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.
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.
It is not really funny. If the venerable Krambambuli of Prussian military distinction can be read as a humorous take on severe alcohol dependence, this is a jocular celebration of political arson. That part may need a bit of explaining. During the Paris Commune uprising of 1871, a legend was spread in the press that the revolutionaries planned to destroy the city using petrol bombs. This was nonsense, but the story spread beyond France’s border and attached to wider and wilder imaginings of what the Socialist and Anarchist underground might be up to. In 1881, the Social Democratic journalist Jacob Audorf wrote a mocking song about this spectre of terror that stayed popular through the pre-WWI years.
Wir sind die Petroleure Das weiß wohl jedermann Drum tun wir alle Ehre Dem Petroleum an. Und weil´s so schön zum Brennen ist Und uns viel Licht verschafft, Sei auch Petrol zu dieser Frist Uns edler Gerstensaft!
Hier Petroleum, da Petroleum Petroleum um und um! Laßt die Humpen frisch voll pumpen: Dreimal hoch — Petroleum!
Philister rümpft die Nase Und meint, es riecht nicht gut Schimpft hinter seinem Glase Uns „Sozialistenbrut“ Er liest im Geldsacksblatt sich dumm, meint was er liest, sei wahr Brenn heller, lieb Petroleum Mach ihm den Standpunkt klar!
(refrain)
Schon brennt es in den Städten So licht und frank und frei Man spürt, daß es vonnöten Auch auf den Dörfern sei Es leuchtet in dem Heere schon Man ist vor Staunen stumm Trotz Sub- und Ordination Hell das Petroleum!
(refrain)
Und ob auch trüb die Zeiten Wir wollen treu vereint Stets mutig vorwärts schreiten Ist mächtig auch der Feind Und sperrt der Bruder Staatsanwalt Auch einmal einen ein Kriegt´s Petroléum mehr Gehalt Und brennt noch mal so rein!
(refrain)
Petroleum-Genossen Ihr Brüder, wanket nicht! Tu´ jeder unverdrossen Die Petroleuren-Pflicht! Wir kümmern uns den Kuckuck um Die schwarze Stöckerei Das Wahlrecht und Petroleum sei unser Feldgeschrei
(refrain)
We are the petroleurs As everybody knows So we hold in high honour Petroleum (i.e.kerosene) Because it burns so well And gives us much light Let petroleum be to us today Our noble beer!
Petroleum here, petroleum there Petroleum all about Let us fill the beer mugs afresh Three cheers for petroleum!
The philistine sneers And says it smells unpleasant Behind his glass, he insults Us as "Socialist rabble" He reads himself stupid in his millionaire newspaper Thinks what he reads is true Burn brighter, dear petroleum Make our position clear to him
(refrain)
It's already burning in the towns Bright and free You feel it is also needed In the villages It's already lighting up the army We are stunned into silence Despite sub- and ordination Petroleum's burning bright
(refrain)
And though the times are dark We will always stay united Steadily going forward Though the enemy is mighty And though brother prosecutor May lock up someone sometimes, The petroleum is the stronger And burns all the purer for it!
(refrain)
Comrades in petroleum Brothers, do not falter Let every man unfailingly do His petroleering duty We do not care a button for "Black Stöcker" policies The vote and petroleum Will be our battlecry!
As an explanatory aside, the German word Petroleum correspons roughly to what the Victorians called kerosene, common lamp and household stove fuel. In an age before cars, that was how people encountered distilled crude oil. The Stöcker referenced in the fifth stanza is Adolf Stöcker, an early exponent of popular antisemitism and conservative outrage politics.
Illustration of an entrance to a Kneipe in Berlin by Heinrich Zille courtesy of wikimedia commons. The publican is pictured with the quote: “My sausage is good. Where there is no meat, there is blood. Where there is no blood, there is bread. You can’t criticise my sausage!”
Unlike the drinking ritual of military officers or student fraternities, this songh had no specific location or time. It could be sung in the company of Social Democrats and their political fellow travellers, which would usually mean a drinking place, a Kneipe. To this day, in the face of competition from bars, bistros, and clubs, the oldfashioned Kneipe has retained a place in Germany’s culture. It is where you go to drink with friends, a traditionally (but never exclusively) masculine space for beery companionship and conversation. The typical aesthetic of today is a brewery-sponsored post-WWII phenomenon, though. Working class Kneipen before 1918 were often extremely basic. They were also known hotbeds of sedition and revolution, monitored closely by the undercover police. Richard Evans turned those files into an absolutely fascinating book, Kneipengespräche im Kaiserreich.
This was a very different place to an Offizierskasino. Barriers to entry were few. The people here had nothing to defend by exclusion – they gained strength from unity and had little beyond numbers on their side, after all. Keeping up appearances was not a full-time occupation, though masks of masculinity and good cheer were uniquitous in Wilhelmine Germany. You could still be unwelcome, but it would be by appearing to look down on them. Subject to daily humiliation, working class men could be a prickly lot.
What these places had in common was alcohol and music, the universal social lubricants of pre-modern Germany. Officers might have pianos, fine wines and cuisine bourgeoise while workers made do with draught beer and Schmalzbrot, but this part was the same: Men sang together, they drank together, swaying to the rhythm, built social bonds and identities. We can still see this in football (soccer) fandom or the Oktoberfest. It used to be universal. There were teetotal Socialists, but it was no easy path to tread.
Many of the songs were the same, fashionable ditties and folk tunes, but as for the student fraternities and the military, there was a distinct corpus of working-class songs, many of them overtly political. Singing them was not without risk. There was no such thing as ‘illegal music’ in Wilhelmine Germany, but on a bad day, the authorities could still nab you for anything from public nuisance to incitement to riot. That said, the law had considerable latitude and people used it to the hilt.
That is where songs like this fit in. You could sing about the great tomorrow, poke fun at the police and the clergy, or versify the political struggles of the day, but there was an anarchic joy in associating with this brand of violent activism. Of course the people who sang this were not arsonists. The whole point of the song was the absurdity of the idea that working class associations were some kind of dark international cabal dedicated to the destruction of civilisation. Even anarchists who might be open to some incendiary ‘propaganda of the deed’ were a vanishingly small percentage of the movement. But if you spent you days organising people into committees and mutual aid organisations, holding debates, struggling endlessly over incremental progress, and suffered the disdain of the establishment for it, imagining a different kind of revolutionary power must have been a balm. What would it be like, to actually be the people the bourgeoisie imagined and feared? What if you had the power to simply burn it all down?
It must have been tempting to imagine, a few beers in, on a hard wooden bench.
Rifleman of the 14th Mecklenburger Jäger, courtesy of wikimedia commons
Füretangbowle, second type
(communicated by the Grand Ducal Mecklenburg Jäger Battalion Nr. 14)
You heat three bottles of red wine in a cauldron, remove the same from the fire, and set it down on the table. A piece of sugar the size of a strong man’s fist is wedged into a cleaned pair of fire tongs, good arrack poured over it (one bottle, by swigs, poured from the serving spoon, not from the bottle) and set alight. The sugar is left to burn until it has entirely melted into the cauldron. The drink can be given a spicy flavour (würzigen Geschmack) by adding some bitter orange peel and a few cloves, but you must refrain from adding any water as it is spoiled by the slightest addition of this. After the flame dies, the drink is filled into cups (Obertassen) which each participants sets onto a saucer sprinkled with spirit-infused salt. After all lamps in the room are extinguished, this is set alight and the Crambambulilied is sung.
As a recipe, this is not extraordinary at all. It’s a version of Feuerzangenbowle, a mulled wine prepared with flambé sugar that is still a popular wintertime treat and showpiece at many Christmas markets. The unusual-looking name is simply the Low German version of that word. Neither is it particularly strong. The preceding recipe combines a bottle of rum with one of strong red wine for a much more potent mix. What makes this particular recipe interesting is the ritual and cultural associations it has. Let’s go on a bit of a dive.
We can easily imagine the effect of setting alight every single cup in a darkened room with eerie blue flame. If we briefly put on our anthropology thinking caps, it is not that unusual for warrior societies to share psychoactive drugs as part of a group ritual enhanced by fire, light, shadow, and chants. Here, then, we see the chosen young Germans inducted into their role as warleaders in a secret nighttime ceremony, their minds opened by the drug consumed jointly as part of an elaborate ritual, bodies synchronised through sacred chanting…
But seriously, there was something like that going on. Our first pointer is the choice of a specific song and its social context. The author of the recipe clearly expects the reader to know the Crambabulilied, and it is easy enough to identify: It is a humorous paean written in 1745 by Christoph Friedrich Wedekind, the original runs to 102 stanzas and celebrates Krambambuli, a specific kind of liquor made in Danzig (today Gdansk in Poland). This was coloured a bright red with juniper berries and shows up surprisingly consistently in German culture, given how niche it was in culinary terms. The name seems to have stuck in people’s minds, leading to it becoming the title of a famous novella and no fewerthanfivemovieversions as well as a shorthand for just about any strong, red alcoholic drink, but above all mulled wine, in student parlance.
