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.
The 1840s were not a good time to be an average Joe anywhere in the Western world. The Kingdom of Bavaria was probably no worse than elsewhere, but it certainly was no better. Food was expensive, wages low, unemployment high and help stingy. People could consider themselves lucky to have any regular income, so artillerymen Korbinian Stiglmayer was far from badly off by comparison. Still, pay did not go far, so when he faced the outrageous price of 26 Kreuzer for four Maß of beer on 1 May 1844, he protested loudly and refused to pay.
At least that is how it went of we trust police reports. They are not always the best source when it comes to civil unrest, but often the only one. Certainly, gunner Stiglmayer was not alone in his frustration. By the time the gendarmes arrived at the Maderbräu inn, the guests had already dismantled much of the interior and the riot was spilling out into the street.
Maderbräustraße, the origin point of the riot. This picture was taken 30 years later, but the building (left foreground) still existed. Courtesy of wikimedia commons
This was not the kind of thing you would expect in Bavaria, then or now. The recently minted kingdom was famous mostly for its mountains and its folksy Catholicism, a place where stout-hearted peasants lived in simple contentment in their pretty painted houses. That was as little true in 1844 as it is now. Bavaria’s climate made for good harvests, though, and the people enjoyed good food when they could get it. Even today, specialties like Weißwurst, Brezn (different from the Brezel of Baden), Obazda or Dampfnudeln are popular with tourists and locals alike. The latter is a traditional feast day dish, something you could make even in a modest kitchen if the money reached to milk, fine flour, and some butter. There are already three recipes in the 1817 Baier’sches Koch- und Haushaltsbuch by Maria Katharina Siegel. The first one reads:
Common Bavarian Dampfnudeln
Take one and a half Maaß (about six cups) of flour in a bowl, make a well in the centre, pour in a little lukewarm milk and two spoonfuls of yeast, and let it rise in a warm place. Once this is done, stir in an egg and two yolks as well as 4 Loth (4 x 16 grammes = 64g) of melted and cooled butter, the required salt, and if desired, raisins and seeded Zibeben (large raisins), ẃith as much lukewarm milk as is needed to make a dough. Beat the dough well until it detaches from the spoon, roll it out on a floured table to the thickness of a finger, cut out round pieces with a glass, cover them with a warm cloth and let them rise properly. Pour enough milk into a saucepan to just cover the bottom, add a spoonful of butter and perhaps a little sugar, let it come to a boil over a coal fire, and arrange the pieces in it. Let them quickly boil up in a covered pot, then spread out the coals (to reduce the heat) and let them finish cooking slowly for a quarter hour. Cover them and leave them to cool for a few minutes, then cut them out of the pot and serve them sprinkled with sugar if desired.
The second recipe has a slightly different technique where walnut-sized pieces of dough are cooked floating in boiling milk and served with a sauce of cream, egg yolk, sugar, and lemon zest. The third recipe suggests putting the pieces into hot butter, then adding the milk and finishing the cooking on a low heat. It prescribes the same sauce as the second.
This was the kind of modest luxury common working-class people had been eating less and less as the ‘Hungry Forties’ progressed. Munich had been spared the brutal famine that afflicted Ireland, Scotland, Prussia, and Flanders, but poor harvests and growing poverty had been felt for years. Police reported seditious signs posted in Munich since 1840, and previous rises in the price of bread and beer had been met with vocal protest. The working population was strained to near breaking point already when King Ludwig I decreed a rise in the price of beer by 1/2 Kreuzer per Maß, to 6 1/2 Kreuzer.
It did not look like much by itself, but there was a point when things had to break, and this was it. King Ludwig was an ageing, unpopular monarch who spent lavishly on architecture and his scandalous mistress Lola Montez while neglecting the welfare of his overtaxed people. This was unwise, but like all German monarchs of the early nineteenth century, he could rely on a modern, disciplined military and the solidarity of his fellow monarchs. Or at least, that was the theory. Going by what French newspapers reported at the time, Ludwig should probably have thought twice about cutting a military pay bonus effective 30 April 1844.
We have no way of knowing how many soldiers refused to obey orders when called on to quell the riot. French papers, free from censorship, reported breathlessly of mutinies by whole regiments while German ones, under strict control, mentioned not a word. What we know certainly is that the king lost control of his capital for four days as rioters, many soldiers among them, roamed the city smashing up government building, breweries, bakeries, and butcher shops. The police, small in number and suddenly without the protection of the garrison, were a particular target of popular anger. Many officers were beaten up by the angry crowd while soldiers would often be invited to drink with them.
The targets of the riot show the cause of the pent-up anger. Rising food prices drove people into misery while wages barely changed. A handbill recorded in police files records the exhortation: “Woll ihr wohlfeil Bier und Brod, so schlaget einen König tot” – if you want cheap beer and bread, kill the king. It did not come to this. The guards regiments protected the palace, the rioters concentrated on the property of brewers, and the king surrendered. By 4 May, he revoked the beer price hike and reinstated the military bonuses. Their immediate purpose achieved, the people went back to work and the authorities really, really preferred not to mention the whole affair ever again.
Of course, nothing had been resolved. A correspondent for a radical paper at the time, Friedrich Engels (yes, THAT Friedrich Engels) wrote that, having won a contest in a relatively insignificant matter, the people could put the fear of God in the authorities over more important issues as well. Indeed, four years later Munich, along with cities all over Europe, erupted in revolution. Ludwig I abdicated, and his successor Maximilian conceded a far more liberal constitution. Neither did the tradition die out – as late as 1910, beer price increases in the town of Dorfen in Bavaria ended in three breweries and five private residences burned to the ground. The people had not forgotten what to do if they needed affordable bread and beer after all.
I’ve not given up on the Feeding the Revolution series, but this week there is very little time and I wanted to post something. Here is the first recipe from the next source I’ll be getting into, the Solothurn Cod S 392:
Front page of Solothurn S 392 courtesy of ecodices
A1 If you want to make good compost
Put in seeds that is (vtz) fennel seed, dill seed, and caraway, anise, coriander, and honey that is well scummed (verschumpt) with mustard. Pour it on when it becomes quite hot from the fire etc.
A compost, from Latin compositum, was a dish of vegetables and fruit that would by modern standards be described as a pickle. Surviving recipes vary widely, and the word is sometimes used to refer to sauerkraut. This one describes how to make a pickling liquid by boiling honey with mustard and seasonings. This would then be poured over the fruit and vegetables to be preserved and stored in covered, watertight containers, probably glazed earthenware. Using expensive ingredients on such preserves looks like a way of raising what was a commonplace food to the dignity of lordly tables.
