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.
In 1774, in the midst of one of Old Europe’s rare years of peace, a force of about 500 militiamen gathered under arms. They had been called up by the ducal Bavarian Pflegsverwalter (regional administrator) Johann de Stock to suppress a terrifying insurrection in the town of Markt Schwaben. This was a major disruption to the lives of men from villages all over the region as they were required to leave their work, arm themselves, and go out to risk life and limb facing an unknown enemy. Bavaria, like most of Ancien Régime Europe, relied on such locally raised posses to enforce the law, so the peasantry were familiar with the idea. A force of 500 was highly unusual, though. It suggested something had gone very wrong.
As the men marched into town, they came face to face with evidence of the threat to public order that so agitated their leader. In the middle of the marketplace, for all the world to see, stood a wooden stage. The citizens of Markt Schwaben were defying divinely appointed authority to stage a theatre play. It must have been a rather deflating moment as they learned the truth and, happily, refused to raise a hand against their neighbours. De Stock was reduced to writing an angry report to his duke about the breakdown of deference in his district.
If you know your way around the history of German drama, you could be forgiven for expecting a conflict over freedom of speech here. This was when a generation of angry and ambitious young playwrights were upending convention and voicing new philosophies on stage. Aristocratic pretensions were openly mocked, bourgeois characters dignified as heroic protagonists, and soon enough, Lessing pleaded for religious equality and Schiller lionised rebellious criminals and called for Gedankenfreiheit. Were the forces of obscurantism cracking down on this flowering of liberal thought here?
In a word, no. The citizens of Markt Schwaben planned to stage a religious play about the life of St John of Nepomuk. Such religious plays were an important part of Bavarian folk tradition. They were organised by parish communities or towns and some continue to be staged today, often drawing large audiences. There really was nothing untoward about this – if anything, Duke Maximilian saw these as oldfashioned and embarrassingly backward. It looks like the problem at the heart of this confrontation was the ego of one man – Johann de Stock.
The setting in which the Komödienkrieg (comedy war) took place was a very traditional one. Rural Bavaria before the Napoleonic Wars was deeply Catholic, governed by vestiges of feudal laws, and relatively poor. That does not mean ragged peasants living in mud huts. The people lived in farmhouses in villages and small towns, and they did not feel poor. Compared to other parts of Germany – let alone to Bavaria today – it was an existence managed on slender resources, though. People made do, they repaired things, saved food and firewood, and cultivated a mindset that valued security over risk-taking. In this world, a pasta soup made with barley flour was a full meal, and not a poor one. The Baiersches Kochbuch describes one:
Grated Barley Soup
Take as much barley flour on a pasta board (Nudelbrett) as can be moistened with one egg. Break the egg into the flour, salt it, and work it all together to make a very firm dough. Grate this on an iron grater. Slowly boil the barley in a pot for a quarter of an hour before serving. Use one Maaß of good meat broth, stir it frequently, and serve it. For 6-8 people, you use again as much flour and two eggs.
This is a fairly typical representative of the Mehlspeisen, cereal-based, often almost meatless main dishes that rose to prominence in Early Modern Southern Germany. They still commanded respect – there was flour, eggs, and cheese in the house, after all – while sparing the expense of a piece of meat. Eating like this was not hardship. Respectable people had such meals on workdays. But it was a world where you had to make a meal for four out of barley, one egg, a litre of meat broth, and the ubiquitous bread.
Just as they faced their relative poverty with quiet determination, the people of Markt Schwaben navigated a deeply hierarchical world conscious of their individual dignity. Church and state, the nobility and the respectable people were accorded proper deference. At the same time, they stood up for themselves and had a thorough awareness of their rights. Even the few among them who still were serfs – a minuscule percentage by the 1770s – did not behave as we tend to envision the downtrodden masses.
The townspeople had come to Johann de Stock to ask permission to stage their play, as they were expected to. Not finding him, they had received it from his father – by their lights and in a still feudal society, a perfectly reasonable process. On the strength of this, they invested labour and money into a project to make them proud, and were understandably dismayed when de Stock came back from his travels and immediately tried to shut it down, threatening to have people flogged and pilloried. Perhaps he was worried it would make him look bad, perhaps he was just piqued that he had not been asked in person, but his reaction was certainly emotional and excessive. The people of Markt Schwaben refused to knuckle under.
It needs to be pointed out that this was not funny at the time. Stories from Bavarian history often have a folksy, humorous tone, but that is a product of modern history writing. The people who stood up to their governor that day risked painful, humiliating punishments, crippling fines, and the loss of their economic and social existence. Bavaria’s rural militiamen were not ‘Dad’s Army’ types. They had earned a reputation for cruelty they would uphold through much of subsequent history into the 1920s, when the authorities called on them to put down urban working-class rebellions. Things could have ended very differently.
On that day in 1774, though, shared cultural expectations worked to defuse the situation. Everybody understood that de Stock had overreacted and this abuse of authority was not something they felt bound to respect. The eventual decision from the capital imposed a face-saving restriction by forbidding an open air performance, but the play was staged multiple times to much greater audiences than expected. Sadly, we do not know any of it, but the events were turned into a modern folk theatre performance in 2015. People remember such things.
What strikes me about this story is that, like the unrest in Paderborn, it is related in a jocular tone that underplays how serious it really was. This is a common strategy in traditional societies: Conflict is a misunderstanding, a silly thing, a matter of personal failings or foibles. Of course these often play a role in settings where authority is accepted in principle. It’s the ‘few bad apples’ that cause problems, one administrator, one judge or police officer. It is possible to resist in the context of a system like that, even gain concessions, but in the end, it is the system that enables the abuses.
