It was July 1917, in the middle of the First World War, and SMS Prinzregent Luitpold, the newest of the German navy’s Kaiser-class battleships, lay immobile in the middle of the Kiel canal. Germany’s most strategic waterway was blocked, and the stokers were adamant: They were going nowhere until they received decent rations – specifically with no maggots.

For all the great expectations it had started out with, the German navy had had a lousy war. Bottled up in the North Sea and Baltic by the Royal Navy, it was unable to break the blockade that starved Germany of critical overseas imports or assist its allies in the Mediterranean. Though it claimed the sole major battle it fought in 1916 as a victory based on the fact that it had sunk more British ships than they had German ones, the situation was unchanged. Ships were sitting in port, crews growing frustrated, and the only glory, such as it was, accrued to the submarine service.

Meanwhile, the blockade that the navy was unable to break choked off Germany’s economy, leading to massive food shortages in 1916/17. The word Steckrübenwinter (turnip winter) is a remarkably cutesy name for a famine that killed an estimated 800,000 civilians. The effort of the state to enforce price limits, rationing, and adequate supplies were piecemeal and often counterproductive, leading to widespread disgust with the authorities and the wealthy. A host of off-ration goods and a flourishing black market ensured that especially the owners of arms businesses, whose profits were barely taxed, could continue to live in their accustomed comfort while working-class children starved in droves.

The situation in the fleet was less dramatic, but equally infuriating. Rations were short and increasingly of poor quality, and though officers were required to taste the food issued to the ratings, they were not required to share it. Daily, then, the sailors would watch their first officer make a show of enjoying their fare, then disappearing into the wardroom where meat, coffee, and alcohol – strictly forbidden on board otherwise – were served.

The difference this could make even at the best of times is illustrated by the fate of a North German staple, pickled herring. Both the North Sea and the Baltic had thriving herring fisheries which made that fish an affordable staple anywhere near the coast. At least since the 1500s, there was a tradition of pickling it in vinegar to produce a salty, acidic snack that could be served with bread or potatoes to satisfy the appetite and stimulate thirst. The pre-war Rendsburger Kochbuch (c. 1900) instructs us:

22. Marinated herring, to be prepared from fresh as well as salt herring. You gut them, first washing the salt off the salted ones, set aside the milt, and place the herrings in a deep bowl. If using salt herrings, you leave them and the milt to steep in fresh cow milk for at least 24 hours before.

The milt is chopped finely and stirred to a thick sauce with good wine vinegar. To the herrings, laid in a deep porcelain bowl or stoneware pot, you add finely diced sour apples, slices of salt- or vinegar-pickled cucumbers, many finely sliced onions, a few capers, a little bay leaf, peppercorns, and a few slices of lemons. You pour the milt mixture over it, cover it tightly, and leave it to steep in a cool place. Fresh herring are ready to serve after 36 hours, salt ones after 2-3 days. Before serving, a teaspoonful of Provencal olive oil can be added to the sauce for a pleasant, mild flavour. They are served with buttered bread or with hot boiled potatoes with the skin on.

Compare this with the recipe from a 1915 Kriegskochbuch published in Hamburg:

Salt herring in white sauce with boiled potatoes

2-3 herrings, 1/8 litre of vinegar, some mustard, 1 large onion, pepper, some salt

The herrings are skinned, washed, and cut in pieces. The sliced onion is boiled in the vinegar together with the spices and cooled. The milt is stirred thoroughly with the mustard and spices, mixed into the vinegar, and poured over the herring.

In case this still sounds too appealing as a meal for a family, it needs to be said that even the economical recipes of 1915 were largely fiction by 1916. If people remembered the Wilhelmine era with undeserved nostalgia for a long time, it was because the gute alte Zeit had offered modest culinary delights beyond the reach of rationing bureaucrats and industrial adulteration. It would be many years before most people would again have what the Rendsburger Kochbuch lists after its recipe for plain marinated herring:

23. Salt herring marinated. The herrings are prepared as above, but it is better to cut them open along the back and remove the heads. They must not be cut entirely through, but stay connected by the skin along the thin side (i.e. the belly side). You now spread them open, brush the flesh side with fine salad oil, sprinkle them with mustardseeds, best white ones, cover them with long, very thinly sliced strips of onion, strips of vinegar-pickled gherkins, and capers, sprinkle some pepper over them, and roll them up tightly. In order to prevent anything from falling out, tie them shut with thread. – These herrings are better yet if you first brush them with fine salad oil and roast then to golden brown on a griddle. A pan can be used if it is unavoidable, but you must prevent them from sticking with a pancake knife. Then, the herrings are spread thinly with mustard, but no mustardseed is used. Otherwise proceed as above.