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.
We know that it took a crusade to suppress the desire for freedom among the Stedinger in 1234. By 1431, this method had been applied a few more times, so there was nothing fundamentally shocking about Friedrich I, Elector of Brandenburg, and papal legate Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini laying siege to the town of Taus or Domazlice in Bohemia (today’s Czech Republic). Expecting a relief force, the seasoned campaigner Friedrich positioned troops to receive the enemy who obligingly arrayed themselves for battle, unfurled their banners, and started to sing. The combined force of crusading troops took one good lock at the enemy and legged it for Germany, leaving behind their entire baggage train including the correspondence of Cardinal Cesarini and the original papal bull that authorised their presence. The cardinal barely escaped with his life.
Rebels refusing to fight fair. Fifteenth-century drawing courtesy of wikimedia commons
The story of Domazlice – which may be legendary – invites easy mockery, but what had happened to get us there was truly earth-shaking. After all, the crusading forces that had been struggling to subdue the rebellious Bohemians for over a decade were large, well-equipped, mostly ably led, and included some of the finest knights in Europe. Their opponents were mainly peasants on foot, indifferently armoured and lugging an enormous, unwieldy collection of primitive guns. Fifteen years ago, all of it had started with an angry protest, a high-handed response, and the customary recourse of the powerful to brute force, but this time, force had failed them.
The place where it happened, Bohemia, was a rich and populous country on the eastern border of the Holy Roman Empire. Its kings had been Holy Roman Emperors, residing mostly in Prague, so ties between the kingdom and the empire were close and people of different languages mingled on both sides of the border. These were not ethnic nation states, Germans here, Czechs there, and anyway, there were plenty of other tongues around. However, some of them had turned out to be more equal than others. Between the influence of the empire and the way their language afforded them access to wider networks of trade and education, German speakers were overrepresented among the rich and powerful. Many nobles spoke only German by choice or of necessity, and plenty of Czechs resented their marginalisation bitterly. Nineteenth-century historians have read what followed as a war between Germans and Slavs, a national independence movement, or a battle for economic self-determination, and it was a bit of all those things, but above all, it was a chaotic shock to an already creaking system of government.
The people who routed one crusading army after another were townspeople and farmers, mostly Czech-speaking, mainly non-noble, from Bohemia. The kingdom was noted for its wealth and there were already recipes claiming it as their origin in the fifteenth century. It would acquire a reputation for culinary excellence in later centuries. However, it was also a land of rugged mountains, ruled over in popular legend by the wild spirit lord Rübezahl and populated by poor, hardy peasants. In those high valleys, grain grew indifferently, cattle would rarely thrive, and often long winter and early storms ruined a promising harvest. Farmers on both sides of the border had developed an ingenious device to save their crops in that instance, and we learn of it from the 1485 Kuchenmaistrey:
1.xliii Item to keep ears of grain over the year such as spelt or wheat, take them while they are green when they are ready to cut (seng) and dry them in a baking oven or in the sun. Store them high, as you do cherries, and when you would have them, lay them in fresh well water and they will return to their virtue (zu ir krafft). Boil young chickens with this or cook them with small pieces of bacon and salt, or with butter. Gamebirds boiled with this are also easily digested.
Item you can also keep dried pears of all kinds this way.
This trick is not unique to Bohemia. We know it as Grünkern in Germany today, and internationally it is more familiar as the Levantine dish freekeh. Prepared this way, it is the kind of food that everybody ate, from the poorest of peasants boiling a meagre porridge from parched grains and old bacon in their mountain hut to the landed gentry and substantial burghers enjoying a fine young chicken or a few quail stewed in the richly seasoned pot. It is not exactly a national cuisine, but a shared culinary grammar that everyone understood, and it could feed the armies that the country direly needed.
If you want to learn about the Hussite revolt in detail, the best way is to listen to season 9 of Dirk Hoffmann-Becking’s excellent History of the Germans podcast. It is a long and winding story complicated by fault lines of language, politics, and religion, but its origins lie in Prague and with a popular, eloquent Czech-speaking cleric known as Jan Hus. He was a serious intellectual, important in the development of Czech as a literary language, close to the royal family, and famous for his personal rectitude. What made him a problem was that he also read the Bible, which was actually a new thing for clerics to do, and took it very seriously.
1400 was not a good time to be a serious Christian. Technically united by the Catholic church, Western Europe was in practice divided between two rival popes, one in Rome, the other in Avignon, since 1378. After an attempt to resolve the crisis in 1409, there were briefly three. None of them were particularly stellar examples of leadership or probity, and the church suffered accordingly. Hus, who felt this problem acutely, wrestled with the question of church reform in sermons and writing. His words fell on fertile soil: People were heartily sick of the venality, corruption, and arrogance they saw in the clergy. They equally resented the way the church and their new king imposed the orthodoxy of a distant power centre on them and sucked out their wealth in increasingly creative ways, not the least of them the sale of indulgences. We will get back to that point. Despite efforts by the archbishop to silence him, Hus drew a vocal following that made him effectively untouchable in his home country.
The schism, together with much other outstanding business, was eventually resolved in a great church council held at Constance from 1414 to 1418. Hus was called before this council to defend his writings and, despite promises of safe conduct, arrested, tried, and burned as a heretic. His persecution by the church had already led to unrest in Prague, but news of his death caused a massive outcry. A letter of protest was submitted by the Bohemian estates while people in the city and elsewhere attacked unpopular clerics and demonstrated. King Wenceslas initially tried to balance between the parties, but quickly came down on the papal side. His successor Sigismund took an even more pronounced stance. The result was a popular uprising, driving royal government and the higher echelons of the church from Prague. In what would become a local tradition, protesters stormed Hradcany castle and threw representatives of the church and imperial power out of an upper-story window.
The response was quick. This was no mere riot, it was a challenge to the established order where noble dynasties ruled increasingly sophisticated states with the assistance of highly educated clergy and armies of expensively trained armoured horsemen. A crusade was called to slap down the unruly mob, something nobody expected to be terribly difficult given how quickly they descended into internecine feuding. Sigismund led his army into Bohemia in 1420 and – lost.
There are a few moments like that in military history, the point where someone figures out an inexpensive solution to an expensive challenge and proceeds to wipe the floor with a formerly invincible opponent. The Bohemian rebels fielded infantry armed with halberds and pikes, crossbows and handguns, supported by artillery and improvised field fortifications built from heavy baggage wagons. The knights of the emperor had no answer to this. They went down to defeat in 1420, 1422, 1426, and 1432, with a break for several battles between internal factions.