This week was far too busy for any major writing projects, so all I have for you is a recipe from the Solothurn MS. but I think this one is interesting:
A10 To have green and ripe cherries in wintertime
Take a small cask, and with it take cherries or sweet cherries (amelber), and do not handle them much with your hands. Also pluck cherry leaves with the stalks and branches (prossen und studlin), and also take it fresh. There follows first a layer of leaves placed in the cask, and then put a layer of cherries on the aforesaid leaves. Thereafter, again, a layer of fresh leaves as is said above, and again on this fresh cherries et caetera until the cask is filled. In the end, close the cask well, seal it with pitch, fat, and wax. Afterwards, put it into a warm well and you will have it etc.
Keeping fresh fruit was a challenge in the days before artificial refrigeration and protective atmosphere, and this is yet another iteration of the practice of keeping it from drying out or going mouldy by excluding air. While Apicius (I.17) famously immerses grapes in a sealed vessel of boiled water and Germany’s first printed cookbook, the 1485 Kuchenmaistrey, suggests coating them in glue, this recipe seals cherries in a cask, cushioned against damage by resting on fresh leaves, and keeps them cool in well water. The ‘warm well’ specified here is almost certainly not a hot spring – there are very few of those in the region – but simply a well that usually does not freeze in winter. That reading also suggests the cherries were stored for several months, from harvesting to the time hard frost became a concern, and given the care taken here, I could see that working. Serving a bowl of fresh, juicy cherries in December would make a beautifully understated way of showing off the skill of your household staff and the depth of your pockets.
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.
Earlier this week, I got to join Thomas Ntinas for an interview on his eminently enjoyable food history podcast The Delicious Legacy. Thom graciously suffered me to talk in great detail about what I do and why it fascinates me, and turned the whole thing into an episode that makes a good audio introduction into medieval German cooking.
Once again, I am coming back from a longer absence than I had intended. I must apologise, but sadly it does not look likely that I will soon be able to return to my optimistic schedule, unless the economic crisis of 2026 does end up costing me my job after all. Still, what kept me from posting a longer article this weekend was a good thing. For the first time in weeks, I had the chance to go to flea markets and actually test out some historic recipes. Let me tell you about that.
First, yesterday as I was walking over a flea market in Hamburg, I spotted what looked like a cast-bronze, three-legged Grapen style cookpot. Grapen were a central tool of North German kitchen between 1300 and the early 20th century, but later versions were typically made from cast iron. Bronze ones are very rare and usually museum pieces. This one, though, turned out to be a genuine one and inexpensive enough for me to actually buy. I’ve put in a few hours cleaning it off, but it will take a lot more time with vinegar, wire brushes, and polishing tools. Once it is actually done, I hope to use it to recreatesome recipes.
The other thing I did was try out a few recipes for a small publishing project. I intend to put all the ‘Feeding the Revolution‘ articles into one compilation with redactions of the recipes adapted for the modern home kitchen (or protest catering station). Today, among a few other things, I tried out the Bouletten from the 1868 Volksküche manual:
Nr. 19: Mashed potatoes and Bouletten with sour sauce
Bouletten: 3 lbs (1.5kg) beef, 3 lbs (1.5 kg) pork, 1/3 Metze (1.15 litres) of grated Semmel bread, 2 Metzen (6.9 litres) grated boiled potatoes, 1/2 Mandel (seven) eggs, pepper, spices, onions and salt, 1 lb (500g) of fat to fry 100 Bouletten.
Mashed potatoes: 2 1/2 – 3 Scheffel (110 litres) potatoes, 8 Quart (9.12 litres) milk, 3 lbs (1.5 kg) salt
Sauce: 1 lb fat mixed with 2 lbs flour, 1/2 lb flour added dry to the roux, 2 Quart (2.28 litres) good vinegar, 1 lb sugar, pepper, spices and onions, the necessary quantity of water. Cooking time: 1/2 hour
I began by downsizing quantities to a more manageable 1kg of potatoes, 500g of mixed ground beef and pork (this is a common thing in German cuisine, gemischtes Hack, for same in any supermarket and most butchers’ shops), one egg, and 100g of grated bread. Without guidance as to quantities, I went with 1 1/2 medium-sized onions, 2 tsp of salt, and a generous pinch of pepper and mace. I shredded the boiled potatoes coarsely, diced the onions, and mashed it all together in a bowl by hand. This turned out easier than I expected, and the mass held together very well. I shaped patties from pieces the size of eggs and tried out various temperatures and quantities of fat to fry them. The best combination, in my opinion, was a high temperature with about a tablespoon of fat in a pan of five Bouletten. Looking at the original instructions, this is unlikely to be accurate, though. The potatoes and breadcrumbs soak up fat quickly. Just one pound to cook 100 means at best a light coating on the pan.
The patties were initially hard to handle. They stuck to the pan and came apart easily when turned over, though they held together well enough for me not to break any completely. High heat can produce a slightly crispy exterior, and I did not burn any, though that would definitely have been possible if I had let my attention wander. Eaten warm, they are soft, almost spoonable, and would go well with mashed potatoes and a sweet-sour sauce. After they had cooled, I had one on a baguette sandwich and was surprised how well it went with mustard and lettuce.
Now, it bears repeating that these are good despite being made very cheaply. This is a product of skill. The upper class version of the same dish requires much less ability. Here is the description from Henriette Davidis’ Praktisches Kochbuch:
Fried Frikandellen
The Frikandellen turn out especially fine and tasty if you mince one part beef, one part veal, and one part well-marbled pork, adding 100-200g of butter to the meat. This mixture cannot always be had, though. In that case, you mince 1kg of good beef with 125g of suet of fresh bacon (Speck) very finely and add 4 whole eggs, 20g salt, a pinch of mace or ground pepper, 30g of ground rusk (Zwieback) or grated white bread, and one cup of cold water, mixing all together thoroughly. You then shape round balls, smoothed flat with wet hands, sprinkled with ground rusk, lay them into boiling (lit. rising, steigende) butter and fry them golden in the pan, repeatedly drizzling the meat with hot fat. The Frikandellen must be golden, not brown.