The song, shortened to a more practical length (here with an English translation), was set to a jaunty, easily manageable tune and recordings are fairly easy to find even today. It’s the kind of thing you can probably still manage a few beers in and does not require any great vocal range or lung capacity. Neither is it maudlin or festive, and certainly not mystical. Crashing mugs on the table to its quick rhythm seems entirely fitting for red-faced, swaying students to do. This was the music schunkeln was invented for.
Students are also the reason people still know the song, or more specifically, German student fraternities, the Corps or Burschenschaften. These organisations were the backbone of university social life in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and they largely revolved around nationalism, athletics (often swordplay), and alcohol. The Crambambulilied was not a folk song, not something you would expect just anyone to know, but it became part of the ‘Kommers‘, the drinking rituals of these fraternities and thus familiar to everyone in their penumbra.
And that is how it ends up being performed in an officers’ mess in 1910. Not any officers’ mess, by the way. It fits this particular one fairly well. The Großherzoglich Mecklenburgisches Jäger-Bataillon Nr. 14, for all its grand-sounding title, was not really very fashionable or traditional. Its pedigree went no farther back than 1821, constituted to give the short-lived German Confederation a shadow of an army, and though it was provided with a grand ducal association and integrated into the Prussian military, it was not properly either of these things. Neither was it a traditional regiment. An independent battalion without a proper colonel was not where you really wanted to be in the complex, creaking edifice we call the ‘German army’ (there was no such thing in reality). Between 1868 and 1882, while garrisoned in Schwerin, its officers were even forced to live in a local hotel as more senior and connected units turfed them out of overcrowded army facilities. By 1910, when the recipe was recorded, the unit had been posted away from its traditional recruitment area to Colmar, an unusual thing for German units.
The unit’s quarters in Colmar c. 1910, courtesy of wikimedia commons
Normally, military units in the German Empire were formally under the command of the respective member states and stationed in their territory. This did not apply in the Reichsland of Alsace-Lorraine annexed from France after Franco-Prussian war in 1871. The government did not trust the locals there to not wish the French back. As a result, the area was directly ruled by the Empire (it did not go well) and had no military of its own, its recruits posted away from home and its garrisons filled by mostly Prussian units. Though close to the French border and thus likely to see action early if the war everyone expected actually came, this was not a prestigious or desirable posting.
That was the kind of unit the Jäger-Bataillon Nr 14 was. It did not have young men of ancient pedigree clamour to fill its ranks, but it would certainly attract the upwardly mobile, men from families who had to work for careers and live on what they made at the end. A military career could be attractive if it succeeded, but it was a risk. Life as a junior officer cost more than it brought in pay. University – law, economics, medicine or public administration – was a safer bet. Many had relatives there.
Another connection between the worlds was a peculiarity of the German militaries, the Einjährig Freiwillige (one-year volunteers). This was a kind of unpaid military internship open to the educated classes. Instead of being conscripted for a regular turn of two or three years, they served only one, but had to pay for their own equipment, accommodation, and food. During this time, they were selected for leadership training and, crucially, unlike all other enlisted men, had access to the officers’ mess.
The officers’ mess, slightly confusingly known as the Kasino in contemporary parlance, was basically a shared household in which the officers of a unit ate and slept, but in social terms it was much more than that. An Offizierskasino developed its own, secluded social space, access guarded jealously. Its rituals could be obscure to outsiders, used to mark belonging and strengthen bonds between officers. What they were not was hermetically sealed. The Prussian army especially used them to create a large cadre of reserve officers by passing crowds of one-year volunteers through them. Just out of school and on their way to university and civilian careers, these men coveted the military association to boost their status and opportunities. Some stayed on, becoming career officers with the approval of the unit’s officer corps, but many more left, taking with them a uniform they would proudly display every Sedantag and a handful of friendships and connections that might help them in the future.
This is where student life bleeds into military culture. Career or reserve, these were young men of a kind: clannish, snobbish, intensely ambitious and driven. Both the Prussian military and its academic professions were very competitive. Young men with no secure position defended the social status that afforded them the opportunity to enter the race jealously. Knowing their shibboleths and rituals, sharing their stories, and not least jointly finding release from the intense pressure in alcohol made you part of this world. It’s a lot to find in a silly ditty and a bit of stage lighting effect, but food history can be like that.
When it was invaded, the city of Paderborn had more glorious history than present attraction. Once an imperial residence of Charlemagne and archepiscopal see for much of central Germany, it had been reduced to a middling territory of the Holy Roman Empire under the governance of its prince-archbishop, still burdened with debt from the Seven-Years’ War and struggling to modernise its economy. In 1781, hostile troops entered its gates with loaded muskets to impose the law of their commander and break the resistance of the hapless citizenry.
Well, sort of. They had muskets. And intimidation had probably been the idea when they settled into their occupation, though the fact that people played mocking music in the background probably did not help matters. Or that the soldiers left the city every evening to return to quarters, only to march back in every morning. Really, it was the kind of vaguely silly spectacle that the Old Empire excelled at producing, and the start of it had been the most German of occasions, a Kaffeeklatsch.
A nineteenth-century interpretation playing up the comedic value of the scene (misdating events to 1777), courtesy of wikisource
The 1780s were not, by most objective measures, good times in Europe. It wasn’t just bad weather – though the tail end of the ‘Little Ice Age’ bit badly enough to produce a measurable dip in height records reflecting widespread malnutrition. Part of it was actually innovation: growing cities and increasingly streamlined production meant that more people could be employed at ever shrinking wages while the agricultural revolution made sure a steady stream of unemployed rural workers were available. And this innovation, a growth in pre-industrial productivity through what is sometimes called the ‘Industrious Revolution‘, produced winners, especially among the educated and wealthy middle classes.
They enjoyed all kinds of newfangled luxuries – sheet music, novels and poetry, fashionable clothing, new kinds of tableware, and new foods and drinks to go with it. Cookbooks proliferated, new recipes, usually labelled in French, spread, but above all, colonial imports were added to the table. In Germany, as throughout Europe, sugar consumption rose drastically, though it was still far from modern levels, and an increasing number of people also made coffee part of their daily diet.
Not everybody liked it. Brewers worried it would endanger their livelihood. Physicians were concerned about the possible effect on drinkers’ health. Johann Sebastian Bach, who drank coffee, thought it was all a bit ridiculous. But nothing could stop the rise of coffee from an exotic luxury served in coffee houses in Bremen and Hamburg in the 1670s to a regular article of consumption for the moderately wealthy a century later. Nothing, that is, except the mighty Prussian East India Company and its main import article. Despite all efforts to make them abandon the habit, the famously Nederlandophile people of Emden and East Frisia remain dedicated tea drinkers to this day, something that should be worth its own article at some point. The rest of the country fell in love with the brew.
Any drink this popular generated a wealth of opinions about how it should be prepared and enjoyed, and coincidentally, an entire book was published on the subject in 1781 by a physician named Franz Joseph Hofer. He describes the process as follows:
…If the coffee is to be enjoyed profitably, the unnecessary watery parts must first be removed by roasting or burning, the oil is made suitable through activation of its salt, and the phlegmy parts allowed to unite with the water without reducing the useful gummy, earthy, and nutritious parts to ash by excessive heat, driving out the etheric oil, and render the resinous element sharp and empyreumatic. If, on the contrary, the beans are not roasted enough, much remains that detracts from the flavour, scent, and potency of the coffee. It is always better to roast it less than too much.
The best degree of roasting is when the coffee beans take on a violet colour and exude a pleasant, scented oil. This roasting or burning commonly takes place in an iron vessel. Usually, it is a closed vessel so that not as much (of the aroma) is wafted away. Yet it is better done in a glazed earthen vessel (Tigel) in which the beans are stirred with a wooden spatula until all have attained a light brown colour. Then, they should be poured into a cloth and left in it until they are cold. The same (the people who do this) also advise to pound the beans in a mortar rather than grind them in a common mill. The reason for both is obvious: Iron, once heated, changes the beans far more than earthenware and the mortar is far less heated by pounding than the mill by grinding. You should also not roast and grind more beans at once than you intend to use, because the best and most efficacious oil is lost from ground coffee.
However, if you do prepare more powder in one go, you should keep it in a well-closed tin or glazed earthen vessel. Krüger (a medical writer) advises to pour olive oil on the surface of the coffee powder which prevents its oils from evaporating while not rendering the coffee disgusting.