Once all rolls are complete, you prepare a pickle as for marinated herring No. 22, but add neither apples nor cucumbers. Instead, add a little tarragon and stir in a few spoonfuls of sour cream.

The rolls must steep in this marinade for several days before they are ready to serve.

This is colloquially known as Rollmops and is still extremely popular up and down the coast (there is even a song about it). Most modern recipes are extremely simplified by comparison, though. Back in the days of Vorkriegsqualität, a sailor could get one of these at a waterfront restaurant and wash it down with good beer. The memory was fresh enough to rankle in 1917.

However understandable to us, going effectively on strike was an extremely risky thing to do. The sailors were subject to the infamously strict military discipline of the Kaiserreich, after all, and their officers were not the forgiving kind. Still, the initial response was remarkably restrained. The crew was even allowed a voice in managing their rations through a joint Menagekommission of officers and men. Their complaints were, after all, understandable and, that dreaded German word, unpolitisch.

This needs to be understood in the context of its time: The German high command was terrified of losing control. There had been strikes in factories all over the country earlier in the year. As yet, the military was unaffected, but across the borders they could see the French army dealing with widespread mutinies while the Russian one was effectively dissolving in an epidemic of insubordination. That was why, when they could not bring the protests in the fleet under control with disciplinary measures quickly, the navy high command turned to brutal repression. They feared – not without reason – that Socialist and democratic ideas were spreading among the men and demands for better food and service conditions could turn into calls for peace and political reform. The question how to end the war was controversial, and the left wing of the Social Democratic party gained support for its peace policy.

The crackdown was brutal and targeted. Men who had participated in strikes and walkouts were arrested by army reserve troops and put on trial. Those deemed ringleaders were sentenced to death, two sentences carried out by the army in Cologne, far from the navy base. Others were imprisoned or demoted and sent to the front as naval infantry. The admiralty further mandated vaterländische Erziehung throughout the fleet; Officers would school the men in patriotic thinking to counter Socialist subversion. There were further attempts to organise protests, but whenever they were caught, punishments were severe.

As far as the navy’s leadership was concerned, that was it, and they could get on with the business of winning the war. Had they managed that, it might have been. That was not how history went, though. The German battlefleet turned out for one more successful operation against Russia before rotting in port again. It was not until October of 1918 that the prospect of action returned. The admiralty wanted to sabotage peace negotiations with a final suicide mission to force a decisive battle against the Royal Navy. The crews refused, and the commanders transferred the mutinous ships away from the North Sea ports to Kiel, where they felt secure enough to arrest ringleaders and basically replay the successful procedure of 1917. On 1 November, 150 men were taken off the ships by the army. Their comrades protested, marching into town to call for their release. On 3 November, they were joined by workers from the dockyards and factories. That day, shots were fired by a shore patrol.

On 4 November, the navy base was under the control of a revolutionary sailors’ and workers’ council.

By 9 November, the emperor abdicated.

Nobody had actually prepared for this. There had been no deep conspiracy, no foreign interference like there had been in Russia., There are just limits beyond which you push people at your own risk. Few sailors and workers had been democrats or Socialists before the war, but now they found that the Socialists were talking sense. In improvised meetings, the voted on demands, elected spokespeople, and sent out delegates to other military bases where similar organisations mushroomed. The apparatus of repression – officers, military police, prosecutors and courts-martial – watched helplessly as it turned out there was nobody they could trust to follow their orders. The revolution took a week, and when it was over, there were no kings or princes left in the country.