With this much butter, eggs, and high-quality meat, it would take quite some talent not to have them come out tasting good. As an aside, the two words used here are still current in German for the fame dish. Frikadelle is the technical, formal word and usually found in cookbooks. Bulette is a local name in the region of Berlin, considered informal and slightly proletarian. Other areas have different words for this ubiquitous dish.
So much for today, and I apologise in advance if there is no more until the coming weekend. I am looking forward to another very busy week with some apprehension, but I have not forgotten my readers. Stay safe out there, everyone.
As you enter rural Northeastern Germany, you will quickly notice the way place names change. If you know your way around languages, you can also spot strange words in the local dialects. Village traditions are different. What you are seeing is the cultural footprint of the Wends, what you could call Germany’s lost civilisation. It is haunting and romantic, and easily misunderstood. Historians have been imposing all kinds of narratives on them, mostly posthumously, so almost anything that we read about them may or may not actually have happened. But what we hear about the year 983, on balance, probably did.
Fanciful, but not implausible reconstruction of a Wendish feast hall at the Oldenburg/Starigrad museum,. Schleswig-Holstein
Unfortunately, it is rather had to tell in detail what actually did happen. There are few records outside the immediate neighbourhood, and since there are no Wendish chronicles, we must rely on the Latin writings of German-speaking clerics. They are biased witnesses. After all, the Wends spoke a Slavic language, they were pagans, and they acknowledged no king, or at least not in the manner these people thought proper. By their lights, they were benighted and evil.
Needless to say, the Slavic peoples of what is today Central Germany were not the demonic antagonists that the chroniclers painted them as. We know less about them than we would like to, and this has invited some fanciful interpretations over time. The best evidence supports the conclusion that they lived in small farming communities around fortified central settlements, that they had some kind of warrior aristocracy, practised some form of polytheistic worship, and were generally very much like their Germanic-speaking neighbours except for the last part.
Their neighbours to the West were the Saxons, newly part of the Empire and, rather shockingly, now providing the emperors for what had been a Frankish realm. The backstory to this is complicated, but very well explained elsewhere, most entertainingly by the excellent History of the Germans podcast. What had happened, in short, was that a newly, not necessarily happily, Christianised, very powerful monarchy had landed right next to the Slavic inhabitants and they had to deal with this problem. As far as the church hierarchy was concerned, they were next on the list for conversion, and that was not a comfortable place.
Relations between the Slavic polities and the Empire had existed for a while, not usually hostile. Charlemagne had enlisted the aid of pagan Slavs to subdue pagan Saxons. There were wars between Saxon and Slavic lords, but this was the tenth century, there were fights everywhere. This was no Cold War situation with two hostile parties glowering at each other over a fortified border. Many Slavic princes readily acknowledged Emperor Otto I as their overlord. What apparently was widely resented was the attempt by the Saxon lords to impose Christianisation.
We do not really know how it happened or who started it, but in 983, two bishoprics in Slavic lands, Havelberg and Brandenburg, disappeared, their cathedrals looted, the towns burned. A Slavic army crossed into Saxon territory and was only barely stopped in a heroic battle. Following this disaster, the territory of East Central Germany remained pagan for over a century. The secret to that success, it appears, was organisation. A number of smaller groups we often find it hard to pin down formed a larger confederation around assemblies of their notables and a shared cult centre called Radgosc, which roughly translates either as ‘the hospitable place’ or ‘the place of the council’. This did not include all Slavic groups even in the region. Some remained under the Emperor. Others were integrated into the Christian kingdoms of Poland and Moravia. In this piece of Germany, though, despite all efforts to subdue it, paganism remained alive even past the Wendish Crusade of the 1140s.
Later interpretations have viewed this as a clash of cultures between Germans and Slavs, the valiant resistance of proto-democratic tribes against encroaching feudal domination, or the last stand of the old pagan Gods against the steamroller of the Catholic church. Very likely none of these things are true, but archeology suggests there were some cultural differences that defined a distinct Slavic identity against Germanic speakers, and interestingly, one of them was millet.
Foxtail millet grows well in Central Europe, and we find evidence of it in Slavic settlements whenever we look for it. It is much rarer, though not unknown, among Germans. Fascinatingly, this association seems to hold true for centuries. Around 1600, the Mecklenburg clergyman Johannes Coler still associates millet with Wends and describes how to cook it:
Once I was travelling through the Wendish land (Wendische Land) when my host in a village served me yellow millet porridge in which a whole capon had been cooked for a midday meal. When the dish felt unfamiliar to me and also did not taste quite pleasing to me, but the host still often admonished me to eat, I was made to do something against my will, but I noted in my mind (in meine Sin), if I had wanted to have it (the capon) dressed, I would have left the millet porridge on its own and also have treated the capon differently. Then it would have tasted as good or better to me as it did to the Wendish farmer with the millet.
(…)
You can also cook millet porridge in a sack if you first leave the millet to soak (einquellet) in milk so that it softens, and afterwards set the milk by the fire on its own and make it boil. And when it is nicely boiling along (daher seydt) in the pot, you pour the soaked millet into the boiling milk and cover the pot firmly at the top. Wrap a sack around the pot on all sides many times (vielseitig umb den Topff umbher) so that the pot stays nicely warm. Thus the millet cooks fully, and it is then called: millet cooked in the sack.
A recipe like this – with or without the wrapping – is reasonably plausible even centuries earlier, and we know this kind of Grütze, often served with butter, cheese, or bacon, was a staple of rural cuisine in the region until the twentieth century. However, eating millet was not a hard delineator of cultures. Germans ate millet, which is how we have some written anecdotes and later recipes for turning millet porridge into decorative fried or roasted chunkslike sliced polenta. We don’t know whether the wealthier among the Wendish tribes did this. They lived in a world where foraged foods, fish, and game were far more plentiful, so they may not have bothered.