From these properly ground beans prepared in one of the ways described above, coffee is again prepared by various methods.
Some pour boiling water onto a coffee powder contained in a funnel or pointy cloth bag and rejoice to receive a clear, brown and pleasant-smelling tincture which contains only the finest oil with the most easily soluble gummy and resinous parts, thus passes through the veins more easily and heats the body less.
Others treat is they do tea: They prepare an infusion (Anguß) of boiling water and leave it to simmer gently on a coal fire in an earthen pot. If they then filter it, it is to be preferred to the above. Those who let their coffee boil strongly deceive themselves if they think that their coffee, for being more bitter, thicker, and stronger, is also more virtuous. If you want to prepare coffee a la mode de France, I will give you the recipe here: Throw the coffee powder into boiling water. If it is driven to the top and the edges by the boiling, move it to the centre with a spoon and stir until it settles to the bottom. This motion is intended to reduce waste and improve the coffee. After the coffee has then been boiled up and again allowed to settle a few times, you taker it off the fire and leave it to stand covered until you can pour off the clear liquid, unless you want to filter it. But it should not be left standing for too long because the water would extract more resinous components. For this reason, coffee (the beverage) does not tolerate boiling well, and one can imagine how much to expect from coffee that has been boiled again.
I do not condemn the habit of adding hartshorn (ammonium carbonate) or isinglass (dried swim bladder used as a gelatin source) to coffee in order to clarify it in that these ingredients are, in part, innocent and, in the other, contain some nutritive power. Yet this addition greatly reduces the pleasure to be had from the coffee. If you simply pour on cold water, you receive it as clear and with no such loss.
Preparation also requires a dosage. Blankard believed he was preparing a properly flavourful coffee by mixing a teakettle or two Maaß (about 2 litres) of water, depending on whether he wanted it strong or weak, with one or one and a half Loth (16-24 grammes) of coffee powder.
Such a brew makes my stomach cramp. Mr Spielmann advises 6 ounces (Unzen – approx. 200ml) of water to two Loth (approx. 32 grammes) of coffee powder.
This is likely too strong for many. But if you take, for a good Schoppen (approximately 0.4-0.5 litres) of water, a Loth (approx. 16 grammes) of coffee powder, boil it as described above and filter it, you have a moderate coffee that can be served medice (with no concern for health). The beans, the roast, the temper, and the additives … shall teach everyone how strong they may prepare their coffee.
(…)
So far, we have spoken of coffee with no admixtures, but it is commonly drunk with sugar, milk, or cream, along with which many also enjoy bread. The Arabs and Turks are said to take it without sugar or milk, and some Germans copy the Turks …
In many places, especially where there are coffee houses, a special kind of bread is baked. Without doubt, this bread, which is similar to biscuit (Zwieback), is healthier than that for which butter and eggs are used. Sugared (bread) (Zucker-) or other similar baked goods are unhealthy.
Yet often, one can have neither biscuit not butter or egg bread because the bakers, by ancient tradition, may bake no bread other than what our wise ancestors, who did not drink coffee, also ate, and such policy is praiseworthy. What a piece of black beggars’ bread (Bettelbrot) tastes like with coffee, I do not know – yet I witnessed that it appeared to go together quite well.
This may not sound too appealing to modern coffee drinkers, but it is at least interesting that some Germans already enjoyed filtered coffee. It is still the most common kind and today generally thought to have been invented by Melitta Bentz. The nibbles served with it may be more appealing.
Zwieback is a little problematic because the words covers so much ground, but at least it is fairly unlikely to be the hardtack called Schiffszwieback today. This was usually called Schiffsbrot until the 19th century. I would place it closer to what we call by that name today, and there are some recipes that support this. The 1723 Brandenburgisches Koch-Buch (a pirated copy of the earlier Die wohl-unterwiesene Köchin by Maria Sophia Schellhammer which was first published in 1692) has several recipes, with this one the most likely:
To bake common or plain Zwieback
You take 2 Maaß of wheat flour and half a pound of fine sugar along with a Loth of anise, fennel, half as much aniseed, and 6 spoonfuls of yeast. Then you boil half a Maaß or a little more of water, add a quarter pound of butter to it, or a little more, let it stand for a while until it cools, and then mix it all very thoroughly until it is as thick as a semmel dough. Let it stand for a while until it rises from the yeast, then roll it out quite thin, brush it with butter, and bake it in an oven that is not heated too strongly.
(p.355)
Oddly, the Maß was not officially a measure used in Brandenburg in 1723, but it usually came to a little over a litre and that does not seem too off the mark here. The Loth, 1/32 of a pound, was 14.6 grammes in Brandenburg at the time, and around that level elsewhere. The result is a yeast-leavened, slightly sweet and notably spicy, thin cookie, probably baked to a dry crisp. This should go well with tea also.
The Zuckerbrot Hofer disapproves of, on the other hand, seems to have been a much daintier confection. Marcus Looft’s Nieder=sächsisches Koch=buch of 1758 has a detailed recipe:
Zucker=Brodt
Take eight good, large, fresh eggs, only the yolks beaten together, then stirred small (i.e. until they are a cohesive liquid) and one pound of grated sugar gradually worked in by handfuls so it becomes quite thick. Then also add a spoonful of rosewater, cardamom, and cinnamon, and stir all together thoroughly. Then beat the egg whites to a stiff foam and add them along with half a pound of fine flour and half a pound of fine, sifted, white starch that is stirred in skilfully at the very end. Then have small, elongated tin moulds first brushed with butter and then put it in them and bake it. If you have no tin moulds, you can make little paper boxes, half a sheet in size, and also brush them with butter, and bake it in them. When it is done, cut it in pieces as you wish to have it, dry it a little, and store it.
On the whole, this does not sound too unpleasant, either, though I can see how it would feel decadent. But altogether, a pleasant, invigorating drink, sweet nibbles, and pleasant conversation, what could be the problem? In a word, money.
Coffee, after all, did not grow in Germany, a problem that generations of German governments would face through modern history. In the 1780s, most of it was imported from the French colony of St Domingue (today Haiti) and thus produced profit for France, not the local economy. By eighteenth-century economic orthodoxy, this was an intolerable state of affairs. The strength of an economy was measured in the products it put out and the influx of gold and silver it created. To that kind of thinking, an outflow of cash was intolerable. Something needed to be done.
Paderborn was far from the only place where government measures bit in the late 18th century. Prussia imposed high tariffs to boost local substitutes. Hesse-Kassel actually banned coffee entirely. Both countries for a time commissioned veterans as Kaffeeriecher, bounty hunters who would smell out roasting beans and deliver the culprit to the authorities (the histpry of coffee in Germany gets wild). Prince-Archbishop William Anthony was not ready to go to such extreme lengths. Sagely, he decided not to impose a complete ban. Instead, he decreed that the lower orders would be forbidden from wasting their hard-earned money on the frivolous enjoyment of coffee for their own protection, or that of their taxable incomes. The nobility and clergy, naturally, could be trusted with so problematic a substance.
Nobody is entirely sure what he expected the response to be, but when a city official responsible for enforcing the ban found his wine cellar inexplicably flooded one morning, it was clear to all observers that it was not positive. People protested. There was public talk of clandestine, nightly coffee feasts and invitations passed from hand to hand. On 12 August 1781, people gathered in the streets to drink coffee, play music, and generally have fun in defiance of the rules. Official documents speak of rowdy drunkenness, but we have no eyewitness accounts and no record of damage or injuries. It was probably just a street party.
Two days later, the grenadiers moved into town. Paderborn actually had a garrison of regular infantry, but they had not intervened. The authorities apparently felt that the situation required more troops on hand. The local population met them not with resistance, which even a small force would have easily broken, but with mocking songs. City officials wrote letters of protest against this unwarranted punishment. At any rate, there wasn’t enough room in town, so the soldiers would march back to quarters every evening. One can only guess how they felt about the whole thing. After some back and forth and an exchange of legal rescripts, the daily army commute ended. Things quieted down. On paper, nothing had changed. No judgement was passed, the archbishop remained in power, the coffee ban on the books. It was simply no longer enforced, flouted in private, then increasingly in public, until Napoleon casually ended the archbishopric’s existence as a sovereign state and made coffee the least of everyone’s problems. Big politics had arrived.
All of this sounds silly and a bit twee to us, and the nineteenth-century historians we often depend on certainly share that perspective. It is very important to remember that the people in government did not see it that way. They were entirely serious about the laws they passed, their legal disputes and threats of force, and they had a point. If it had come to violence, people would have been just as dead from the tiny Paderborn grenadier company’s ragged musketry as from any of the more famous militaries of the age.