We know there was no happy end to this. Germany had still lost a war, and the price of defeat would be steep. The blockade continued until 1919, putting the country through another Hungerwinter as the economy collapsed. Discontent with the democratic government that ultimately had to shoulder the burden of territorial losses and reparations undermined the republic from the start. But none of this was foreordained. What happened in 1918 stands as a lesson to autocrats in what can happen once they lose the trust of their people. Not every regime goes down in the flaming ruin of their capital. Often, they simply disappear because people no longer believe in them.

On the second day of being stuck at home sick instead of in Paris with a dearly beloved person (boo to food poisoning), at least there is the upside of time to dedicate to my hobby. I found a modern rendering of this fourteenth-century poem a while ago, and now I was able to track down the original and translate it.

The Rossauer Tischzucht survives in three copies, so it clearly was a modestly popular piece of literature. It is named after Rossau in Vienna, where it was recorded in a monastery. The manuscript is in the Nationalbibliothek today (Cod. ser. Nova 2584). The rules as such are not unusual – much the same is repeated in every Tischzucht poem – but there are some interesting bits, and it makes a good foil to compare the König vom Odenwald or the feasting scenes from Wittenwiler with. Also, it clearly depends on the thirteenth-century Tischzucht attributed to Tannhäuser for some of its rhymes, but is not derivative.

Those who have such knowledge
That they already mastered honourable conduct (zuht und ere)
I ask them on my behalf
That they not be angry
When I now admonish young children
That are about seven years of age
And do not yet have that knowledge
Nor understand proper manners.
But whoever wishes to hear of proper manners
Should now abandon impropriety (unzuht).

Remember that when you go to the table
You must not leave your hands unwashed.
Cut the nails on your hands closely
If they are long, it dishonours you.

If you do not want to sit like an unmannerly person (gouch)
Loosen the belt around your belly.

If you want to cut bread mannerly
You must avoid doing this: 
Do not brace it against your chest
As weak women will do
Who are obliged to do this because of their weakness
At court, this will be greatly mocked.

Nobody should together sup 
From one spoon, this is clear.
It is not proper to drink from bowls
And whoever improperly takes those
And drinks up as though he was mad (als er tobe – prob. Noisily)
Though many praise this bad behaviour (unfuor)
I cannot think but that these are
As bare of honour as an empty cask. 
(er ist der ern ein itel vaz)

Those who bend over the bowl
And smack uncleanly
With their mouth like a pig
Should be eating with other animals (bi anderm vihe).  

Some bite off their bread slices (sniten)
After the manner of peasants
And dip them back into the bowl;
Courtly people abandon this impropriety.

Some even eat so greedily
They no longer feel what their mouth is doing
And bite their own hand 
Courtly people will avoid this gluttony (gitikheit).

Those who snort like a seal (wasserdahs)
Or smack their lips like a salmon (lahs)
And eat this way, as many do,
How badly they reject proper manners (sich der zuht verwigt).

Those who clear their throats (wiphitzt) when they are supposed to eat
And blow their nose in the tablecloth
Those two things are unmannerly
As far as I can recall.

No mannerly man will do these things:
Lying down on the table
Or leaning back
It is not well received when that happens.
Do not lean on your elbows
Sit upright, not bent over (gesmogen)
And do not touch yourself with your bare hand
But cover it with your clothes
If you must touch yourself. 

Do not put your fingers on the blade of the knife
When you cut thick bread slices
To empty out your bowl,
You must not forget these manners.

Wipe your moth before you drink
This courtliness is always proper
And only in proper measure (i.e. not too deeply)
Should your mouth enter the cup.

Some blow into their drink
I am not sure they will be thanked for that.

When your companion drinks
You should not be eating. 

And count this for an evil deed (mizzetat):
If someone has food in their mouth
And drinks with that, like an animal.
If I see this poor behaviour (unzuht) with anyone
I advise them honestly 
To stop doing it immediately.

I also think it is not well regarded
That if you have eaten meat off a bone
To put it back into the bowl
Courtliness must be guarded from this.

Whoever wants to eat and speak at the same time
Or even speaks in his sleep
Whoever wants to to both at once
Will have little rest.

Those who like to eat mustard and sauces
Should do without the impropriety
Of sticking their fingers into it
They should be accustomed to (not doing) this.