A fascinating aspect of this story – however little we know for certain – is what it says about identity. It is unlikely the Slavic peoples that the Saxon emperors encountered felt they were ‘Wendish’. They certainly had an idea of who they were, but their groups were small and often at odds. It took a violent and sustained confrontation with a very different culture to give them a shared ethnic or national consciousness. Language alone may not have been enough – we know of several people who spoke both and even went by German and Slavic names simultaneously – but religion would easily have been. The people of the Elbe valley may not have been aware they shared a specific religious outlook initially, but the confrontation with the militant church quickly made it clear. This, after all, was not a matter of mild-mannered preachers coming to their villages to spread charity and perform healing miracles. The doctrine of Christ was backed by armoured horsemen and ensconced in fortified churches. You could absolutely not ignore them.
Faced with the peremptory demands of bishops and princes, even people who may have sympathised with the new faith probably reconsidered. The imperial church, supported by an enormous power structure and the arrogant certainty of simply being right, managed to unite people who had spent centuries fighting each other. No doubt the experience also motivated individual fighters on the battlefield – we might call it ‘radicalised’ today. At least it seems that once it started, the revolt quickly spread across the confederation, and once the rebels had set up their central temple of Radgosc, they stood up to several attempts to reconquer their lands.
Of course, there is no longer a temple at Radgosc. We do not even know where it originally was. Still, given the way Christian kings all around never stopped trying to subjugate them, the fact that an independent pagan community was able to hold out for almost two centuries in the middle of Christendom. As far as we know, this was not the achievement of an inspired leader, but the decision of the people to band together in the face of a looming threat to their lives and convictions. It was probably less democratic than Marxist historians wanted to imagine it in the twentieth century, but there is no reason to think of it as primitive. They built a structure to last, and it did, well beyond their lifetimes.
So when we imagine – assuming we trust the written sources that survive – the Wends meeting to eat and drink, debate politics, consult the horse oracle, or wait for the sacred boar to emerge and indicate a season of war or peace, we do well to recall how the arrogance of power can unify its victims, how it pushes them into developing identities and organisations in opposition to it, and that they sometimes win.
On the evening of 3 May 1847, the year before all of Europe exploded into revolution, there was music in the streets of Stuttgart, but not the kind most people were glad to hear. Inhabitants of the impoverished suburbs had assembled under cover of darkness to serenade a master baker with a Katzenmusik, a noisy protest to remind the powerful of their obligations towards the poor. This tradition, known in France as charivari and in England as rough music, existed in most of Europe, and it goes back a long way. Nonviolent, but disruptive, it publicly shamed those who were seen as breaking the rules of proper behaviour.
Master baker Mayer of Stuttgart was one such person. For several days now, he had offered no bread for sale. His oven was being repaired, he claimed, but this was widely suspected to be a lie. Mayer had a history of speculating in grain and rumour had it he was withholding his goods from the market until the bread price rose even further. This was not, as it would be in most Western countries today, a private business decision. Stuttgart in 1847 had a regulated bakers’ guild whose privileges came with obligations. The authorities set the bread price according to the cost of grain, and it was the job of the bakers to produce it. Clearly, Mayer was breaking that compact.
The price of bread in the 1840s, much like that of petrol or electricity today, was central to the survival of working class people and subject to a variety of regulations. There were limits to what any government could do, though. A series of poor harvests and the general economic squeeze of the ‘Hungry Forties’ meant that prices were high simply because there was not enough. Bread (or beer) riots happened throughout Germany. Stuttgart was no exception, but events here took an unusually violent turn.
There was no such thing as a protest permit, but it was known when a Katzenmusik would happen. The city garrison stood prepared when the angry crowd surrounded the bakery, first shouting and singing, then smashing in the windows by throwing stones. Troops sent to disperse the protest attacked the crowd with their sabres. The result was a series of running street fights in which several soldiers and numerous civilians were injured. So far, this was the depressing normality of 1840s Germany. Then, King Wilhelm I of Württemberg decided a personal intervention was called for. He left the palace at the head of a guards detail to restore order by appealing to his subjects. To his great surprise, the soldiers were pelted with stones and when a group of rioters armed with fence rails came close, they fired a volley in the air. Several people were injured, and one bullet killed a journeyman shoemaker who turned out to be a citizen of Frankfurt, making this – technically – an international incident.
Wilhelm was what you would traditionally call a good king. He cared about the welfare of his people, fostered education and industry, and permitted one of the most liberal constitutions in any German state. Stuttgart was not the kind of place where jackbooted thugs or moustache-twirling plutocrats ruled as tyrants. The town’s bread prices were set by a public process, with a reduced rate for the poor, and civic spirit produced all kinds of adornments and comforts, including that inevitable feature of the early 19th century, a Suppenanstalt.
Soup has been a mainstay of poor people’s diets for millennia. It can accommodate almost any ingredient, is easily varied, and stretched by just adding water. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, scientific thinkers engaged with the concept to produce economical, but nutritious versions in an effort to fight the rise of extreme poverty. In Germany, the central figure in this endeavour was Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. A veteran of the American War of Independence, holder of an English knighthood and a count of the Holy Roman Empire, the life story of this highly respected scientist and engineer deserves at least one post of its own. In Germany, though, he was most famous for Rumfordsuppe.