The silliness was deliberate. It was a tactic of resistance. An official could fight violence or sabotage, but an improvised statue depicting him on donkey-back appearing in the town square was another matter. Troops found it hard to intimidate people who deployed choirs mocking them with religious hymns wherever they marched. The government had no way to stop this short of shooting people, and to the credit of the men in charge, they did not.
A lot of protest in the preindustrial world revolved around symbolic gestures, around claiming public space and breaking with custom. This mattered a lot, and it still does. The exercise of power depends on people following customary rules. Refusing to do so – no longer giving deference, keeping quiet, or giving way – can make the mighty look like fools, and that alone is a mighty weapon. Do not underestimate the power of a defiant street party. And if you still have to storm the Bastille later, at least you had some good coffee beforehand.
Big building projects in the countryside tend to make a lot of people unhappy, but archeologists love them. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany saw an enormous amount of infrastructure development, and in the process, excavations and unrelated discoveries completely upended the traditional view of Bronze Age Central Europe. Much of the story around these finds is speculative, but it has become much more solid lately. It is a tale of power and its abuse, pride before the fall, gold, amber, armies, and some legitimately humongous millstones.
The most famous object in this story was not discovered in excavations, but by grave robbers: the Nebra sky disc. This bronze and gold disc, about the size of a dinner plate, shows sun, moon, and stars and has been convincingly interpreted as depicting a formula for reconciling solar and lunar calendars. It was this that drew tourists, funding, and global attention, but many of the other things coming to light put together an even more intriguing picture.
We have, by definition, no written records of prehistory, so our terminology is fuzzy and unwieldy. The area of East Central Germany in the Middle Bronze Age was part of what we call the Unetice culture (in German: Aunjetitzer Kultur). Its settlements and cemeteries are tracked by a specific kind of handled cup, presumably a drinking vessel. The people farmed and raised cattle, pigs, and sheep, lived in wooden longhouses and seem to have been led by local chieftains. It was a warlike society, at least in appearances (The modern United States is an example of a relatively peaceful society that still values weapons as markers of masculinity, and so may these people have for all we know). Men were buried with bronze weapons, chieftains in richly appointed graves, and settlements were fortified with palisades.
Except that sometimes, they weren’t. About 1800 BCE, in exactly the area where the sky disc was buried, the chieftain and warrior graves stop. Instead, we find a seriesof trulygigantic individualburial mounds. The men in them – kings, in all likelihood – were given rich sets of gold jewelry and decorated bronze weapons, more than previous chiefs had, and no doubt the burial chambers had been richly furnishedl with perishable wealth as well. Settlements without fortifications show up, and so does a strange kind of longhouse without stables.
While weapons no longer show up in graves, there are several hoards of bronze axes that are absolutelyfascinating. They are largely identical, made around the same time, some show signs of wear, and they were buried together with a smaller number of daggers and dagger-axes. At least one of these hoards is associated with one of the stable-less halls, and archeologists now interpret them as military equipment. The dagger-axes indicated leaders, the axeheads regular troops, and the halls, at least part of the time, probably served as their accommodation. Without written sources, scholars are reticent to call it an army, but it really looks a lot like one.
Part of an axe hoard now on display at the Neues Museum in Berlin, courtesy of wikimedia commons
This is also where another of the strange things showing up in the archeological record becomes interesting: the grindstones. In various places, but notably as part of the enormous burial mound called the Bornhöck, grindstones for grain were found. They basically looked the same as they had since the beginning of agriculture: a large, flat stone underneath, a smaller rider moved back and forth on top, and small, round hammerstones to periodically roughen the surface. There were no rotary millstones yet, so this was how flour was produced, and similar tools, usually made of granite, were found in Unetice culture homes everywhere. People ground spelt and barley on them and baked it into bread.
But these were huge. They were far too large to serve a single household, so heavy that they were most likely worked by two persons, and they are clearly associated with the ruler. We can easily envision them used to feed an army, the workforce of the giant construction sites, retainers, and foreign guests. They may have been operated by captives or slaves – at least that was how they did things in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Along with bread, usually baked in the household, people ate meat, fish, legumes (probably not a lot), nuts, and fruit, but very prominently dairy products. Cattle was important as a source of traction and a measure of wealth, and along with the milk of sheep and goats, they provided the basis for what was probably mainly a domestic cheese production. Of course we have no recipes, just the evidence of pottery strainers, residue analysis, and an unbroken tradition of cottage cheese as far back as written records survive. Tacitus describes lac concretum as the food of the Germans in the first century CE, and throughout the middle ages, this kind of fresh cheese, often known as ziger, was a staple of everyday diet. Unfortunately, as with many basic foods, we do not have recipes surviving until very late. Everyone knew how to make the stuff, why write it down? In German, the first really good description comes from Anna Wecker in 1598:
Preparing the zueger
All zueger of plain milk, be it of sheep, goats or cows, are made as is written of the almond zueger before. And the scheidmolck (acidic whey) is best which you obtain from those who make cheese and churn butter, just as you can sometimes get the zueger from those people. But if not (if you cannot get it) and you must separate it with wine or vinegar, do not do too much so that it does not become sour. Vinegar also affects it harder than wine which is why you quickly add too much of it.
If you have made such a zueger or one as described after, pour the whey into a clean dish until it settles well. Pour off the clear (liquid) above into a pitcher or small pot that is new. Keep it in a place that is not too warm, well closed. When you wish to use it, remove the skin if it has formed one and pour of it into that (liquid) which you want to separate. It does not matter if the skin is grey or yellow, the (liquid) underneath stays good. You may salt it, that way it keeps all the better. It becomes like a vinegar. Always refill the pot again.
The process is described in more detail for almond milk which was a late medieval affectation:
… Hang it over the fire and stir it until it is just about to begin boiling. Then add a little rennet (Lab oder Renne) as though you would make another kind of cheese. Or add seydmilchen (acidic whey), or if you do not have that either, take wine or vinegar enough to make it curdle. … Let it curdle like a zueger or cheese and take it off the fire then.
Set it on a ring (a wooden coaster), sprinkle water all around it with your hand, and cover it with a white cloth as you do an egg zueger (hard custard). Take it up soon with a spoon that has many holes, into baskets or other moulds.
The variety is interesting and may go back a long way. Rennet, an enzyme from the stomachs of calves, would have been available to cattle-raising farmers, vinegar could well already have been in use, and the acidic bacterial cultures of the scheidmolck Wecker describes, like brewing yeast and sourdough, can be captured wild and continued in use. Quite possibly the people of the king under Bornhoeck already used all three, though they probably had no wine yet.
Bronze Age finds routinely include cooking pots and cheese strainers. The people knew how to make cheesecloth from nettle or linen fibre and presumably sieves from horsehair, and they had a tradition of centuries to draw on processing their milk, not least because they had to. Lactose intolerance was common in the population, so drinking fresh milk was not an option. Varying the temperature and treatment of the curds allowed for a lot of variation, from yoghurt-like spoonable dishes to firm feta- or peynir-like preparations to hard cheeses that in turn could be salted or air-dried, brined, smoked, or wrapped in leaves and aged. We cannot know (yet), but the Unetice people could easily have enjoyed a variety of fresh and mature cheeses flavoured with salt, herbs, and fruit with their bread and stew. A comparison of size and dental status shows that the people of Unetice culture on average were taller, better nourished, and had better teeth than their neolithic forebears.
Studying the skeleton found in the barrow of Helmsdorf showed that the elite enjoyed a very meat-rich diet, especially the meat of immature animals – lamb, veal, and kid. This suggests they preferred tender meat and likely roasted it. The same skeleton also revealed massive, lethal injuries from being stabbed at close range with a dagger. Traditions, it seems, run deep in both the culinary and the political sphere.
If this is indeed the first known tyrannicide in European history, the attempt was unsuccessful. The system was stable enough to continue after the death of one ruler, at least for some time. There were more rich graves with the same set of jewelry, more axehead hoards, more of the same. In detail, we know little about how this kingdom functioned. It is possible that the rulers’ power was based on spiritual or religious authority, possibly linked to the sky disc itself, but they might equally have been able to monopolise local copper mining, control the amber trade, export enslaved people, or simply led a particularly successful warband to military dominance. These things have happened in societies literate scholars labelled ‘primitive’, the most famous case being the rise of Shaka and the Zulu kingdom which was observed by British officials and eventually turned into 1980s TV.
Gold artifacts from the Leubingen grave: garment pins, temple rings, a hair ornament, and an arm ring. Courtesy of wikimedia commons
However it came into being, this kingdom produced a notable amount of social stratification. A small number of exceptionally large and rich graves exist alongside many that are poorer in grave goods than those of other Unetice settlements. There is also an interesting pattern in the way copper and amber are distributed around it, suggesting it dominated and blocked exchange systems. To its north and west, copper and bronze did not appear in anything like similar quantity for centuries while amber becomes rare to its south and east. Perhaps controlling the supply was what made them rich, or perhaps the rulers simply claimed these goods for themselves. Either way, it would take some considerable time until new routes developed going around them to the east, bringing coveted amber south.
