more similar then than they are now.
Of roasts of wild and domestic pigs
Pork is parboiled and trimmed before it is roasted
I. You roast pork on a spit. Then you fry onions in butter, add pepper and vinegar, serve that over the roast and sprinkle it with salt.
2. Item you sprinkle roast pork with sugar and salt and serve it.
3. Item when it is done, you boil mustard, dripping, and vinegar together etc.
4. Item your fry diced apples in dripping. When they are done, add vinegar, small raisins, pounded ginger and pepper. Pour it over the pork roast and serve etc.
5. Item you stick the pork roast on a spit and roast it. Then you boil wine vinegar, pounded nutmeg, pepper, and sage together. You pour it over the roast, sprinkle it with sage, and serve it.
The comparative brevity and less detail may suggest that pork had less status than beef, which makes sense in cattle-rich Northern Germany. Pork did not become the quintessential German meat until modern times. Still, we can get some useful information and recipe ideas here.
First, we learn that pork must be parboiled and trimmed before roasting, but does not require larding. Presumably it was rich enough on its own. Second, pork seems to go with sauces. Only recipe #3 does not produce a serving sauce. I am especially fond by the onion sauce in #1 which has a long history and can be very delicious indeed. The apple sauce in #4 is a variation on a long-standing favourite that many Śouth German recipes call a gescherb or ziseindel. #2 seems to basically produce diluted, meaty mustard which, while probably not bad, seems a little superfluous and #5 seems to be quite unbalanced with sage flavour. Still, I would try them all.
Franz de Rontzier, head cook to the bishop of Halberstadt and duke of Braunschweig, published his encyclopaedic Kunstbuch von mancherley Essenin 1598. He clearly looks to Marx Rumpolt’s New Kochbuch as the new gold standard, but fails to match it in engaging style or depth. He is thus overshadowed by the twin peaks of Marx Rumpolt and Anna Wecker. What makes his work interesting is the way in which he systematically lists versions of a class of dishes, illustrating the breadth or a court cook’s repertoire. He is also more modernly fashionable than Rumpolt. Looking to France rather than Italy and Spain for inspiration, and some of the dishes he first describes may be genuine innovations.
Roasting is generally something that historic recipe sources assume as a given; You take a piece of meat, stick it on a spit, and put it by the fire. Everybody who has ever tried it knows that there is a good deal of skill and experience involved in even the simplest roast. References in various places show that people also understood this ion the sixteenth century. Temperature control, basting and marinating, larding and barding, all played a role in the process. Franz de Rontzier helpfully collected a number of recipes in his 1598 Kunstbuch in which he describes the process in slightly greater depth. I will begin today with the beef recipes:
Of Roast Beef
I. You place beef loin on a griddle and roast them a little. Next you leave then overnight in alegar. then you lard them, stick them on a spit, and when they are done, you drizzle them with the alegar they marinated in mixed with drippings (Bradfeist) and pepper. You also drizzle them with meat broth mixed with pepper etc.
2. Item you lard beef loin very finely, roast it on a spit, then you soak a sop (Supffe. a piece of toasted bread) with meat broth, cut the beef loin in slices, lay it on the sop, drizzle it with dripping, sprinkle it with ginger and salt, and serve it.
3. Item you place beef loin on a griddle to roast it a little, then stick it with cloves, stick it on a spit, roast it and baste it with meat broth. Then you boil bay leaves in vinegar, drizzle it over that when you are about to serve it, and sprinkle it with salt etc.
4. Item you lard beef loin with bacon and roast it on a spit. Then you pour beef broth over toasted white bread, sprinkle it with parmesan cheese, and let it boil Then you cut the beef roast apart, lay them (the slices) on the sops, drizzle them with drippings, and serve them warm.
5. Item you first roast a beef loin on the griddle, then on a spit, and you soak white bread in milk and cream in a silvered dish (in einem silber) and let it boil. You place the beef loin roast on it, sprinkle it with sugar, and serve it warm etc.