Rumfordsuppe or Rumford’sche Suppe was a soup designed along scientific lines to extract the maximum of nutrition for minimal outlay. It was cooked on purpose-built stoves in central kitchens to realise economies of scale. A portion was meant to be a meal in itself, enough to meet the needs of a man doing hard physical labour all day, and between the calories from cereals and potatoes, the protein of legumes and meat, and the salt providing electrolytes, it probably came fairly close for 19th-century institutional food. The count’s original plan was for soup kitchens to sell this at cost, or slightly below, to drive home the point that the people eating it were customers, not charity cases. It was, however, also quickly adopted by institutions catering to the indigent, prisoners, and common soldiers. Local variations abound, and it continues to feature in cookbooks until the end of the century to remind us that wealthy households were expected to provide for the less fortunate in times of dearth. One of the early institutional recipes comes from the records of the Hamburg Allgemeine Armen-Anstalt recorded in January of 1798:
This dish is very pleasant in taste and, given a proper variety of inexpensive ingredients, stimulates the appetite to the degree that an ever growing children and adults persisted in eating the same food for twelve months and regularly came back for it. (…)
About 150 pounds of water, 23 pounds of potatoes, 10 pounds of barley groats, 10 pounds of peas, 5 pounds of hard bread, the harder, the better, 3 pounds of meat, smoked or salted, ideally pork, 7 pounds of alegar, and 2 3/4 lbs of salt (The quantity of this must be determined more precisely according to the strength of the vinegar and the sharpness of the salt, but above all by the taste of the eater). About 20-30 pounds of peat to heat the stove.
On the previous evening … the barley groats and peas or beans are placed in the cauldron and the water poured on to soak them. If the meal is to be eaten at 12 o’clock, the fire must be lit under the cauldron by 6 in the morning. After the groats and peas have been cooking gently for two to three hours, the peeled potatoes and the salt are added. After another hour, the meat or bacon is added, chopped very finely. A quarter hour before serving, the vinegar is added. The bread, the harder, the better, is cut into small cubes and placed in the bowl in which the soup is to be served, and the soup poured over it. This is done so that it does not become soft and the chewing necessary for proper digestion is thus promoted. That is why, if old bread is not to be had, it must be fried thoroughly with fat. In this latter case, it is also better to use wheat bread because the acidity that black (i.e. coarse rye) bread always has is deleterious to the taste. … During cooking, the soup must be stirred frequently so it does not burn and is the better mixed and creamier (seemiger). The closer this soup comes to a porridge or the more jelly-like, the more nourishing it is. … It is entirely unnecessary and wasteful to eat bread alongside it because the soup already contains bread and nothing is added to its nutritional virtue (Nahrsamkeit). The bread is better saved for breakfast and supper. … This soup is made flavourful in the most incredible way by the addition of salt and vinegar and the proportionately small addition of chopped bacon or meat, but it must be prepared in a cleanly fashion and cook long and slow for five to six hours.
It can be varied in a number of ways. Grey peas, white beans, green peas, carrots (Wurzeln), white cabbage, or turnips (Rüben) can vary according to their season and potherbs (Suppen-Kräuter) be added. Barley groats and potatoes remain the primary ingredients that must never be omitted.
Further, in place of bacon or pork, smoked or salted oxmeat or chopped onions fried in fat can be added. … It all relies on the manner of preparation, as it does in the kitchens of the wealthy.
(quoted after Antje Kraus: Die Unterschichten Hamburgs in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart 1965)
It is interesting to compare this with the instructions preserved by Maria Katharina Siegel in her Baier’sches Kochbuch in 1818:
The demand to participate in the distribution is very strong. That is why 900 portions of 1 3/4 pounds daily have been issued for a long time, feeding a total of 1200 people, adults and children. To produce 900 portions or 1575 pounds, you take
1400 pounds of water, 80 pounds of peas, 80 pounds of barley groats, 80 pounds of beans, 48 pounds of bread, 12 pounds of meat, 34 pounds of alegar and 14 pounds of salt. Altogether 1748 pounds, of which only 173 pounds are lost in cooking (verkochen).
The preparation is as follows: The previous evening, the groats and legumes are placed in the cauldrons filled half full of water and boiled up once. As soon as the water boils, the fire is withdrawn, the ash grate closed, and the cauldrons covered with close-fitting wooden covers. By the following morning, you will find the contents so swollen up and turned to jelly that it is thick enough to cut. This manner of soaking is greatly to be preferred to the customary use of cold water.
The time. If it is to be eaten at 11 o’clock, the water required to fill the cauldrons entirely is bought in by 5 o’clock in the morning and the fires are lit. This must not burn more strongly than is necessary to barely slowly cook the content and must be banked down as soon as it has just begun to boil. Very little fuel is needed to keep it boiling.
The preparation: Once the groats and legumes have cooked for two or two and half hours, the meat, cut in small dice, and the salt are added. The vinegar is poured in about a quarter hour before serving. The bread, which must be as old as possible, is cut into small cubes and must be added just before the soup is served. This is done in order for it not to become too soft and thus to promote chewing necessary for good digestion. That is why the same, if it cannot be had old, must be fried with fat.
Handling: during cooking, the soup must be stirred frequently, especially at the beginning, to prevent it from burning and make it thicker. That is also why the cauldrons must always be covered and the covers be provided with a hole for the handle of the stirring tool (Rührkrücke) to pass through. To this end, they are also rubbed with bacon before every use.
A complete meal. It is unnecessary to eat bread with this soup, more properly a porridge, as it contains this already, and nothing can be added to its nutritional virtue (Nahrsamkeit). Nobody here eats bread with it, and any such request is dismissed by the staff (Principienten) with the words: Why should we eat bread with it if there is bread in it? Its nutritional virtue is generally recognised, and many forestry workers returned with the lunch bread which they customarily took with them after having eaten of this soup because they felt no hunger all afternoon. As a rule, a healthy adult man is entirely satisfied with one portion, and very few are able to eat one and a half, or 2 5/8 pounds. Children have enough with half a portion. The soup is very enjoyable if it is prepared cleanly and carefully and cooked for at least six hours. The same finds such universal approbation that more is demanded every day than can be prepared and people come from villages one or two hours away.
Deviations from the Recipe: Barley groats and peas, but not, as many writers claim, potatoes, are the principal ingredients that must never be omitted. Potatoes can be dispensed with. The soup is as nutritious and creamy without them as with them. If you wish to use potatoes, you omit half the legumes and replace one pound of of peas or beans with two pounds of peeled, finely cut potatoes. The barley groats must never be lacking, and only half the legumes can be replaced by potatoes. The other half must remain. If the soup is to be more like a porridge, the peas and beans are ground coarsely (geschroten). But this produces a strong flavour and causes it to burn easily. That is why grinding is only advised if the peas refuse to soften.