In the way archeology will – and in this case with some likelihood – the end of the ‘rulers of Nebra’ is linked to a natural disaster, in this case the aftermath of the eruption of Thera. At this point, the system was simply unstable enough to collapse in the way neighbouring chiefdoms did not. A study of the sky disc suggests that the astronomical knowledge encoded in it was either lost or became irrelevant. The disc was modified, first to include a stylised ship, then holes for mounting on some sort of display. It was too precious to ever have served a purely practical purpose, but towards the end, an artifact of celestial knowledge was turned into a mere symbol of power for its own sake. If it really was owned by the princes, this suggests nothing good about their rule.
The sky disc was buried with a set of objects looking remarkably like princely grave goods. It clearly was deliberate and may have been the final act of some power elite hoping to turn away divine wrath or lay to rest an era best forgotten. In the aftermath, the pattern familiar from nearby regions continues. We find weapons in graves again, chieftains buried with smaller amounts of jewelry, and metal goods in many more burials. Copper and bronze flowed northeast. No more gigantic barrows were raised.
That is all we know, and much of it could still be upended by a new excavation any day. Still, the story looks solid, and it raises the question how this felt to the people who lived through it. Did the people raising the Bornhöck hill feel proud to contribute, or were they forced into corvée labour by axe-bearing thugs? Were farmers grateful for the safety of unfortified villages, or feel defenceless in the face of royal exactions? Clearly, though this power structure outlasted its founders, it was not embraced as a cosmic necessity by its subjects. They did not choose a new king after they were rid of the old one. Perhaps this state had less to offer them than other Bronze Age polities, or just leakier borders that allowed the discontent to simply leave and set up elsewhere. Or perhaps, they actually decided to take matters into their own hands and remove their useless prince, just as it seems other subjects did around this time. We have not found the palace of the ‘Nebra rulers’ and cannot say whether it decayed back into the soil or perished in a blaze. If we ever find it, it could be fascinating indeed.
As it is, the legacy of this vanishing kingdom stands as a warning, or encouraging, example. We can easily envision how, having built up control on the strength of genuine abilities, offering their subjects identification and probably some real benefit, a dynasty of rulers increasingly embraced their power as a given. Their grave goods, though functionally the same – a set of weapons, arm rings, and elaborate pins suggesting a traditional royal garment – the amount of gold used rose from extravagant to genuinely staggering. There is, by the way, every reason to believe they knew, at least through second-hand accounts, of Mycenean Greece, Minoan Crete, the Hittites, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. When excavators their barrows ‘northern pyramids’, they may have been more accurate than they imagined. A king trying to copy the example of New Kingdom pharaohs, or even the more modest Mycenean tumuli, could well have made himself thoroughly unpopular. If you want to run a state for your personal benefit – and who wouldn’t? – it is important to give your subjects something valuable in return. Otherwise, they might just decide a king is not worth the bother and expense.
From 23 to 25 August of 1791, the city of Hamburg was filled with songs and old-world pageantry. Processions of journeymen paraded through the streets to music, waving flags and green boughs. The Honourable Council was terrified.
Just a few days before, a trivial altercation had started in a locksmith’s workshop over the way the master favoured one journeyman over the others. The man in question was betrothed to the master’s daughter, so jealousy probably played a role here. The men first called on the self-governing body of their guild to fine their colleague for shirking, but after he refused to accept the judgement, they decided that the unfair employer was at fault. He was declared geschimpft which meant no journeymen would work for him until the ban was revoked.
Things escalated rapidly from here. A few days later, the entirety of 80 journeymen locksmiths refused work until the sanction was honoured and the masters called on the council. With ill-considered heavy-handedness, the city government arrested three ringleaders and expelled the rest of the protesters from the city without their papers, tools, or even change of clothes.
These were not abject exploited wretches. Artisanal production in Hamburg, as in many other places in Europe, was controlled by the Ämter, the artisan guilds, who regulated every aspect of it. Entry was by apprenticeship and rigorous testing, and the number of workshops in a city was limited to reduce competition and ensure an adequate livelihood to all. This meant that most journeymen could never aspire to mastership unless they inherited or married into one. But they still were credentialed, skilled craftsmen with established rights and protections, earning easily twice as much as unguilded workers. These men had their pride, and they would not be pushed around. Hamburg’s journeymen took to the streets.
The atmosphere was almost festive as they brought out all the traditional flags, signs and tools of their brotherhoods. They also came with a good deal of pent-up anger. Hamburg was a rich city, by any reasonable measure an independent maritime republic, but it was also increasingly crowded with French refugees and Holstein peasants, suffering from rising food prices, sky-high rents, and depressed wages.
Journeymen had been able to support families on their pay, rent rooms, and eat well. Their estate did not usually reach to the famous Hamburg beef – a dish of cold-smoked salt meat often erroneously linked to the history of the hamburger – but they could expect a respectable diet of bread, meat, and a variety of vegetables as well as occasional treats like the famous Braune Kuchen or Hamburg Klöben.
Klöben was nothing special – a kind of enriched bread with dried fruit, sugar butter, milk, and spices in the same family as the more famous Stollen. It was not tied to Christmas, but eaten on festive occasions, often served with tea of coffee, and we can well imagine the exuberant strikers of 1791 eating it as they marched through the streets. We do not have a recipe from the 1790s, but the Hamburgisches Kochbuch of 1830 preserves one:
IX No. 88: To bake good Klöben
Take 10 pounds of flour, 2 pounds of butter, half a Loth of cinnamon, half a pound of currants, a quarter pound of sugar, 1 cup of syrup, 2 cups of large raisins, 4 beer glasses of warm milk, 2 glasses of yeast, and prepare it as Hannoverschen Kuchen. From this dough, you can prepare 5 Klöben, brush them with egg yolk, and bake them in an oven.
Helpfully, it also explains the reference:
IX No 106: Hannoverscher Butter Cake
Take two pounds of good wheat flour, a quarter pound of ground sugar, cardamom, three egg yolks, and grated lemon peel in an earthen bowl. Lay one pound of butter and a little salt in the centre of the flour and pour on a large beer glass full of warm milk and a little less warm white beer yeast. Stir it all well together and if the dough is not soft enough, add a little more warm milk. When all is stirred well and the dough detaches from the bowl, work them thoroughly with your hands on a table and roll it out as evenly as the sheet on which it is meant to be baked. …
I have made this and can attest that it is quite good as described here. Sugar syrup, something like molasses, was an inexpensive byproduct of sugar refining, a major industry in Hamburg, and cinnamon and currants would also have been on hand at reasonable prices. The recipe produces a dense, firm loaf that can be sliced more easily than broken and is excellent dipped in hot tea or spread with extra butter. It is well suited to sharing with comrades and can be carried wherever it is needed. Bakers in the city made it regularly.
We do not know for sure what the journeymen ate on their excursions, not what they thought they were doing, other than standing up for their unjustly mistreated comrades. All our records come from the side of the Honourable Council and the good citizens of Hamburg, and they were deeply concerned. These were not arch-reactionaries. Hamburg was, after all, a republic that abhorred hereditary aristocracy to the extent it forbade any nobleman from obtaining citizenship and any citizen from accepting ennoblement. Many of its leading men were liberals. Just a year previously, they had raised a liberty tree and celebrated the success of the French Revolution! But, like many of the revolutionaries of Paris, they had little time for demands for equality, especially when they came from people on whose labour their comfort depended. Their version of liberty embraced a complex accretion of privilege and an absolute protection of property rights. Beyond lay chaos and destruction.
The thought of local sans-culottes horrified them, and as protest continued, labourers, sailors, and factory workers joined, armed with fenceposts and looking scary. If we can trust our accounts, many journeymen shared these reservations and the groups occasionally came to blows. They, after all, were here to defend their traditional rights, not those of some upstart sugar-refiner or smelly longshoreman. The council, probably wary of repeating the mistakes of Louis XVI, repented of their overreaction and agreed to allow the expelled men to return. At this point, though, things had already proceeded farther than they were willing to allow. Labourers – the great unwashed – were consorting with respectable journeymen, and the orderly parades of the previous days became noisier, more riotous assemblies. Paris provided a warning, and the large exile community could tell the tale. They called out the army.
Unlike France, Hamburg did not actually have a large army, but its soldiers, supplemented by the militia of wealthy citizens, made up in assertive brutality what they lacked in numbers. Numerous protesters were shot, three journeymen tailors killed, and a curfew imposed at gunpoint. The general strike ended with no further resistance.