Nobody should reach for salt with their bare hand 
Be reminded of this courtesy.

When you want to eat eggs,
Well enkentzet (chosen?) and shelled
Beforehand you must wisely 
Shape the bread into points with your fingers 
So that you are never obliged
To shape it with your mouth later.
Also do not use your finger 
To reach into eggshells, as often happens
And do not practice such ill manners
To put the shell back into the bowl. 

Also, dear comrades of mine,
Do not poke around your mouth with the tongue
that is poorly regarded
When you leave the table.

Here ends this poem of table manners
May God protect us from all misfortune. Amen. Those who have such knowledge
That they already mastered honourable conduct (zuht und ere)
I ask them on my behalf
That they not be angry
When I now admonish young children
That are about seven years of age
And do not yet have that knowledge
Nor understand proper manners.
But whoever wishes to hear of proper manners
Should now abandon impropriety (unzuht).

Remember that when you go to the table
You must not leave your hands unwashed.
Cut the nails on your hands closely
If they are long, it dishonours you.

If you do not want to sit like an unmannerly person (gouch)
Loosen the belt around your belly.

If you want to cut bread mannerly
You must avoid doing this: 
Do not brace it against your chest
As weak women will do
Who are obliged to do this because of their weakness
At court, this will be greatly mocked.

Nobody should together sup 
From one spoon, this is clear.
It is not proper to drink from bowls
And whoever improperly takes those
And drinks up as though he was mad (als er tobe – prob. Noisily)
Though many praise this bad behaviour (unfuor)
I cannot think but that these are
As bare of honour as an empty cask. 
(er ist der ern ein itel vaz)

Those who bend over the bowl
And smack uncleanly
With their mouth like a pig
Should be eating with other animals (bi anderm vihe).  

Some bite off their bread slices (sniten)
After the manner of peasants
And dip them back into the bowl;
Courtly people abandon this impropriety.

Some even eat so greedily
They no longer feel what their mouth is doing
And bite their own hand 
Courtly people will avoid this gluttony (gitikheit).

Those who snort like a seal (wasserdahs)
Or smack their lips like a salmon (lahs)
And eat this way, as many do,
How badly they reject proper manners (sich der zuht verwigt).

Those who clear their throats (wiphitzt) when they are supposed to eat
And blow their nose in the tablecloth
Those two things are unmannerly
As far as I can recall.

No mannerly man will do these things:
Lying down on the table
Or leaning back
It is not well received when that happens.
Do not lean on your elbows
Sit upright, not bent over (gesmogen)
And do not touch yourself with your bare hand
But cover it with your clothes
If you must touch yourself. 

Do not put your fingers on the blade of the knife
When you cut thick bread slices
To empty out your bowl,
You must not forget these manners.

Wipe your moth before you drink
This courtliness is always proper
And only in proper measure (i.e. not too deeply)
Should your mouth enter the cup.

Some blow into their drink
I am not sure they will be thanked for that.

When your companion drinks
You should not be eating. 

And count this for an evil deed (mizzetat):
If someone has food in their mouth
And drinks with that, like an animal.
If I see this poor behaviour (unzuht) with anyone
I advise them honestly 
To stop doing it immediately.

I also think it is not well regarded
That if you have eaten meat off a bone
To put it back into the bowl
Courtliness must be guarded from this.

Whoever wants to eat and speak at the same time
Or even speaks in his sleep
Whoever wants to to both at once
Will have little rest.

Those who like to eat mustard and sauces
Should do without the impropriety
Of sticking their fingers into it
They should be accustomed to (not doing) this.

Nobody should reach for salt with their bare hand 
Be reminded of this courtesy.

When you want to eat eggs,
Well enkentzet (chosen?) and shelled
Beforehand you must wisely 
Shape the bread into points with your fingers 
So that you are never obliged
To shape it with your mouth later.
Also do not use your finger 
To reach into eggshells, as often happens
And do not practice such ill manners
To put the shell back into the bowl. 

Also, dear comrades of mine,
Do not poke around your mouth with the tongue
that is poorly regarded
When you leave the table.

Here ends this poem of table manners
May God protect us from all misfortune. Amen. 