A little meat is needed. As regards the meat, beef or mutton, particularly salted, is the best, and pork the least suitable. Fat is entirely unnecessary. If prepared properly, the soup is so thick and rich that wealthy inhabitants believed much fat was added and claimed that no such rich cooking went on in their own kitchens. Bones, too, are not needed and probably not even advisable … Potherbs, leeks, and pepper or some dried fruit are inexpensive means to vary and enhance the pleasant taste.
The recipe must be followed precisely. It is particularly necessary for the satisfying virtue of this soup that it be prepared on the above manner and be cooked for at least six hours gently on a slow fire so the water can gradually fix itself within the farinaceous (mehlartigen) substances and maintain their virtues. If this is not observed meticulously, the result is not even the same soup described here. Three years ago, I had proof of this. Rumford’s Soup was to be cooked here, and a butcher experienced in the rural art of cookery for weddings and baptisms was selected for the task. He deviated from the primary principles and the attempt failed. Cooking is generally done in copper cauldrons encased in masonry (eingemauerten). Setting up such a cauldron is quite easy, the masonry can be prepared within six hours, and cooking can begin immediately. The cauldrons are not damaged in the process and will be as useful for washing or brewing after the soup kitchen is dissolved as they were before. It will thus not be difficult to borrow the necessary cauldrons. Here, it was possible as everyone who had a suitable cauldron was happily willing to provide it to be set up in masonry where the cooking took place.
Small outlay. Aside from the cauldron, no other equipment is required except for wooden covers, stirring tools, and two ladles of which one holds 1 3/4 litres, the other 7/8 of a litre. It is thus very easy to introduce Rumford’s soup more widely than has previously occurred, primarily as the expense, regardless of the present enormous cost of all necessities, is not very considerable. A portion of 1 3/4 pounds only comes in at 65/9 Konventionsmünzen (the local Taler currency) and sells at 4 Pfennige (the smallest coin). Nothing is provided without cash payment as the process would otherwise be regarded as a free feeding of the poor (Armenspeisung) and fail to have the desired result in the present time of dearth. …
It is fairly clear from the wording that both texts rely on a shared source, but the ingredients vary, and this seems to be a conscious choice. Rumfordsuppe was not a dish as much as an industrial process that could be adapted to locally available raw materials. Preparing it even with the best of will struck a precarious balance between efficiency and enjoyment. At its worst, institutional versions were little more than nineteenth-century Nutraloaf.
Reading the texts above gives us both a fairly good idea of the soup and of how King Wilhelm so badly misjudged the mood of his subjects. The pride the authors took in mastering the complex process to produce what they see as appetising food is palpable. They are providing a lifeline to their fellow men through the miracle of science and educating them in the rational management of their bodily needs. Contented customers return day after day to enjoy their delicious meals. Strong labouring men marvel to find all their needs met by a single serving. Absolutely no bread is needed alongside it, and any such importunate request will be denied.
Bread, though, was not just calories. It was the mainstay of the German diet, the universal symbol of hospitality, the very essence of what food was. It could make a meal in itself, but accompanied all other foods. Denying someone bread was cruelty. There were bread riots, not potato or porridge riots, in German cities. The poor demanded bread from their rulers. An impoverished artisan or labourer depending on a bowlful of Rumfordsuppe for his survival would have found it hard to appreciate the effort and good will of the people who sold it to him.
This problem is depressingly common in history. The comfortable, secure and validated by their institutions, do not need to be evil to hurt the poor and excluded. Even their best efforts to help can be disruptive and humiliating. If the help is accompanied by well-meaning efforts to educate and uplift the unfortunate, something the middle class seems especially prone to, the response can be violent. Certainly, the king riding into the suburbs of his capital that day did so with the firm belief that he had done all he could for his people and was beloved by them. Compared to many princes of the German Confederation, he was right, too. It made no difference to the people who eked out a precarious existence in rented garrets and cellars, competing over shrinking wages for ever fewer jobs. They resented being condescended to by the well-dressed, well-fed and well-protected over the few crumbs they were thrown. It was this sense of moral injury, the unquenchable anger of people who were not the victims of individual villains, but of an entire system that even with the best of will could not help inflicting harm on them, that fuelled revolutions.
The response to the riots of May 1847 was typical for the way Ancien Régime governments often dealt with such events. There were arrests and trials, people were sent to prison or exiled for alleged participation in the riot or even careless words spoken in support. Soldiers patrolled the streets, the curfew hours were extended, and a Bürgerwache, an improvised security force drafted from the ranks of the middle class, was formed. At the same time, a motion to provide for an increased grain supply passed the council. Cereal stores throughout the kingdom were registered and donations solicited from the wealthy to purchase more from abroad. By the end of the month, these measures brought down the bread price. Tensions defused for the time being, the curfew was returned to its previous hour and the Bürgerwache stood down. The city also records that visits to the Suppenanstalt decreased sharply.
If you were a member of the government or just the respectable classes, your interpretation of these events would be clear enough. The poor, never the most stable of people, were driven to violence by a temporary shortage of bread. Order was threatened, but restored through the quick response of the authorities. Some compromise was needed: civic-spirited charity, against economic reason, provided relief and the angry mob was placated. But if you lived in those suburbs, among the labouring classes, your story would read very different. You had successfully reminded the ruling class of their obligations to their subjects. Those who had broken the unspoken rules of society to egotistically fill their coffers had been chastened. Higher authority had been called on to intervene in the crisis. Once again, the poor could live with dignity and bread. In a way, this day could be read as a victory on both sides, but it decided nothing. A year later, royal crowns tumbled and barricades grew.