Tellingly, the government did not feel like they had won. This was new territory for everyone, the thought that the working class could make common cause against the wealthy terrifying beyond what the fairly banal events warranted. They actually informed the expelled journeymen locksmiths that they were welcome to return to work and after they, understandably, refused, sent them their papers, personal effects, and additional travel money. The treatment of the injured and the funerals of the dead were paid for by the city fisc. It was the strangest “no hard feelings” gesture imaginable.
Of course nothing had really been resolved. The journeymen knew that the council was willing to meet protest with violence. The council felt sure they could not stand up to any repetition of this groundswell of anger. Prussia and Austria were convinced that French secret agents had orchestrated the whole thing and put pressure on the republic to crack down on its refugee population. Meanwhile, well-meaning reformers suggested that the traditional institutions of the guilds were to blame for leading good men astray and educating the artisans would heal the rifts in society.
Over the coming years, the government of Hamburg attempted valiantly, if vainly, to address the problems the protest had laid bare. An expanded effort to support paupers and educate their children for vocational careers, a school for apprentices, and an effort to uplift the lower classes from their deplorable habit of being poor all had some effect, but their most significant impact was providing us with a wealth of statistics on rents, food prices, wages, and the baffled question how anyone could possibly survive being working class. In the face of rising industrialisation, population pressure, and competition from unguilded labour, the journeymen of Hamburg were rapidly becoming proletarians.
We can only imagine what solution might have been attempted by the genuinely creative and well-meaning liberals on the council if the city had not been conquered by Napoleon’s armies in 1806. Over the coming decade, it saw a brief period as capital of the Département Bouches d’Elbe, wrenching liberalisation of its economy, a trade embargo, a brutal winter siege, and a long, slow recovery in the hungry years after 1816.
But it is equally intriguing to imagine what might have happened had the protesting journeymen decided to embrace the labourers who came to join them. In the end, they were ready to jealously defend their higher pay and job security, but twice starvation wage is still uncomfortably close to starvation. Joining hands, they might have been able to get more. Unity in strikes can open purses in the way appeals to customary right seldom does.
A friend of mine whose skill as a herbalist and craftsperson are deserving of their own channel, sent me a gem they discovered online. It is the 1910 manual on bowls and punches for field and exercise use in the German army (Bowlen und Pünsche für den Manöver- und Feldgebrauch der Deutschen Armee). Reading it is absolutely fascinating, and I will share a few choice bits with you to get away from the sombre tone of recent weeks.
It probably needs saying that this is not an official field manual. Most technical literature for the German military were produced by private publishers, and they took the opportunity that association afforded them to also produce books like this. Priced at three marks and sold strictly to officers only, it was intended to raise money for German troops in China and their dependents. Much of it is filled with repurposed filler text and doggerel, but about half the pages contain actual, useful recipes and instructions.
The recipes claim to be designed to combat two common health problems, namely chilblains and cirrhosis of the liver. Against the first, the authors recommend hot punch drinks in winter, against the second, chilled Bowle in summer. These thirst-quenching, refreshing mixed drinks were intended as an option to moderate alcohol intake which, reading what goes into them, is mind-boggling. It is not hard to believe that cirrhosis of the liver was a common health problem in the officer corps.
An example of a Bowle involves strawberries which makes it a seasonal drink:
Strawberry Bowle, second type:
One heaping plate of fresh strawberries (forest strawberries are preferred) are layered in a serving bowl with the requisite amount of pounded sugar and just barely covered with water. After the berries have been left to steep for a few hours, you add five or six bottles of light Rhenish or Moselle wine. Just before serving, one or two bottles of champagne (Sekt) may also be added. Care must be taken that the strawberries are placed in the drinking glasses undamaged so the drink keeps its appetising appearance.
Some of the recipes seem designed more for show than use, though some German troops saw service in the tropics and may actually have done this:
Pineapple Bowle, fifth type, for howitzer batteries
In the colonies or other places where pineapples can be had in sufficient quantity, you take off the top quarter of the fruit with one straight cut, carefully hollow out the fruit with a spoon, and smooth the top edge by removing the spines etc. Then you place a piece of ice inside the hollow, fill it up with cold champagne, and use the previously removed quarter with its green leaves as a lid to cover it. In order for this delicious cup not to fall over, use the empty casing of a field howitzer as a support.
For winter, we get hot, higher-proof mixtures like this:
Favourite Punch of King Wilhelm I of Wurttemberg
(The recipe was obtained from the old king’s table setter)
One orange is peeled and squeezed out, two lemons have their zest rubbed off on sugar, a third is peeled very finely. the sugar, orange juice, and lemon zest are placed in a vessel and the juice of the three lemons squeezed into it. Also add one bottle of good white wine, three Schoppen (about 2.1 litres) of water and further sugar to taste. It is left for several hours in a well-covered bowl, then allowed to boil, but not strongly. Add a little more than one Schoppen (0.7 litres) of rum or arrack, but this must not be allowed to boil.
Along with those, there are a number of traditional mixed drinks, mostly based on wine. The recipes are a melange of the familiar, the weird, and the fashionably exotic, with pineapples being a special favourite. Many are sourced from named military units, some from foreign forces, and in a few cases, specific toasts or customs for drinking them are also recorded. One feels notably modern, an ancestor of the margarita:
Frozen Punch
Cut a pineapple in slices, add a kilogram of sugar moistened with water, pour on two bottles of Rhenish wine cover the terrine and leave it to stand for five to six hours. Then squeeze in the juice of two lemons, strain the liquid, mix it with one bottle of champagne (Champagner), fill the punch into an ice cream maker (Gefrierbüchse) and let it freeze while constantly turning and stirring. Meanwhile, add half a bottle of fine arrack or rum gradually, glass by glass, until the beverage is thick, but liquid.
As an aside, the word used for champagne here – Champagner – means the real thing from the Champagne region of France. In other recipes, the word Sekt can mean any kind of sparkling wine made by the champagne process.
Others are less immediately intuitive to modern drinkers. There is, for example, something for an artilleryman’s stomach:
Howitzer (Haubitze)
(Communicated by Field Artillery Regiment No. 58)
Stir four fresh egg yolks in a large Bowle glass with one (unit of) cognac and one curacao. Continue stirring and add half a bottle of champagne (Sekt) that is not too cold or too dry. Drink, and you will say “C’est une chose!”
And some things were just plain silly:
Pot às feu of the East African colonial troops (Schutztruppe)
(Communicated by the officers’ mess at Dar es Salaam)
In a large glass mug (Becherglas), add one shot glass of yellow chartreuse, a splash of angostura bitter, and one spoonful of crushed ice. After shaking it well, fill it to half full with any champagne (Sekt) you have. The moment you raise the glass to your lips, you add one teaspoon of fine powdered sugar, quickly stir it, and drink up before everything comes foaming out of the glass.
The final chapters are even more interesting. They record a number of recently imported “American Drinks”, namely cobblers, sours, and cocktails. If you are used to thinking of ‘Old Europe’ as a separate world, the opposite of America in every regard, this seems strange, but it really is not. America had a strong hold on the imagination of the German public in the early 1900s, and though it was in many ways considered strange and confusing, people were fascinated by its habits. At the same time, a Prussian officer, far from being seen as a relic of bygone glory, was seen as inhabiting the same pinnacle of modernity as a New York broker. It was perfectly natural to take an interest.
This is their version of Martini:
Martini-Cocktail
(use a large bar glass)
Fill the glass with finely crushed ice, add two or three splashes of sugar syrup, two or three splashes of angostura bitter, one splash of curacao, half a wine glass of Old Tom gin, and half a wine glass of vermouth. Stir it well with a mixing spoon and strain it into a cocktail glass. Press a piece of lemon peel into it and serve.
The main thing that strikes me personally is the extremely liberal use of ice in most summertime recipes – a habit that has sadly fallen out of favour in Germany today. The absence of soft drinks is no surprise, given the focus of the book. It is hard to imagine a teetotal Prussian officer. It means, though, that I am not going to try out any of the recipes. Perhaps someone else would like to.
If you believed the official line, East Berlin in 1953 was a relatively happy place. Governed by a benevolent party under a people’s democracy, its inhabitants were building a happier future for everyone from the ruins of war. The city was used to proletarians in the street marching under red banners, shouting in chorus, and displaying pride in their achievements. Still, the crowd of construction workers that assembled on the grand, newly built Stalinallee to march to their union headquarters and the seat of government were not what the Politbüro had in mind. They were angry, and for good reasons.
New buildings on Stalinallee in Berlin, May 1953, courtesy of wikimedia commons
Some revolts are large. but get little mention history books except maybe as a comedic anecdote. Others are small, but take on legendary status. What happened in East Germany in June of 1953 was big, and it was immediately seized on by both sides of the Cold War to make it fit their respective narratives. Much of this was created in West Germany, where a propaganda of official commemoration arose that quickly obscured what actually happened.