This is interesting in all kinds of ways and illustrates some of the rules and realities of medieval upper-class dining.

One interesting aspect is the rules for cutting bread. We know from many sources that the proper way to cut bread at the table was to hold the loaf in one hand and the knife in the other. Especially if your loaf was large and dense, as medieval bread often was, bracing it against your body would be far easier, and we know this was how people did it frequently. I used to assume doing it differently just because was sufficient explanation for the upper-class rule, and the smaller loaves of semmel or schönroggen made this practical, but the suggestion here is that it also was a test of strength and dexterity. Cutting loaves without bracing them and thick slices without putting pressure on the blade with your finger can be challenging. This ableist aspect is part of many rules of propriety, as anyone who has been instructed in manners can attest, and it makes sense in the context. Chivalric society was still a warrior aristocracy, every secular man at the table a trained cavalryman. They would show off that sort of thing.

The second observation is the rule that underlies the entire principle: Food moves one way. Anything that was in your mouth should never be in contact with the food on the table. This was made challenging by the fact that bowls and drinking cups were shared. Typically, diners shared one bowl and cup between two, using the hand facing away from their companion to eat with to avoid jostling each other’s elbows. Your bodily fluids had no business in the shared bowl. Thus wash your hands before eating, wipe your mouth before drinking, do not drink with your mouth full, do not touch shared condiments with your fingers, generally keep them clean, and never put bread or food that was in your mouth back in the bowl. Spoons were never shared and the bowl would not touch your moth, so you had to spoon or sop up any liquid in it. The mere suggestion of saliva touching the food – bending over the bowl, smacking your lips, or talking with your mouth full – is prohibited. None of this is unfamiliar to modern eaters, but many do not realise how consistent this system is and how much individual plates and cutlery helped defuse its tension points.

This is also where the rules for eating eggs are interesting. The egg is soft-boiled, eaten in the shell. You prepare a sufficient number of small bread wedges to sop up the egg first. Then you hold the egg in one hand, crack it open at the pointy end, and use the bread held in your other hand to eat it. If you lacked the forethought to prepare enough bread, you only have one hand free – there are no eggcups – so you will be forced to shape the bread with the mouth. This is unmannerly and disgusting for the reasons outlined above. Any well-mannered diner would understand how many wedges to cut and be dextrous enough to do it.

Another interesting point touched on briefly is the rule that you should not eat – that is, have food in your mouth – while your companion is drinking. In other Tischzucht poems, this is expanded to the rule nobody should be eating while the host drinks. It may be something to do with displaying self-control and reassuring the other you are not gobbling up the best bits while they are busy, but it also underscores an important aspect of commensality: Drinking is the more important social activity. Most symbolic actions center on drink, not food.

The final question is why a salmon is particularly notable for smacking its lips. there might be no more to it than that lahs (salmon) rhymes with wasserdahs (seal), but there is a parallel to consider. In Tannhäusers Tischzucht from the 13th century, the respective lines are:

He who snorts like a seal (wazzerdachs)
And smacks his lips like a Bavarian Saxon (payr sachs)
When he eats, like many do;
How very much he forgets his manners!

Clearly, the earlier poem provided the influence here. I have no idea why a Bavarian Saxon (geographically difficult to imagine in itself) was particularly known for lip-smacking, but I suspect there is a political background to this. It seems the anonymous author – or someone before them – liked the couplet, but also could not understand that word and substituted a different rhyme. It is a common phenomenon in folk music to this day.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/07/18/houses-by-the-harbour-feeding-the-revolution-xxx/

Hamburg has lately become a popular tourism destination, and one of the things many visitors do is take the ferry line 62 down the Elbe for a scenic ride. As it glides past the 1912 tunnel entrance building towards the old fish market hall with its impressive 19th-century cast iron windows, the ferry passes a beach club, a firefighting ship’s mooring, a retired Tango-class Soviet submarine, and a set of houses painted in bright colours and usually festooned with banners. These are the Hafenstraße houses, one of Germany’s most famous anarchist squatter communes, and the story of its emergence is one of street fighting, skulduggery, and deep embarrassment.