I got home a little earlier than expected, so here is another brief recipe from the Solothurn MS:
A4 Cold chard as a dish
Take chard that is young, with the root attached. Boil it in a courtly fashion (brüwe es hofelich) in a cauldron or a pan, then pour it out on a sieve and let the water drain off. Take it and cut it up on a serving tray. Salt it lightly, pour on vinegar that is mixed with fresh wine, and sprinkle it with sugar. This is a lordly dish for the evening meal, the colder, the better et caetera.
This is one of the relatively rare vegetable recipes surviving, and I find it a little hard to envision, but it is interesting: Cooked chard seasoned with vinegar and sugar and served cold. The closest analogy I can think of is a salad, though it is not called that. The recipe includes both the root and the leaves which with chard, a variety of Beta vulgaris, absolutely works even with the modern versions bred to produce almost only leaves. Historically, we should probably imagine a plate full of fairly solid pieces, chopped root and thick leaf stems, to make bite-sized morsels. With a sweet-sour dressing, this seems an interesting idea.
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.
I’m afraid the coming week is shaping up to be extremely busy and I cannot promise any posts between now and after the coming weekend. Today; I want to at least give you a short thing, a sauce recipe from the Solothurn MS:
First page of the Solothurn recipe collection
A6 To make a good sauce
Take horseradish and clean it well. Put it into a pot in a baking oven and let it become very dry. Afterwards, grind it to powder and rub it through a sieve so it becomes similar to (i.e. as fine as) flour. Then store this flour carefully until it is needed. Mix it with wine or with good broth, or with boiled almond (milk). Serve it at the table with roast dishes or fritters (gebachen oder gebraten).
This is very interesting, another addition to the list of portable sauces from medieval Germany. We have a good deal of recipes for instant sauces that could be kept until needed and then dissolved in wine, vinegar, or broth and served quickly. A well-run household could have been set up to provide a variety of condiments at short notice. I have not tried this one, but I think I will because it sounds like it could be practical as well as posing a technical challenge.
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.
On the evening of 7 September 1830 in Braunschweig, you could feel the tension everywhere in town. Assemblies of more than six people were officially banned. Artillery was set up on major streets and squares. 1,300 soldiers had been deployed to guard the ducal palace. As dusk fell, as crowd of townspeople gathered in front of the gates, calling for bread and work. The previous day, cavalry troops had dispersed them for making similar demands, but they were not here to humbly petition today. Many had brought axes and hammers to batter down the doors. All the ingredients for a bloodbath were in place. A few hours later, the duke had fled the country in disguise, the palace was ablaze, and the protesters had won. It was an outcome few had expected, least of all Duke Karl II of Braunschweig and Oels.
Braunschweig palace on fire, 1830 painting courtesy of wikimedia commons
Karl II was certainly an interesting person. Orphaned at 10 years to inherit the dukedom after his father died in battle fighting Napoleon, he became known as the Diamantenherzog (diamond duke) for his love of luxury. Cultured, Anglophile, a grandmaster-level chess player and self-centered narcissist, he would have made perfect tabloid fodder in a later age. Unfortunately, none of this made him fit to govern a country in the midst of Europe’s last great hunger crisis. As he insisted all power should rest with him, he refused to assemble the Landtag, a kind of parliament, that had the authority to grant taxes. Instead, he opened up creative sources of revenue, starved the state and army, redirected cash to his court, and alienated senior members of his government to the point they went into exile. Between flaunting his wealth at home in lavish theatre performances and parties (his mistress was a famous opera singer), he spent a lot of his time in London or Paris where life was much more civilised and he was not constantly being bothered with talk of poor relief, taxation, or the abolition of serfdom.
The people who presented him with a humble petition to call the Landtag on 1 September were still the sort who would attend operas along with their ruler and snack on grouse and quail eggs. Those who came to his palace a week later were unlikely to ever have seen an opera house from the inside. They were the urban poor and those struggling to stay above the poverty line, people whose livelihoods were threatened by the economic upheaval of industrialisation and whose meagre incomes, already squeezed by rising prices, were taxed and fined in increasingly creative ways to fund the lavish lifestyle of their ruler. Many had purchased their release from serfdom at ridiculously inflated prices payable to the duke’s private fisc. Their daily meals, if things went well, would consist of bread and butter or cheese (never both, what a wasteful indulgence) or flour soup of the kind the Dresdner Kochbuch describes:
Roux Soup / Potage aux roux brun, ou aux pauvres gens
Twelve Loth of butter are heated, four or five tablespoons of flour added, and it is slowly cooked to light brown. Then you add a Kanne of warm water, it is dissolved and brought to a boil while stirring attentively, and two Kannen of boiling water are added. The whole is salted and a pinch of pepper and a generous tablespoon of strong caraway added, everything is boiled for half an hour and poured over thin, toasted bread slices through a sieve.
This soup can be rendered more delicious by adding an onion, two carrots, two parsley roots cut in slices, and a bunch of green parsley. In this case, the soup must boil for at least one hour. It is also served with poached eggs.
In middle-class households (bürgerlich), a few eggs are broken into the soup tureen, the soup is poured over them and the whole stirred gently.
This was still quite common well into the twentieth century. I remember the taste well, smooth, thick and salty, served with boiled potatoes. We did not think we were poor, but if you ate like this regularly, you were definitely not rich. Not even if you could afford the poached eggs.
“Not rich” described a lot of people in the early 19th century well. This was the period called Biedermeier in German, and it is becoming quite fashionable again in some quarters for its twee little houses, its plain but elegant interior design, and its charmingly human literature and art. Of course the houses were small and the furniture simple because few people could afford anything more, and people read books about charmed love, fantastic medieval adventures, and humorous anecdotes because you could go to prison for writing anything political. Germany was living in the long economic shadow of the Napoleonic wars, the tail end of the Little Ice Age, and the concerted effort of its rulers to make the years between 1789 and 1815 not have happened.