The story is by now well researched and too complex to recount in detail. What makes it interesting is that a chain of events that nearly toppled one of post-WWII Europe’s Communist dictatorships began in small, private frustrations building up to uncontainable anger. It was indeed a spontaneous uprising of, in the broadest sense, the working class.
Life in the newly founded German Democratic Republic was not easy for anyone. The destruction of World War II still crippled many areas of public life: food and clothing were rationed, electricity intermittent, and housing scarce. The government had just embarked on a drive to impose Soviet-style economic reforms on its citizenry which angered both the middle class who lost their farms or workshops to collectivisation and the workers who saw no improvement in their standard of living as a result. Hundreds of thousands left for West Germany, where living standards were higher and democracy more tangible. The government was worried by these developments and decided to address the loss of skilled labour by raising the required work quotas by 10%.
Surely, the workers would understand that the good of the Arbeiter- und Bauernstaat required them to work 10% more for the same pay? Not really. Through much of 1953, the government received worrying reports of resistance and protest. At least one party official explaining the benefits of collective farming ended up dumped in a cesspit. On 16 June, building workers on two of the most prestigious projects in the capital downed tools and marched to the Gewerkschaftshaus to call on the labour unions supposedly representing them to do a better job. Their protest was joined by thousands and ended in front of the government headquarters.
Later, the East German state claimed all of this was a coup orchestrated by nefarious Western agents, but in reality, nobody had seen it coming. The people simply had had enough. They lived in cramped quarters, often lacking basic amenities, and found that their wages could not buy them the things they needed because they simply weren’t there. True, things had improved since the catastrophic Hungerwinter of 1947, but nowhere near as much as the state’s propaganda claimed.
Cookbook writing was a very particular genre of fiction in the Soviet bloc. Publishers walked a fine line between providing a useful product and preparing the people for a future free from material needs, a world of collective hedonism that was just around the corner. The East German Verlag für die Frau (gender roles were considered immutable even in Communist Germany) published a number of works that managed to stay relevant for decades despite changing circumstances. One of them, Unser Backbuch published in 1953, includes a recipe that would, by the standards of the mid-1950s, be a modest luxury, maybe a Sunday meal.
Sift the four into a bowl, shape a well in the centre, distribute the margarine along the edge and sprinkle 1 teaspoon of salt over it. Beat together the milk, egg, and crumbled yeast. Stir in the liquid starting from the centre and work the dough very thoroughly, then let rise in a warm place for about 1 hour. Then punch down the dough, work it again, and roll it out on a greased baking sheet. Wedge a piece of wood into the open side and press the dough upwards (to raise an edge) on all sides of the sheet. Leave in a warm place to rise for about 20 minutes. In the meantime, fry the finely cubed bacon in the butter until transparent (glasig), distribute them on the dough, and sprinkle lightly with salt and caraway. Mix the sour milk, eggs, flour, and 1 teaspoon salt in a tall pot and beat in a water bath until the mass begins to thicken. Pour over the bacon, spread out, and bake for 45 minutes at a medium heat. You prepare onion cake (Zwiebelkuchen) like bacon cake, but cover it in 500g of sliced onions fried in bacon fat.
If you are familiar with the bourgeois cookbooks of pre-war Germany, this recipe provides a striking contrast. No fresh herbs, no exotic spices, no ample portions of meat and enticing decoration. A meagre half pound of fat bacon and five eggs must make to for a family, and the only butter, a single tablespoon, goes towards frying the bacon cubes. The equipment is similarly basic: A baking sheet, open at one end but closed with a handy length of wood, and a bain marie improvised with two cooking pots are all that is required. These are instructions for what shocked middle class families after 1918 called the ‘servantless household’, life in an urban apartment small kitchen, but in 1953, even that was a fond dream for many Germans living in cellars, sharing communal apartments, or still housed in displaced person camps. Finding five eggs, half a pound of fat bacon, and a whole cup of milk could also pose a challenge in the state-controlled retail environment of East Germany.
Under such circumstances, and especially in contrast with the faster growing economy of West Germany, it becomes understandable that people throughout the country readily took to the streets. As early as 12 June, village communities kicked out their party organisers. By 16 June, East Berlin’s streets were dominated by a crowd of angry building workers. The next day, demonstrations took off in almost every city and town. People demanded better working conditions, lower prices, and free travel to the West. In some places, they stormed police stations and jails to liberate prisoners and destroyed party offices. The police initially did not intervene much as the government expected to bring the situation back under control with a few concessions. They revoked the increase in work quotas and some ministers actually went to meet the protesters with that announcement, probably expecting them to cheer and walk away. That did not happen – by midday, the East German government was losing control of its population. Protesters came close to storming its administrative headquarters the Haus der Ministerien (everyone knew the parliament had no significance). They fled to the protection of the Soviet occupation forces.
Soviet tank in the streets of Berlin, 17 June 1953, courtesy of wikimedia commons
That was how it should have ended; A people had lost patience with its authoritarian government and ousted them from power to take control of its destiny. But this was the Cold War, and though Stalin was dead, Moscow was not going to accept such a blatant display of democracy. Martial law was declared, Red Army troops took to the streets, and the protests in Berlin were brutally repressed. That night, East German police arrested more than 10,000 people. The next morning, armed police and Soviet tanks ensured quiet on the streets. Freedom was over.
The aftermath was surprisingly restrained by Soviet standards, though that is not saying much. About 1800 people were sentenced to prison terms and seven to death. The government, deeply shocked, responded by building a system of mass surveillance and tightening border controls to staunch the flow of unhappy people leaving for West Germany. The famous Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht bitterly remarked that it might be best if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another.
More broadly speaking, though, East Germany preferred not to speak of these events ever again. The government put out the official line that the uprising had been provoked by foreign agents collaborating with domestic fascists and ended through the heroic actions of the party apparatus. West Germany meanwhile spun its own heroic legend about 17 June. Here, the narrative focused on the desire by Germans on both sides of the border to be united, casting the protesters as patriots opposing the unnatural divide between east and west – and the territorial losses following the Second World war which the Federal Republic only formally accepted in 1990. The anniversary of the uprising was made a national holiday, the Day of German Unity, which continued to be observed until reunification. Western politicians and retailers used it to call on their citizens not to forget the unfortunate brothers and sisters in the East and send them gifts of all the good things they missed. The Westpaket full of coffee, chocolate, cosmetics, clothing, and other luxuries, became a feature of intra-German relations and part of East German folklore. East Germans would grumble at the state of their shops, but no further large-scale revolt took place until 1989.
The Communist state had won. Yet in a pattern we see a lot in history, the demands of the defeated were accounted for by the winners. Work quotas were not raised again. Wages rose while prices remained fixed. Industrial policy shifted towards an increased focus on consumer goods. By 1959, Secretary General Walter Ulbricht announced a new five-year-plan with high hopes:
Our table will be set with the best nature has to offer: High-quality meat and dairy products, fine vegetables and the best fruit, the earliest strawberries and tomatoes at a time when they do not yet ripen in our fields, grapes in winter, not just in times of their glut. As Socialists, we are aware that by 1965, a superfluity of food is expected in the Socialist camp. What the retailers are facing is an ever growing wave of foods and delicacies from all over the world!
Not least because resources had to be invested in building walls, this did not exactly come to pass, but the German Democratic Republic was remarkably successful at feeding its people. Per-capita consumption of meat, milk, eggs, butter and sugar reached unprecedented heights, though things like coffee, cocoa, bananas and oranges remained rare till the end. The government had learned a key lesson: Democracy, national unity and freedom of speech were inspiring ideals, but in the end, it was the ability to live with dignity and sufficiency that decided the future of nations; All they needed to do was pay people enough to live.
There are no Easter recipes to share this time. Instead of cooking a feast, I had the chance to meet up with friends to go to some of the amazing museums Munich offers. I still haven’t had the time for a proper recipe post, but while the battery lasts, I will try to share some food-related highlights from the Easter weekend museum tour with you.
I will begin with a piece of high culture from the Alte Pinakothek, an altarpiece painted in 1518 by Quinten Massys. The entire thing is fairly dull, but in this section we have a Good Boi bringing St Rochus a small round bread loaf that I am fairly sure qualifies as a semmel. This is a decent guide to the size, colour, and style we are looking for when we reconstruct them.
Another instance of good bread is provided by Albrecht Altdorfer, carried by the sexiest Saint Joachim at the Nativity of the Virgin I have ever seen. At least that is who I think he is. The whole painting is interesting, but this part is relevant to my specific interest: A rather long loaf with lobed ends, very light and well-risen, probably expensive, and likely soft and delicious.