6. Item you beat beef with an axe to make it tender, steibet (?sear, to firm it up?) it over coals, then slowly roast it on a spit. Baste it with beef broth and drippings, but you must not use butter for this because it makes the beef dry. Sprinkle it with ginger and salt when you roast it and when you serve it etc.
7. Item you roast beef over coals after you have beaten it so it turns brown. Then you trim off the skin on top, roast it on a spit, and drizzle it with beef broth and drippings. Then you boil whole caraway, drippings, and grated bread together, pour that over the roast, and serve it etc.
8. Item you beat it, steibet (sear to stiffen?) it over coals, then roast it on a spit and drizzle it with beef broth and drippings. When it is almost done, you stick it with garlic, drizzle it with the same broth and dripping, and sprinkle it with salt. Then you serve it etc.
9. Item you beat it, steiffts (sear to firm up?) over the coals, stick it on a spit, and stick it with rosemary. Drizzle it with dripping and serve it etc.
10. Item after it has been beaten, gesteifft (seared?), and trimmed, you roast it on a spit. You boil wine, cherry puree, dripping, cloves, and sugar together, serve it over the roast, and sprinkle it with sugar etc.
Very little of what is described in here is new, but it is interesting to see it all in one place. The first thing that these descriptions should dispel is the idea that roasting meat was primitive. Clearly, the author envisions a good grasp of temperature and texture, an ability to gauge when meat was almost done, and a range of equipment for the purpose.
The starting material for many recipes is Moerbraten, beef loin, a prized piece that produces tender roasts. Where this is not specified, the meat is beaten to tenderise it. Either way, the cook is instructed to sear it over the coals before finishing it at a low temperature on a spit. Modern recipes often follow a similar pattern, especially for Schmorbraten pot roasts, and Germans are deeply convinced that this will ‘close the pores’ and lock the juices inside the meat, preventing it from drying out.
Dryness was clearly a concern here, and it is counteracted by larding and basting. Roasts are drizzled with dripping, broth, or alegar and larded with bacon, much as we still do. The instruction in #6 not to use butter is interesting as an Ulenspiegel tale suggests this was the most common method, but here the joke depends on using a sold fat, and it is not surprising to see cooks, of all people, disagreeing on technique.
The condiments also suggest the familiar distinction of medieval recipes: Sauces that meat is served in (cooking sauces), those that are served over it (glazes, in modern terms), and those served alongside (dipping sauces). The latter are not featured here because they are not made with the juice or broth of the meat and thus usually have separate recipes.
The flavours vary widely, from vinegary sharpness in #1 and 3 and all-garlic in #8 through the tart fruitiness of #10 and the creamy sweetness of #5. To modern tastes, some of it looks quite strange. We can easily see rosemary, pepper, or garlic with beef, and ginger, bay leaves, and caraway, while unusual, still fit the profile. The cherry sauce in #10, while familiar from medieval antecedents, is already off, fruit generally going with game rather than beef today. The cream and sugar, almost bread pudding base in #5 is completely alien to modern German habits, but probably not actually bad. The proliferation of honey glazes, ketchups, and brioche buns in supermarkets suggests that mixing meat and sweetness is much more taboo in theory than in practice.
Some recipes here include instructions for serving the meat sliced, on top of bread sops. This is another thing we find in medieval recipes, though I am not sure whether these instructions mean the servings would be individual portions or whether people would take slices of meat and bread from a common serving bowl. A firm, dense bread, softened in broth and soaked in meat juices, actually makes a very nice side dish for a roast.
Franz de Rontzier, head cook to the bishop of Halberstadt and duke of Braunschweig, published his encyclopaedic Kunstbuch von mancherley Essenin 1598. He clearly looks to Marx Rumpolt’s New Kochbuch as the new gold standard, but fails to match it in engaging style or depth. He is thus overshadowed by the twin peaks of Marx Rumpolt and Anna Wecker. What makes his work interesting is the way in which he systematically lists versions of a class of dishes, illustrating the breadth or a court cook’s repertoire. He is also more modernly fashionable than Rumpolt. Looking to France rather than Italy and Spain for inspiration, and some of the dishes he first describes may be genuine innovations.
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