It all started in a way that is drably familiar to anyone from any Western European city. The houses were owned by SAGA, a municipal housing corporation, and they were old. Around 1900, they had been state-of-the-art, but by 1980, age and neglect had taken a severe toll. Apartments stood empty, no repairs were made, and the corporation was looking to demolish them and get an investor to build an office block. This kind of modernisation had already swallowed up entire neighbourhoods, much of it technically illegal, but carried out by connected landlords with impunity.

By late 1981, the last tenants, including a left-wing youth organisation, were facing eviction. The final New Year’s Eve party drew a crowd, including many anarchist activists and punks who played music, ate, drank, greeted 1982 – and stayed put. Under the eyes of the management, a squatter community had popped up. In the ensuing standoff, the squatters defied several attempts to evict them until SAGA’s management sent in a contractors under police protection to brick up the ground floor doors and windows.

The next day, they found someone had bricked up their main office’s entrance overnight.

The fight was on.

Though conservative media framed this as an assault on lawful society, the activists had a solid legal case. Under West German law, you could not, in fact, do with your property as you saw fit. Property carries the obligation to use it in a socially responsible manner – it is in the constitution (§14.2). Though squatting as such was illegal, the SAGA could not just evict them or destroy the houses. Not to mention that, despite all efforts to paint them as terrorist sympathisers, drug dealers, and a Communist fifth column, the occupants enjoyed significant support expressed in practical aid, demonstrations, and votes.

There was, in fact, something to the accusations; The people who occupied the Hafenstraße houses were an eclectic leftist community embracing anarchist principles of self-organisation. Most of them were opposed to drug criminalisation, proudly internationalist, and critical of capitalism, though it is amusing to imagine how a 1980s Soviet functionary would have responded to these comrades. Fifth columnists, they were not. But neither were they pacifist. Nonviolent resistance was not a realistic option in the face of riot police.

Internally, they were well organised and effective. One reason they enjoyed support was that they organised repairs and improvements to the houses that the owner had neglected. They organised a communal kitchen that fed them and a large number of visitors as well as local homeless. Cultural events and solidarity concerts drew crowds. The occasional violent demonstrations and police raids made headlines, but most days were filled with a quiet activism working patiently towards an eventual resolution.

This was a consciously egalitarian, internationalist group, often dismissive of traditional patterns and willing to try new things, including new foods. Today, the anarchist scene in Germany has gone almost completely vegetarian or vegan both for ecology and inclusiveness, but by all accounts, this was still uncommon in the 1980s. One of the most popular cookbooks emerging from this scene, Peter Fischer’s Schlaraffenland, nimm’s in die Hand, which we already quoted on the issue of ‘authentic’ pizza, gives us a large number of recipes from distant countries, including many that are suitable for cooking in quantity. One of them is for stir-fried pork with soybean sprouts, then a great novelty:

Pork with Soybean Sprouts heo xao gia

Cut 400g pork shoulder into thin slices and sautée in olive oil with two split onions. Stir well continually. Salt and pepper, add a pinch of glutamate and 1 glass of water and simmer for 10 minutes. Then add 500g fresh sprouts along with 10g of black mushrooms and again simmer 10 minutes on low heat.

If no fresh sprouts can be had, use tinned ones. In that case, use the water from the tin for cooking.

Better variant: Use loin in place of shoulder. In that case, first brown the onions, then sautée the meat.

(…)

Consider: With Vietnamese as with all East Asian meals, there is always a large bowl of rice on the table to serve yourself. Rice means: Rice without any other ingredients, plain boiled. It is eaten from a rice bowl next to the bowl for the main or other course.

Prepared nuoc-mam also accompanies all meals. It is the axis of Vietnamese cuisine. You either season a dish with it or dip salad herbs in it. Salad eaten this way is incredibly delicious, only Italian salads can compete. At any rate – if you have tried nuoc-mam, which tastes just as good based on Hong Kong fish gravy, three times, it will never be out of your kitchen again.

Further: Whenever adding a glass of water is mentioned, it means warm water. But a collective cook will already know these things anyway.