What is now called the Hussite Wars does not really get enough coverage in the English speaking world. It is a truly revolutionary moment in several ways. Firstly, while most of the heresies the Catholic church combated in the middle ages were at most heterodox groundswells and in many cases did not actually exist, this was the real thing: a grassroots rebellion not against individual abuses, but against the church as an entity. The Hussites eventually made peace and reintegrated into the Catholic church on negotiated terms, but they are today considered a Protestant denomination. Secondly, it was a moment where rebellion was framed in terms of national identity, an oppressed ethnic group opposing a privileged one, in the pattern we see so much of in future centuries. Thirdly, this is when the lower classes, without the extensive training and expensive gear of the dominant powers, managed to turn themselves into an effective army. The medieval Empire continued for another half century or so, but there was no going back from any of these things. And, lest we forget, we owe much of this to an upstanding intellectual and a bunch of commoners whose sense of justice was offended enough to protest what they were taught was the divine order of things. Turned out it wasn’t.
A crusade was the sharpest weapon in the arsenal of Christendom, a general call to arms when all fighting men of the faith was called upon to abandon petty feuds and internecine wars, unite under the banner blessed by the pope, and march against the enemies of Christ to gain forgiveness for their sins. In 1232, Pope Gregory IX declared a crusade and the arms of all Western Christendom were raised against the Stedinger Land, a small cluster of villages nestled between the Weser and Hunte river north of Bremen.
Battle of Altenesch, 13th-century miniature courtesy of wikimedia commons
In the big scheme of things, it is rather hard to see why these farmers represented such a mortal threat to Christendom. They were a substantial and prosperous community, originally having come to the low, marshy region from the Netherlands where they had learned how to build dykes, drainage canals, and locks to make the rich soils accessible. By ancient custom, at this point over 200 years old, they held their land free from obligation and were exempt from certain taxes under what was known as ‘ius hollandicum’, the Hollandish law.
Though they were rich in the eyes of their neighbours, theirs was a modest, rural kind of wealth measured in acres of grain and thriving gardens, cows, cheeses, hams and eggs. It was not the spectacular kind we can admire in museums today, gathered in cathedral treasuries and the palaces of nobles. The Stedinger did not own much in the way of gold and silk, and they were unlikely to enjoy delicacies such as blanc manger or claretum. No recipes from the era survive, but there are descriptions of rural foods in poetry that match what archeology shows. The thirteenth-century poet Seifried Helbling (III. 231) writes:
Then let the poor people prepare roots and greens (rüebkrut) with goat meat
And just a little later, Hugo von Trimberg states in his poem Der Renner (V.9843):
Many a farmer grows old and grey who never enjoyed blanc manger, figs, sturgeon, or almonds. He enjoyed his root vegetables (rüeben kumpost) and was as content eating this with a crust of oat bread as a lord with his meat and venison.
We encounter the word rüben very often when rural food is described, but it is a very loosely defined term which basically covers all root vegetables. These were a relative innovation as gardens around the homes of villagers increasingly were used to cultivate vegetables for the family’s use or sale. It is a pointless endeavour to define exactly what these were since the plants both varied greatly by region and have changed considerably since. Mostly, they were brassica (where we get turnips) and beta (where we get beets), but it is entirely likely the ancestors of carrots, skirrets, parsley roots, and salsify also were subsumed under the heading.
The words used here are interesting in themselves. Rüebkrut suggests either that roots and greens were mixed (what was known as kraut und rüben later) or that they were prepared separately, the greens cooked like spinach or chard. Meanwhile, a rüeben kumpost suggests that the roots are cooked in combination with other vegetables or fruit. Kompost means highly seasoned vegetable dishes in later recipe sources, and while the downmarket version probably did not include honey, saffron, or wine, it may well have incorporated mustard, garlic, and other strongly flavoured ingredients. It could also mean that the roots were salted and underwent fermentation, but that is a difficult area to interpret and I will refrain from coming down on one side or the other until I have seen a good deal more evidence. Certainly, what we are not seeing here is famine food. Rüben were grown deliberately and skilfully, prepared to be tasty, and eaten with bread and meat. It was a good meal for sharing, rich, filling, and testament to the skill of the home’s women who were in charge of the garden. A much laster instruction in the 1485 Kuchenmaistrey, the oldest printed cookbook in German (now available in English translation), is slightly more specific:
1.xliiii Item of dried root vegetables and turnips (ruben vnd steckruben), those are best when smoked suckling pig is boiled with them and they are seasoned with salt and butter, that is proper.
The wealth to eat such a meal regularly was not given to all people farming the land even in good times. The ability to do so in peace could not be taken for granted, either. The Stedinger had their share of problems with the counts of Oldenburg. They resented the idea that the peasantry could actually own land and thus escape the God-given order that decreed rents and corvée labour should flow to the lords. They built castles – always a bad thing if you were not living inside them – and tried to force the nearby villagers into submission, demanding the rents and services that were customary in most of the Reich for land its owners had always held freely.
The problem with that was not so much its blatant illegality as the fact that the Stedinger could fight back, and did so quite effectively. In 1204, they gathered in arms and destroyed two castles to send a clear message to the count. The knights of the archbishop of Bremen rode north to put paid to this nonsense and returned, bloodied and unsuccessful. There would be no tax or tithe to be had from here.
In 1229, Archbishop Gerhard II and his brother, Herrmann von Lippe, joined forces to put down the rebellion once and for all. Preceded by excommunication, their campaign moved out in December as winter halted fieldwork and the swamps and ditches froze. On Christmas day, they joined battle. Herrmann von Lippe did not survive the encounter, and the knights returned to Bremen once more, quite unwilling to tangle with this obstreperous lot.
Thus dawned 1230, and all of the Empire was subject to feudal overlordship but for one indomitable village. It would be satisfying to let the story end here, but sadly, it does not. Archbishop Gerhard wanted revenge, and after founding a Cistercian nunnery to pray for his dead brother’s soul, he started lobbying the pope. As often happened in such cases, weak arguments required creative support and stories grew in the telling. The Stedinger had originally been excommunicated for disobedience and undefined ‘excesses’. When Gregory IX finally agreed to call for a crusade, the charge sheet included indiscriminate sexual orgies and the worship of demonic entities, which makes farming the Weser lowlands sound much more exciting than it actually was.