Further in art from the Alte Pinakothek, here is an interesting seventeenth century genre study of two rather ragged boys eating a pastry. It is by Murillo and has all kinds of artistic merits I am not well placed to judge – I learned during my visit I have no appreciation of art for its own sake. What struck me was the way those two were eating their meal (called a Pastete in the German label and a pie in the English): they are detaching pieces of the filling from the crust. By the late 1600s, we assume pastry crusts would be universally edible, especially on open-faced pastries, but that clearly doesn’t mean they are eaten with the filling. At least not in this instance.
Incidentally, I do not know what kind of pastry this is meant to represent, but the way it can be scooped up with the fingers and dangled suggests it holds together rather well. Maybe an egg-based, quiche-like tart is meant. We have a number of recipes like that from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Another example of seventeenth-century deliciousness if Pieter Lastman’s ultrabaroque Odysseus before Nausicaa. The princess addresses the unexpected guest while her servant, suitably bare and shocked, recoils from the naked, shipwrecked mariner. Between them stands the picknick Nausicaa intended to enjoy alone and will now share.
Does it show I am no fan of Baroque painting? At least we are getting some useful detail from among the billowing fabric and rippling flesh. Along with fresh fruit, the meal includes white bread loaves, one of which looks like it was hollowed out from the side to eat the crumb. That is something I remember doing as a child and getting scolded for. Someone here got away with it, and I am not sure whether to read it as symbolic (the soft, pampered princess used to only the finest bits) or just as something people did. To the left, there is a closed pastry and some sugared nibbles to enjoy with the wine later. The beverages very likely are in the voluminous copper vessel the artist used to put his signature on.
A piece of woodcarving caught my eye at the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum. It is a small part of a larger altarpiece, a Nativity scene showing Mary in bed, Joseph cooking, and two angels serving the meal. The work dates to between 1513 and 1519 and this is how a wealthy woman was served at the time: wine poured from a decorative pitcher, warm food in covered dishes brought by a servant on a napkin. On the side table, we can see two small bread loaves, perhaps one wheat and one rye, as is described in a poem on table manners, or differing in some other way, and a plate that may be holding fruit or some other dish I am not sure about. Soups, cheese and hard custards were recommended for women in childbed, but this does not look particularly like any of these things.
The new Archäologische Staatssammlung also holds some beautiful pieces, and I was particularly struck by a set of grave goods from a Roman cemetery near Augsburg.
The point here is not the beauty or particular ingrnuity of any of these pieces. It is the sheer mass of the ensemble illustrating the possibilities a developed urban civilisation offered to some. This lady went to the afterlife fully equipped to throw some awesome parties. The Romans would not have understood the idea of “Das letzte Hemd hat keine Taschen” (Your final shirt has no pockets i.e. ‘You can’t take it with you.’).
Speaking of which, the Nationalmuseum also has a collection of silver originally owned by the bishop of Hildesheim. This is one of the most complete eighteenth century ensembles, displayed as a first-course table setting, and again illustrates what wealth and power could buy you even if you were really just a minor ecclesiastical prince in a dinky corner of the Empire with more history than it knew what to do with.
For the final image today – the battery is drawing down and the train is past Hannover – I picked another piece from the Archäologische Staatssammlung, a cup from Uffing that dates to the years around 600 BCE and a modern replica. This is an unprepossessing time, about when the Archaic period begins in Greece and a few centuries before La Tène culture gives us what we now think of as “Celtic” art. This particular item survives only by chance and would likely have been dismissed by excavators of earlier generations. After all, it is not made of precious metal, of no innovative design or artistic merit, ‘just’ wood. It shows beautifully what we often miss when we focus on traditions of written sources alone, on ‘great’ art and big names. True, this probably belonged to a wealthy person. We have no idea who its owner was. But objects like it, lathe-turned wood shaped expertly by local craftspeople, were much more common than golden cups and bronze krateroi, and represented a practical kind of luxury that is hard to reconstruct: the domestic comfort of our forebears.
In honour of the day, I am once more departing from the Feeding the Revolution series to bring you a fragment from the rich non-recipe manuscript tradition of medieval Europe. I referred before to the Scottish (or Saxon?) dish and the April fish from the Liber de ferculis malis. This story needed piecing together from two distinct sources.
In a manuscript of the Ulenspiegel tales dating to the early sixteenth century, a marginal gloss preserves a cryptic instruction:
Du schal nene flasken eden in dinem brode as ein Dene
You shall not eat bottles in your bread like a Dane.
The diction is very similar to the Wahre Hovescheit, a fifteenth-century manual of good manners which includes a number of such admonitions citing various professions and nationalities: Do not spread butter with your thumb like a Frisian, drink from bowls like a Wend, or warm your fingers in your armpits like a fisherman. This one is not included in the surviving manuscript, and neither does it make any sense. Who would eat bottles in bread? What does ‘in bread’ mean anyway?
A possible answer is offered by the Möllner Panglossicum Strigospecularium, a late sixteenth-century collection of quotes from earlier literature much of which is lost today. It includes the following lines which I would suggest must have been familiar to the anonymous glossator:
Pleno foro edunt butelli rubri inpositi in panes quasi dicitur vulgo semil id est similia, longiori sunt quam nostri. Sinapi salatibus cucumeribusqve condiant et ceppi in larido sartagine assati superponunt. Et porcellum baubantum vulgo varkelen ille odiosum valde laudant. E carro venditi calidi vidi.
In the marketplace, they eat red sausages (butelli) placed inside breads like those commonly called semil that is similia which are longer than those common with us. They season them with mustard and salted cucumbers and place onions fried with lard in a pan on top. And they greatly praise this disgusting barking piglet (porcellum, commonly varkelen). I have seen them being sold hot out of carts.
Clearly, whoever read this when they glossed the Ulenspiegel was unfamiliar with the Latin expression butellum for a sausage. It is etymologically related to the word bottle (budel in Middle Low German), so the mistake is easy to make. That said, there are problems with the Latin quote that go beyond this faulty translation.
The quote is incomplete, and the short introduction in the Panglossicum is little help. According to the marginal notes, it was taken from:
Itinerarium regni Dannorum ab Caroli Balnearioli vulgo Badeker scriptum a.u.c. mdcccxxxiii
An account of a journey to the kingdom of the Danes written by Carolus Balneariolus, commonly Badeker, in the year 1833 after the founding of Rome
This is pretty atrocious Latin and not very good Low German, either. The name is derived from balnearius, the bathhouse attendant (Bader), with an added diminutive, and the proper Low German form should be Baderken. If we take the date seriously – which was clearly deduced and added by the compiler in the sixteenth century – it is unlikely we are looking at a family name this early. Even allowing for a broad estimate, this places the author in the second half of the eleventh century, a remarkably early time for travelogue writing. Beyond this, we are dependent on speculation. Might the text have been produced for Adam of Bremen as part of producing his Gesta Hammaburgensis? He includes a large amount of information about Denmark and Sweden in his work, not all of which he likely collected himself. A balnearius, a bath attendant, had a place in both monastic communities and ecclesiastical courts.
The use of the word semil to describe the bread may be a problem with this interpretation., It is a South German word derived from the Latin similum, with the northern equivalent being wegg(h)e. Both describe particularly fine, white breadrolls in individual portion sizes. However, since we know little about the origin of most of the senior clergy of northern Germany, it is entirely plausible the author could have been educated at one of the major centres of learning in the south.
The presence of cucumbers equally presents a problem since these are not generally thought to have been present in Germany until the 15th century. Might the text be misattributed, of a much later date? It is possible, though by the fifteenth century, Denmark was a familiar neighbour, no longer the subject of ethnographic writing in Germany. Equally, this may be an early reference to their appearance, associated with West Slavic cultures from where they were adopted into German and Danish cuisine. Another plausible explanation is that the word refers to a different plant, as it most likely did in classical Latin. Some variety of gourd may be meant.
Finally, it is very hard to see what the author may have meant by a ‘barking piglet’. The expression seems intended as a euphemism, but it is hard to imagine anyone eating dog sausages sold hot from carts. One might speculate that this is a dig at residual pagan practices, but 1080 would be very late for this and the stereotypical sign of pagan barbarism to medieval Western Christians was eating horse, not dog. The combination with elongated fine breadrolls and condiments suggests that this was a luxurious dish. Pork seems an appropriate choice of meat. Neither need we assume the ‘red’ to be a reference to a blood sausage. It is not clear how it was achieved, but the colouration clearly was important to the observer and must have been different to the sausages he knew, and perhaps ate, in Germany. Red sausages eaten in long breadrolls with mustard, cucumbers (if that is what they are) and fried onions – one can see the appeal.
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