This had not meant a return to the old Reich with its fragmented, deeply traditional system of government. People lived in thoroughly modern states with standing armies, a secret police, and cross-border cooperation in press censorship, but they were governed by kings, princes, and the occasional city council who basically did as they pleased. Even without widespread poverty, this was bound to create opposition. In 1830, inspired by the July Revolution in Paris, public anger erupted into protests all over Germany. People took to the streets, confronted police and military, and badly scared the upper classes. Braunschweig with its unpopular duke, the weakened apparatus of state, and grievances to unite much of the populace, was the one place where they successfully toppled a monarch.
Duke Karl II had no intention of giving in. The artillery on the streets was not decorative, and a day before his hurried departure, he had discussed major military operations to quell the protest. If we can trust later accounts, he was talked into leaving the country to defuse tensions, expecting to return once his generals had put things to right. Having fled the palace in disguise, he must have been quite shocked when his government immediately appointed his brother Wilhelm regent and, soon after, duke.
The new government, technically a continuation of the old one, sat uneasily with its revolutionary roots. All through the German Confederation, the established rulers managed to head off revolution by a variety of remarkably modern means. In some places, naked military force intimidated protesters, but this was flanked by a press campaign designed to ridicule them as brutish, ignorant, and dangerous. Extreme or incomprehensible demands were highlighted, or possibly just invented, by the newspapers. At the same time, a growing number of xenophobic and antisemitic publications appeared. Riots targeting the homes and businesses of Jews or immigrants occurred in many towns and were often given less attention by the authorities than people throwing stones at the windows of government buildings or demanding higher wages from their employers. Where concessions were necessary, they were made cautiously – new laws, loosened restrictions, or the dismissal of some unpopular officials. In the end, little enough changed for the whole scene to replay itself in 1848 on a greater scale.
Duke Karl II never gave up his claim to being the rightful ruler of Braunschweig. After his death in Swiss exile, his estate turned out to include thousands of uniforms for an army he had hoped to lead in his triumphant return. Luckily for his duchy, even the most boneheaded legitimists among the German princes realised that putting a vengeful narcissist back in charge of a country he had done such damage to the first time around was not a good idea.
So, after another long hiatus, I’m back not with a recipe, but with museum pictures. I apologise. Times have been exceedingly busy and promise to stay so for a bit, but I will do my best to serve the blog more regularly again.
As to those pictures; While visiting a dear friend in the Netherlands to prepare plans for the next big history-themed feast (after Burgundian), I had a day to explore the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and of course I brought pictures. Today, I want to share a lovely set of painted wooden sculptures that were made for an altar around 1520 in Ulm in Southern Germany. Unusually, they retain their original paint, so we have the colour as well as the shape. They show three occasions of Jesus sharing a meal with people.
The first scene shows Jesus at the house of Mary and Martha, welcomed as an honoured guest. A group of four people are seated around an intimate table while Martha brings in a covered dish with the main course.
This is the kind of intimate meal we would expect to see in a well-to-do home in sixteenth-century Germany: There is bread – Jesus is shown breaking the loaf to distribute pieces around the table – there are drinking cups, and a small dish, perhaps a soup, stewed meat, or a bird is served to accompany it. We can only guess at the content of the cups, but I would expect it to be beer. Note the number of trenchers does not match that of diners – this table was not formally set. The meal can still begin with the customary blessing expected of the most senior person present, which in this case clearly is Jesus.
The second scene shows the Last Supper, precisely the moment Jesus passes the morsel dipped in wine to Judas. This table is larger, more crowded with all the disciples and busy through trying to include all relevant iconography. John is leaning against Jesus’ chest, Judas, holding the money bag, receives the morsel, and Peter pushes into the foreground to emphasise his fidelity, soon to be tested severely.
The scene is another fairly good representation of a meal in sixteenth-century Germany, though this is a communal occasion with the diners crowding benches around a cluttered table. There is a central meat dish served on a large platter, accompanied by a bowl of dipping sauce, a small bread loaf, and a jug of what looks like strong beer with a good head of foam, and a smaller one that may be meant to hold wine. The animal on the platter was cooked whole and probably is meant to represent a lamb. Renaissance artists interpreted the Last Supper as a Passover seder that would include lamb, wine, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs. It is unlikely that the artist based his interpretation on actual observation, though. There were few Jewish communities left in Germany in the 1520s to observe after all. More likely, it is based on artistic tradition that in turn was based on reading the Latin Bible. Certainly, the bread is leavened, which may be a deliberate choice to de-emphasise the Jewish tradition of the meal, but more likely is simply what bread looked like to the carver. Whole animals brought to the table were not unusual especially for festive occasions, so this may actually be an impression of an Easter Sunday feastof the kind a wealthy German household might serve.
The third scene depicts resurrected Jesus appearing to his disciples at Emmaus. This is the moment Jesus, having broken the bread, blesses the meal (the missing right hand was raised in the requisite gesture) and the disciples recognise him.
The meal shown here is less cluttered than that served for the Last Supper, but richer than that Martha has set up. It looks like someone was expecting company. There are two small bread loaves, a bowl of dipping sauce, beer, and a large serving bowl filled with a meat dish – one that looks remarkably like pork boiled with some vegetable. One piece appears to have rib bones in it, a reminder that when we look at historical records of meat portions, the weight would have included a fair bit of bone on most cuts.
Obviously, all these table settings are not strictly realistic. The table surface is too small in relation to the people around it, so there is not enough room for everything that would have been placed on a real one: no cutlery, too few drinking vessels, and no sign of napkins. Still, it seems that the artist was trying to convey a realistic scene and made a conscious distinction between the three occasions. What we see here matches other descriptions and depictions of the time.
One observation that will immediately resonate with everyone in living history or culinary historic recreation is how brown everything is. Many otherwise excellent historic recipes produce an endless variation of shades of brown food, often delicious, but visually boring. We are constantly tempted to enliven it by decorative flourishes, herbs, fruit, vegetables, or flowers, but this really was what it often looked like.
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