Sadly, this is a familiar pattern. Lying works, opponents, especially those without access to the media, can be demonised to isolate them, and powerful people support each other even with no immediate advantage to themselves. A crusading army moved into the Stedinger land in 1233 and, to everyone’s surprise, was again defeated with heavy loss of life. The archbishop ended the year down one castle (Slutter), one Count (Burchard of Wildeshausen), and one Dominican crusading preacher who apparently walked into a rebel force and had his head chopped off for his trouble. Notably, as is so often the case, we do not read about wholesale killings or cruelties. The Stedinger destroyed castles and defensible monasteries, but the inhabitants survived. Meanwhile a second army, supported by nobles from all over the northwest of the Empire and boosted by a plenary indulgence on par with that offered for the conquest of Jerusalem, was raised. It went on campaign in the summer of 1234 and defeated the Stedinger army at Altenesch. A massacre of both combatants and civilians ensued, and the survivors were forced to surrender and submit to feudal overlordship.
This, sadly, is how many of these stories end. Rebellion, even when it is militarily successful, faces long odds. The established order always has resources on its side, and many powerful people are invested in maintaining it even at a high cost in blood and money. But not every rebellion fails, and even those that do often instil a degree of caution in the ruling class. It pays in the long run to send the message they cannot get away with everything.
I’m looking forward to a hands-on workshop of historic cheesemaking at the weekend, so there may not be any longer posts for a couple of days, but before I leave, here is one more tidbit from Balthasar Staindl:
Green peas in the pods (in schaefen)
cclxxix) Green peas in their shells are also cooked as a kraut (a vegetable side dish) when they are properly large in the pod, and not yellow yet. Take (hebels) them out, also boil them up with pork and pour that (the broth) on the peas. But they are not boiled quickly. Also take a little bacon, cut it small, fry it, and put it in. Serve it this way and see it does not boil dry.
There are many surviving recipes that do all kinds of things to peas in an effort to make themmore special than they were. These are invariably for dried peas though. This recipe calls for the fresh kind we are more familiar with today, when refrigeration and canning make them easily available year round. Without these methods, fresh peas in the pod do not last more than a few days after picking and were a strictly seasonal pleasure.
The preparation is simple enough: You remove the peas from the pods, boil them in broth, and serve them with fried bacon, presumably as discrete peas rather than a mush, though the latter also tastes good. The one thing I am unclear about is the instruction to boil them with pork. Staindl sometimes repeats himself and gives instructions in a roundabout way that is difficult to follow or render, so this may be instructions to boil the peas. Grammatically, though, it could also mean to boil the pods with the pork which would make sense as a way to give extra flavour to the broth. That way, the information that they are not boiled quickly makes more sense. Fresh peas do not take a long time to cook, and they should be simmered carefully.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
The year was 1483 and the nunnery of Harvestehude near Hamburg was exceptionally noisy. A clerical visitation – basically an inspection to ensure the strictures of monastic life were not too far relaxed – had arrived from the bishop of Bremen, and the gentlemen, accompanied by two members of the honourable council of Hamburg, were surprised to find themselves face to face with an angry crowd. Family and friends of the nuns had assembled to defend them from what they saw as an imposition of their lives, and for all the efforts of the councillors to defuse the situation, the day ended with them returning to the city while the bishop’s inspectors sought refuge with nearby Dominicans, their clerical dignity offering less security from the irate citizens than the solid brick walls of the priory.
The cattle market of Hamburg. Illustration from the 1497 Stadtrecht
If anyone had hoped this would blow over, the next day disabused them of such notions. A crowd gathered at the town hall demanding that the unwelcome visitors should leave immediately and threatening to throw them out if they did not do so voluntarily. Though the council tried to reassure them no decisions would be made without the agreement of the nuns, they refused to be placated. Indeed, as more and more people assembled, other grievances came to be aired, and soon enough the council got an earful. There were, after all, worries enough, and above all else, a serious cost-of-living crisis. The rulers of the city knew they had a real problem on their hands now.
How had it come to this? The fight over Harvestehude provided a flashpoint, but as so often, it was not really significant in itself. The nunnery was one of thousands such places where women lived a quiet religious life they had chosen for reasons of their own. They resented the imposition of harsh ascetic rules by outsiders, and so did their friends and family. Confrontations like this happened everywhere in Catholic Europe, but they rarely led to riots. The mood in Hamburg was tense in the late fifteenth century.
At first glance, this seems surprising. By all conventional accounts, Hamburg was thriving. The town had grown large and prosperous from trade and exporting its famous beer. Its position as the north sea port of mighty Lübeck ensured it was among the top tier of Hansa cities, it controlled territories as far as 100 km away, dominated navigation in the Elbe estuary, and sent merchant ships as far as Portugal and recently, Iceland. But one person’s exciting opportunity is a threat to another’s livelihood, and the government of Hamburg, dominated by wealthy merchants, had a long tradition of taking care of its own first. The working inhabitants, not just the poor, were feeling the pinch as herds of pigs and cattle from the fat pastures of Holstein were sold southward to affluent buyers and bargeloads of grain coming down the Elbe from Saxony and Bohemia disappeared in the holds of westbound cargo ships. Meat and even bread were becoming harder to afford every day.
Hamburg would become famous for its salt beef, a glorious dish of cold-smoked, slow-cooked meat that surely will get its own article one day, but many of its people could only dream of affording such fine cuts. Their lot was bones for soup, or sausages, a staple of North German dining to this day that we have few early recipes for. They were simply too common. We should not imagine a muscle meat sausage like modern bratwurst or salami – the good meat suitable for preserving rarely went into sausages. Instead, they used offal, intestinal fat, blood, and offcuts augmented richly with boiled grains. To this day, Grützwurst is a local specialty, either red (with blood) or white (without). It can be eaten cold on bread or cooked with vegetables. In Bremen, it is śerved with slow-cooked kale and potatoes as the confusingly named Grünkohl mit Pinkel.
This is a tradition that goes back far and reaches through large parts of Central Europe. The late 15th-century Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch takes the actual recipe for granted, but suggests a refinement:
93 Item if you would make green sausages, take parsley and eggs. And grind that together. Then take groats and fat meat and spices. Make a sausage of that.
Actual instructions for making such sausages do not show up until much later. Ohe of the earliest detailed descriptions is given by Marx Rumpolt:
Blood sausage from a wild boar. When a wild boar is wounded or caught alive so it can be stabbed to death like a domestic pig, catch the blood and stir it well, cut bacon (Speck) into it, take a few white bread rolls, cut them all around or grate them on a grater, soak them in milk and pour this into the blood altogether. Add pepper, ginger and mace and see you do not oversalt it, that way the sausages turn out mild and good because of the milk and the bread. Then take clean rice that is nicely cooked and picked clean, that is how the Bohemian peasants do it with barley and buckwheat, it is good in many ways if they are filled and cooked in water. Lay them on clean straw and leave them there overnight, then you may cook it as you would have it. When they are cooked fully, serve them with ground horseradish made with a good beef broth. That is how the Bohemian peasants like to eat it. (Rumpolt p. LIII r)
Note how this is really two recipes – the courtly kind with white bread and cream, and the common one with barley or buckwheat porridge. The latter is how Grützwurst is made, and what the people of Hamburg toon often found painfully expensive to get with their also increasingly dear rye bread.
The records of 1483 are patchy, and we largely have to rely on a much later chronicle, the Wandalia by Albert Krantz, to reconstruct how things went down. Unusually, we do learn the name of a popular leader, Hinrich von Lohe. He is quoted as saying that “…we must starve while just yesterday, a great herd of oxen and swine was brought south over the Elbe…” and that clearly touched a nerve. The council was nervous and like rulers everywhere decided to address the source of their unease by force. They had Heinrich von Lohe secretly arrested and questioned.
Secrecy is a very relative concept in a medieval town, though. There was no militarised police, no plainclothes branch, no isolated detention sites to spirit anyone away to. As soon as his absence was noted, angry citizens began looking for Hinrich von Lohe. They took hold of several councillors and two mayors (Hamburg had several), roughing up one of them in the process. The Wandalia dramatically describes his face marred with blood, but he seems to have taken no major damage except to his robes. Eventually, the crowd went to the city prison and forced the guards to open the doors. Hinrich was freed and accompanied home by a jubilant crowd who forced the bloodied mayor to publicly apologise to him before he was allowed to leave. Tellingly, they did not kill or lock up any of the men they had taken, even allowing the elderly mayor to go home after he pleaded infirmity. These people were out for justice, not blood.
Over the coming days, the confrontations continued, with armed citizens assembling to make demands and the councillors trying to calm them. When they refused to stop several merchant ships loaded with grain from leaving for the Netherlands, matters came to a head. Angry, armed people stormed the town hall, broke into the council chamber, and confronted the mayors with their demand for bread. It is unclear what exactly happened next: Alarm bells were rung, supporters and opponents of the council assembled, but in the end, there was no bloodshed. Krantz sees this as a victory of civic virtue over anarchy, but it looks more likely that nobody had control of the situation and in the end, both sides avoided civil war neither wanted.
The aftermath sounds anticlimactic: Everyone just went home. The council reasserted its authority, and two ringleaders of the rioting were identified and executed. But tellingly, this was no victory for the merchant class. The councillors had heard the grievances of the people and though they had not agreed to take the extraordinary measures they demanded at the time, they codified and publicly announced measures to ban food exports in time of dearth. Such laws, it must be said, already existed, but had not been enforced before an angry ship’s carpenter broke open the gates of the council chamber.
The unrest of 1483 is interesting, but in no way exceptional. The confrontation was triggered not by grand affairs of state, but by a fairly trivial issue. People were upset because outsiders were interfering with their lives, in this case, specifically that of a group of nuns who were not usually even all that popular. Once the protest gathered momentum, other grievances were aired and demands made. The council had no police or military to crack down, so they took to negotiating, stalling, and trying to take out the leaders, but in the end, they had to accept that what their people were demanding was actually not that unreasonable. If you lived and worked in a rich town, it was reasonable you should share a modest portion of that wealth, though sometimes, you needed a carpenters’ axe to get the attention of the powerful.
I am changing to a new computer and a Linux-based operating system (something those of us outside the USA should consider due to geopolitical risk, and those within to minimise personal risk). Getting used to the different surface and learning its peculiarities is a challenge, so there is no long article today. I’ve not given up on ‘Feeding the Revolution‘, but today, I have just a short set of recipes from Balthasar Staindl’s cookbook:
Depiction of ‘January’, Norwich, c. 1500, courtesy of wikimedia commons
(Pea soup)In a different way
When you boil the peas soft, pass some of them through, but so that it is not too thick. Only take pea broth, no water. And if you want to have it good and it should be white, take a good amount (eerlich) of good white cream. But if you colour it yellow, do not use too much cream. When you want to make it white, it is quite as good as almond soup.
A different soup of chickpeas (Zyßerle)
Zyserel are long peas, all white. Boil them as well and pass them through with their own broth and a good amount of cream. Serve it on toasted semel bread (with) raisins.
Lentil soup
cclvii) Boil the lentils very slowly and fry onion into it (i.e. add pan-fried onions). Sour it, spice it, add raisins, and serve it on toasted bread and as an evening meal (nacht essen).
This is part of the chapter on soups, but it looks a lot more substantial than what we consider a soup today. Dried legumes were a staple, much more prevalent than the relatively few surviving recipes suggest, and this is a refined method of serving them. Mashed peas or chickpeas – available in Southern Germany, but not a common crop – with cream and spices served over toast make a lovely dish for a chill, wet and dark evening. The lentils, seasoned with vinegar and topped with onions fried soft in butter or lard, are more robust, but equally attractive. These were the ways money and skill made winter bearable and even enjoyable, and best of all, these were permitted during Lent after the Empire obtained the requisite blanket indulgence in 1490.
Balthasar Staindl’s 1547 Kuenstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch is a very interesting source and one of the earliest printed German cookbooks, predated only by the Kuchenmaistrey (1485) and a translation of Platina (1530). It was also first printed in Augsburg, though the author is identified as coming from Dillingen where he probably worked as a cook. I’m still in the process of trying to find out more.
In 1904 in the village of Kaisertreu situated in the Prussian province of Posen, police began observing a daily ritual that would soon attract national and international attention. Every morning, a uniformed officer representing the fulsome authority of the all-highest imperial and royal majesty Wilhelm II marched out to a plot of land near a dilapidated farmstead to measure the position of a circus caravan, ascertained it had been moved, and walked back to the station. Soon enough, locals gathered to observe the spectacle, and in due time, others came from afar, staying in the nearby town of Rackwitz, today Rakoniewice, in a festive mood to visit the famous caravan and Michal Drzymala, the man who was making the Prussian state look like idiots.
Michal Drzymala’s famous caravan on the way to be displayed in Krakow, image courtesy of wikimedia commons
Often, writing about the history of rebellion and resistance is a grim business, struggling through accounts of brutal repression and suffering. This is a different story. It’s a tale of clever activism, solidarity, and collective schadenfreude at the expense of the powerful, and it comes with a genuine happy end. And of course, no celebration in recent German history could be complete without coffee and cake.
There are more varieties of cake in Germany today than anyone can reasonably count, but there is one kind specifically that looks like it was born from local tradition. To this day, the joy of Streuselkuchen straddles the border, beloved in Germany and Poland alike. Made from easily available ingredients and in quantity, it was popular for rural celebrations and often sold at festivals, and surely you could have got some on an outing to see the Landgendarm make a fool of himself another day. This is the (rather wordy) recipe given in Therese Adam’s Schlesisches Kochbuch, published in Troppau (today Opava) in 1900:
#593 Silesian Streußelkuchen
You prepare the same dough as for Silesian cake, place it on a baking sheet once it has risen, draw it out with hands dipped in warm butter to about a finger’s thickness, brush it with egg yolk and melted butter, sprinkle it thickly with prepared Streußel and Zimmtzucker (a cinnamon-sugar mix), let it rise a little more, and bake it light brown. After the cake is taken out of the oven, you drizzle it with a little more melted butter, carefully slide it off the sheet onto a suitable board, let it cool, and cut it into slices of what size you please. This cake is very good with coffee.
The same dough, spread out by hand on a liberally greased baking sheet, can be covered in halved plums, skin side down, sprinkled with plenty of grated gingerbread (Lebzelt) and sugar, allowed to rise again and baked properly. You then also drizzle it with melted butter. Cherry cake can be prepared the same way. The cherries are arranged on the dough in regular rows, the cake is sprinkled with ground almonds and Zimmtzucker, it is also allowed to rise, then baked and, once finished, drizzled with butter.
594 Cake Streusel (Kuchenstreußel)
Take 2-3 handfuls of flour in a flat bowl, add 2 tablespoons of sugar and mingle it well with the flour. Pour on some butter or lard and stir it in with a spoon so that small lumps are created. If the Streußel is too dry or still very floury, pour on a little more butter, but if it is too soft, add a little flour and finish working the Streußel into crumbs with your hands. You also cover apple, poppyseed, and cabbage cakes with this.
Of course she also provides the recipe for the actual dough:
#592 Silesian Cake
Make dough of 2 kg of fine flour with 4 decagrams (40g) of yeast dissolved in lukewarm milk and 2 tablespoons of sugar together with the necessary amount of uncooked, but warm cream (Schmetten) and 28 decagrams (280g) of melted butter, one egg yolk, and a little salt. It must not bee too coarse, but also not too soft. You work it until it is smooth and set it in a warm place to rise. Meanwhile, you prepare the filling for the cake, be it apple puree, curd cheese (Topfen), poppyseeds, plum preserve (Powidl) or cabbage (see: fillings). Now you take the well-risen dough on a floured board, divide into as many parts as you have different fillings, roll out each part into a long piece about two hands wide, place the filling on it along its length and fold first one long side, then the other over it. Press it flat and wide with your hands, gently roll it out to one finger’s thickness, and cut pieces as wide as the greased baking sheet it. Lay the cake on that, brush it with lard or melted butter, and sprinkle it with grated gingerbread (Lebzelt) or Streußel. You continue the same way with the remaining dough. Let the cakes rise once again and bake them. You can also bake small, round cakes with this dough by cutting off pieces the size of a dumpling (knödelgroße), shape them round, place a spoonful of a filling of your choice in the centre, close the dough carefully over it, place the cakes on a greased baking sheet, shape them round, brush them with melted butter, and sprinkle them with Streußel or gingerbread (Lebzelt). If you have fresh plums or cherries, you can also cover the dough with them. The plums naturally have the stones removed, are laid skin side down, and covered with gingerbread and sugar. Apple and cabbage cake are covered with pounded almonds and sugar, poppyseed with Streußel. You can also fill the same cake with good, ripe blueberries, but they need a lot of sugar. Blueberry cake is covered with grated gingerbread (Lebzelt).
This is a perfect snack to share among a crowd with hot coffee or maybe chilled lemonade as you laugh at the police. But what had happened to draw all those people there? To understand this, we need to take a brief look at history.
German is one of the oldest literary languages in Europe, but Germany as a country is relatively young. The Empire that Bismarck forged in 1871, though it called itself Deutsches Reich and meant it, was less ethnically homogenous than it would have liked to be. It was home to unhappy captive French-speakers in Alsace-Lorraine and a Danish minority on its northern border, but by far the largest non-German population was made up of Poles.
Poland had ceased to exist as a country after Prussia, Austria, and Russia had decided to divide the territory between them in one of the most shameless acts of betrayal in eighteenth-century history, and the Prussian share had ended up integrated into the German Empire. The government held out the hope that these people could become a docile rural workforce that would eventually assimilate into German culture. The Poles, proud of their language and history, had no intention to do that.
Michal Drzymala, the hero of this particular story, was one such Polish-speaking citizen of Prussia who had lived a largely unremarkable life as a farmer in the province of Posen. In 1904, he purchased a dilapidated farmstead where he intended to rebuild for his family and ran smack into the racist barriers Prussian law had set up. Alarmed by the growth of the Polish-speaking population and their refusal to Germanise, the government had legislated German as the sole language of instruction in schools, mandated it be used in all clubs and associations, limited publishing, and flat-out forbade Polish-speaking people from building homes while encouraging German speakers to do so. That last law turned out a boondoggle mostly funneling money to rich landowners, but it had been meant as an act of ethnic cleansing.
Given its reputation in the English-speaking world, it comes as a surprise to many how comically inept Bismarck’s Empire could be at being evil. Its laws were harsh and often unequal, its government racist, its politics authoritarian, and much of the populace liked it that way, but they had rules that they played by. If anywhere in history exemplifies the idea that “the law is the law”, it is Germany around 1900, and Michal Drzymala knew this. When the police turned up to inform him that as a Pole, he was forbidden by law to rebuild the ruined house he had bought, he first settled into the still extant stables. The police then dug out a regulation banning fireplaces in outbuildings. The exasperated Drzymala went out and purchased an old circus caravan. Surely they could not ban that!?
They certainly tried. Having found there was no way they could legally stop him from owning the caravan or parking it on his own land, they discovered a law that limited the stay of itinerant people in any one place to 24 hours. That, the police decided, would take care of the obstinate Pole.
Drzymala obeyed. He moved his caravan by a few metres. The police returned, noted the fact, reported it up the chain of command, and were nonplussed to find the law actually never specified how far itinerant people had to move once their 24 hours were up. For a while, the officers returned daily to measure how much the caravan had shifted. Soon, the story was reported in the local press, then in national papers. Drzymala became a local celebrity, his cause supported by the Polish minority’s political organisations. Crowds, both Polish- and German-speaking, showed up to poke fun at the authorities while the case made its way through the courts. Eventually, the humiliation became too much and the official visits ceased. Still, support kept coming. There were many people in Germany who loved to see the self-importance of the government punctured.
In the end, the case was lost on a technicality. By that time, Drzymala had received enough in donations to buy a house – something the law had no power to forbid. He later moved to a larger farm in Galicia, where Austro-Hungarian law protected the rights of ethnic minorities, and seems to have done reasonably well there. When Poland regained national independence after the First World War, the young republic honoured the elderly farmer with a state pension which he enjoyed until his death of old age in 1937. His famous caravan was displayed in Krakow for many years.
The village once known as Kaisertreu is named Drzymalowo today. By all accounts, they still enjoy Streuselkuchen there.
We have already met the Saxon peasantry as they attempted to rid themselves of feudal overlordship, but this was hardly the only instance they gave their rulers trouble. In 841, as the Empire founded by Charlemagne was facing the prospect of yet another war of succession, the nobles of recently conquered Saxony called on their subjects to fight for their respective pretender and found them reluctant to do so. We do not have much in the way of sources, but there must have been a point when the armed and organised farmers realised that they outnumbered the nobles and their warrior retainers. Instead of killing each other in the name of Lothar or Louis, they decided to be rid of the lot.
This should probably not have come as the shock it evidently did. Saxony had only been conquered and added to the Empire a bare fifty years ago after a brutal series of wars, the first recorded application of the novel doctrine that people could forced to become Christian. Pagan religious practice, refusing Baptism, and even eating meat during Lent were made punishable by death and the assemblies in which the people had discussed their affairs and made collective decisions banned as abominations. Taxes to support the new church structure, including provisions of slaves from the local population, and the installation of often foreign nobles to rule them had not made for a contented populace.
We do not know very much about how the Saxons governed themselves, but the sources we have suggest three key points: They had no such thing as a central authority, their system of government was participatory, and outside observers could not wrap their head around how it actually worked. People, including simple farmers, met to discuss issues and make decisions jointly. This was not an egalitarian society – there were noble families of greatly privileged status, unfree labourers, and chattel slavery. It probably resembled Scandinavian society more than the kingdoms to the south and west. Its people proved fiercely attached to these traditions, though, and the events of 840, however unclear they are in our sources, left the ruling class shaken badly. Indignant chroniclers wrote about it more that about the coronation of Charlemagne.
Saxony was sparsely populated, a country without large cities whose people lived in villages and farmsteads. Wealth was measured in heads of cattle, with some herds reaching remarkable size, though most people were subsistence farmers, relying on grain crops and legumes to0 feed themselves. This was often seen as a primitive society, a survival of pre-Roman Germania, but that seems unlikely. There is evidence of maritime trade and innovation in agriculture, not least the earliest butter churns we know of. Around this time, we also have archeological evidence for carp, a fish that does not occur naturally in the local river systems, and for salting herring which would later become a major industry.
Smoked fish and rye bread
The Saxons clearly enjoyed the bounty of their forests and fisheries. Shells and fishbones show up in excavations, and in the slightly later (probably 10th-century) poem Waltharius, it is said of the eponymous hero:
…Artfully, he lured birds, artfully captured them, sometimes with glue and at times with split wood, and when he came to a place where a river ran, lowering his hook, he drew his prey from the deep… (line 420-424)
Waltharius pays a ferryman for passage with fish who in turn presents them to the king’s cook. They are prepared with spices (pigmentis condisset), the impressed king enquires as to their origin, and suitable heroic events ensue. Fish clearly were a food fit for kings, and in the Frankish realm we already have evidence for fishing rights being restricted at this point, but in Saxony, they were still free for everyone to catch.
We know of other foods – aside from beans – that Saxony produced. Dairy products, both butter and cheese, were prominent, surviving price decrees indicate honey was more plentiful than in the south, and bread was made of rye as well as wheat and barley. Some farmhouses were equipped with racks that seem designed to hang up round flat loaves very similar to knäckebröd. With the required flour made in handmills relying on tedious manual labour, it is likely bread was not a staple for most people. They relied more on porridges for their everyday fare – the lardatam de multra farreque pultam (porridge with bacon) of Waltharius (line 1441). Leavened bread loaves, especially the most expensive wheat bread, were feast day fare. Meat could be provided by pigs, sheep, and goats, but above all by the prized cattle. This was likely rare though, perhaps, as is often the case, connected to religious occasions, which would provide yet another reason for most Saxons to resent their Frankish overlords. Imagine the church banning the one event where you could have steaks!
When the Saxons got together to assert their rights and refuse to go to war against each other, they were looking back at a time still remembered when such impositions had been unthinkable. We do not know who started the movement or who its leaders were, but the chroniclers record the name the rebels gave themselves: Stellinga. The word may actually come from Frisian rather than Saxon, but its meaning is fairly clear. It refers to people of the same place, a shared identity and purpose. Stellinga meant neighbour, fellow, comrade.
If we want to reconstruct what the meals at a Stellinga gathering might have looked like, we have to think of a festive occasion. Pagan religious festivals all over ancient Europe tended to involve animal sacrifice with the fresh meat eaten jointly by all participants, and many traditional holidays here still look remarkably like that. So even if the rebels were not pagan, having an open-air barbecue would have fit their style. Even smaller circles, preserved meat or smoked fish were valued and shared to honour guests. Fresh bread, curd cheese, maybe with herbs or garlic, butter, rich porridge, and quite possibly fruit and vegetables make an attractive spread to go with them. The fact that most people rarely ate that way must have heightened the appreciation. Community was worth celebrating.
The war that caused the Stellinga to rise also led to their downfall. We read that Lothar, desperate for support in his bid for power, approached the rebels and promised them to honour their ancient rights, even permit a return to paganism, if they took care of the allies of his opponent Louis. Since he lost, we should probably take the promise of paganism with a grain of salt, but it is not entirely improbable. Slavic peoples in the region were pagan and nobody had a problem with them as allies or subjects. Either way, it is much more likely the Stellinga wanted a say in their fate, a share in the bounty of the commons, and respect for their way of life much more than they wanted to worship Uoden, Thunaer, and Saxnot.
The Saxon rebels handily defeated the noble supporters of Louis, not least because they outnumbered them hugely. After all, people like Warin I, abbot of Corvey, had not expected their levy to turn on them. For a while, the rebels controlled much of the country and probably killed quite a few nobles and clergy. We should doubt whether the picture of wholesale slaughter and destruction the Frankish sources paint is accurate, though.
The problem, as so often happens in history, was that the rebels had trusted the word of a king. Lothar was defeated in the battle of Fontenoy and forced to make peace. Being reduced to ruler of a diminished kingdom (named after him as Lotharingia, the origin of modern Lorraine) may have felt painful to him, but this golden parachute hardly seems a terrible fate, especially compared to the brutal repression Louis visited on the Saxons. Again, chroniclers exaggerate, but we should not entirely dismiss their figures. The records say that 154 leaders were executed and many more captives castrated as the new king reinstated Frankish law and the preeminence of the nobility. His greatest asset in this was that farmers, no matter how many of them there are, need to work to live while soldiers can rely on pay. Thus he could concentrate forces to overcome them piecemeal, spreading terror as he passed. At the same time, this never produced lasting control, and Saxony, while defeated, was neither quiet nor safe.
Today, Emden is mostly a tourist destination; A pretty, oldfashioned town in a remote corner of the country. If most people have heard anything about the region of East Frisia that surrounds it, it is most likely the Ostfriesenwitze – crude jokes painting its inhabitants as clueless rustics that were popular in Germany in the 1980s. In the 16th century, though, Emden was a commercial and intellectual centre whose influence reached far beyond its immediate neighbourhood. It welcomed Protestant refugees from the wars in the Netherlands in its multireligious community, its port thrived as trade bypassed the Spanish blockade of Dutch ports, its church hosted the Synod of Emden in 1571, laying the groundwork for much of today’s Calvinist church structures, and in 1595, its citizens sent their overbearing count Edzard II Cirkzena packing in a confrontation that would be the first such event named a revolutio.
It was not easy even to contemporaries to say whether these events were inspired by religion, money, or political disputes, but in the end, it doesn’t matter very much. Politics is always about money, money is invariably political, and in sixteenth-century Europe, everything was about religion. The broad facts were that the citizens of Emden were, in their majority, Calvinist, getting wealthy from trade, and fiercely defensive of their traditional rights while Count Edzard was Lutheran, absolutist by conviction, and very fond of raising taxes. This was not a good mix.
Emden was part of the Holy Roman Empire, but like much of the north, it had more in common with the Netherlands or even England than the Southern German realms whose culinary heritage is preserved in so many wonderful recipe books. We know a great deal less about its cuisine, and its reputation has not been the best. Even if these areas lacked sophistication, though, they were rich. Rich in money, in pastures and gardens, and consequently, in all the things Renaissance Germans thought mattered: Cheese, butter, meat, lard, eggs, beer, and bread. The good burghers of Emden no doubt ate lavishly, and even the town’s working classes enjoyed the understated comfort that later drew tens of thousands of German Hollandgänger across the border in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A dish that could sustain disputants and militia fighters as much as printers and preachers is that staple of German folklore, the Eierkuchen.
The fascinating, as yet untranslated 1598 Kunstbuch by Franz de Rontzier, cook to the dukes of Brunswick, describes several varieties without much detail. The plain kind with herring and onions, with bacon, or with apples interest me here:
Of Eyerkuchen
(…)
6 You prepare a sauce (brueh) to go over an Eyerkuchen with vinegar, wine, egg yolk, pepper, and salt.
7 You fry streaky bacon in a pan, break eggs over it and strew it with salt when it is done.
8 You fry lean bacon with onions and apples, break eggs over it, and let it bake through.
9 You fry bacon with slices of white bread and large raisins, break eggs into it and bake it through together etc.
(…)
Eyerkuchen of smoked herring (Buecklingen)
1 Clean the Buecklinge, fry them in butter, break eggs over them etc.
2 You fry onions in butter and fry the Bueckling with this until it is done. Break eggs over it, and when it is done, season the Kuchen with wine vinegar and pepper etc.
3 Fry Buecklinge in butter, pour eggs beaten with parsley and rosemary over them etc.
6 (should be 4) Fry Bueckling in butter with gooseberries (Stichbirn), break eggs over it and cook it until it is done.
(p. 534 ff)
There are many other recipes you can check out in the full recipe post, but these are easy, quick, affordable, and filling. The basic principle is easy: You heat some butter or lard in a pan (do not stint on this if you are working outdoors in a North Sea drizzle or protesting in Minnesota winter), fry up what ingredients you want to have in it, and cover it all in beaten eggs, maybe with some extra flour, cream, or milk. The pan is then covered and the whole cooked at a lower heat until it has solidified into a kind of cake which is inverted onto a plate and sliced. It can be served with a basic sauce, drizzled with vinegar, or eaten as it was, hot and rich straight from the kitchen. This is quite unlike what modern Germans think of as an Eierkuchen, more like a frittata or what they call a tortilla in Spain (a Mexican tortilla is a very different thing). A single pan full can feed a small family.
This kind of food – plain, but rich and plentiful – sustained the revolt of 1595 when the citizens of Emden, faced with ever increasing tax demands and peremptory legislation, faced down their count and won. The conflict had been simmering for some time, and the count had obtained an imperial writ to force the city into obedience, but this had the opposite effect. In March of 1595, a crowd of angry protesters marched out of the Great Church to seize the town hall and armoury. Clearly there had been a degree of planning; A militia organisation was set up quickly, officers appointed, and the elected burghers’ committee declared themselves in charge. On 2 April, they conquered the castle that had been meant to dominate their city, ejecting the count and his followers. Over the coming years, simmering hostilities interrupted by various peace treaties and a ferocious exchange of pamphlets accompanied what had quickly become a stalemate. Writers elaborated the ancient Frisian freedom or castigated rebellious subjects, field fortifications were thrown up, conquered, and retaken, and in 1602, after a brief siege of such a fort, the count was actually forced to flee East Frisia, leaving the city of Emden to collect his taxes for two years.
In the end, it Frisian liberty trumped divine right and the nearby Netherlands’ powerful army a distant emperor’s writ. The city council had sought their aid early, and the choice paid off handsomely. Emden, its size increased by outlying areas, would from now on be protected by a garrison paid by the estates of East Frisia and commanded by a Dutch officer. Its council alone made its laws and set its taxes. For over a century, the city proudly declared itself a republic.
There are not many instances of Early Modern revolts succeeding fully, but this is one. Part of the explanation lies in the organisation and determination of the burghers. They had the example of the Dutch estates general to follow and no intention of negotiating an easier arrangement with their ruler – they wanted him gone. The assistance of the Dutch, themselves happy to secure a large port on their northern border as an ally and strongpoint, also helped greatly. Emden, protected by modern fortifications and professional troops, could enjoy a period of quiet prosperity, though the pivotal role it played during the wars of the mid-1500s never returned after the Dutch ports opened again. To this day, grand houses, a massive town hall, and an ornate gate bear witness to its old civic wealth and pride.