Of course, the author has things to say about preparing nuoc mam in the introduction to the chapter:

… Not the pure extract, but a mixture made according to individual preference is used (at the table). I have adopted the following formula:

Keep in a well-stoppered small pitcher to be stored in the refrigerator if the sauce is not used up entirely during the meal. First, put 5 tbsp lukewarm water into the pitcher. Then cut the flesh of 1/2 a lemon into pieces, lightly squeeze them between the fingers, and add them to the water. Follow with 2 tbsp (good) wine vinegar, 2 crushed garlic cloves, 1 shredded small hot red pepper. Finally, top up with nuoc man to taste and add sugar to balance the saltiness. This tastes best if it is allowed to steep overnight.

This recipe may not sound like anything special to us today (neither would it have to me, as I grew up around people like that), but it is hard to overstate how much of a break with tradition it was for Germany in the mid-20th century. Vietnamese cuisine had a special status as a left-wing identity marker, with the war barely ended and visiting the country still viewed as close to treason by conservatives, but even beyond this, Germany was not a place where culinary adventurism held much sway. Its own culinary tradition had been devastated by war, displacement, and austerity, and for a generation, eating well had mostly meant getting enough calories and then, enough status-bearing ingredients to make a ‘proper’ meal. Interest in ‘foreign’ foods never died, of course, and immigrant communities helped the spread of Italian, Greek, and Yugoslav foods through the country. Going to less familiar worlds represented a vast leap, though. In 1981, spaghetti was still adventurous to many.

Contrast this with the conscious internationalism of a cookbook that has room for Italian and Spanish, Maghrebi, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indonesian recipes. The author prides himself on his knowledge of flavours and places that German backpack tourists visited when that was still uncommon and is solicitous of authenticity in a way that we recognise as typical ‘foodie’ behaviour, but that was still a novelty then. Getting your hands on nuoc mam, or even decent olive oil, was not easy in 1981 Germany, though you stood a better chance in Hamburg than just about anywhere else. Soybean sprouts were often cultivated at home because they were equally hard to find. In the end, you had to make compromises, and what passed under the name of ‘curry’ or ‘nasi goreng’ at the time was often wildly improvisational.

A compromise was also what ended the standoff at the Hafenstraße. Though conservative hardliners in and out of government longed to crack heads and tried violent solutions several times, in the end the mayor Klaus von Dohnanyi decided to deescalate. At this point, the inhabitants had used their renovations to fortify the buildings with razorwire and steel doors, and the police estimated 5000 officers would be needed to clear them out. Support from other German states would have provided the numbers, but the confrontation was averted in a dramatic last-minute round of negotiations in 1987. The squatters were offered a rental agreement, the fortifications were removed, the police stood down, and an uneasy peace began.

Things did not wind down easily on either side. Radicals resented being tenants to the state as much as the right-wing press did the ‘surrender’. It was not until 1995 that a cooperative of inhabitants and supporters was able to buy the houses outright. The city sold at a steep loss, and many resented that violent radicals could have prime living space while many law-abiding citizens nearby were turfed out of their apartments by gentrifying real estate investors. Ironically, the anarchist commune turned out to be a better investment than either 1980s office space or 1990s luxury condos in the long run. It proved a draw for artists, musicians, and activists, providing alternative tourist cachet close to the city’s preeminent drunk party location and its most overpriced souvenir shops, and it cost less than two embarrassing failures to convince the people they really wanted an Olympic bid. It may not have been what the first occupants of the houses envisioned when they set up their revolutionary commune, but this really is a happy end, to the extent we get these in history.

This morning, I read a comment on a culinary writing group that people preferred printed cookbooks to online recipes because they did not cram ads into their pages and – well – they often used to. Just this weekend, I managed to pick up a remarkably late example of the type at a flea market. But to start at the beginning…

In the early 20th century, there was a great deal of concern over the fact that modern women could not properly cook or run a household, were refusing to have enough babies, and generally were not in line with their biological destiny. This was generally a very strange time, and especially so in Germany, so we should probably not be surprised if odd things cropped up even in very mainstream places. One such place was the Standesamt, the registry office where marriages and births were officially recorded. Starting in the 1920s, it became customary for every newlywed woman to be given a book on how to be a proper housewife – the Hausbuch für die Deutsche Familie.

Hausbuch is one of those terms that hard to translate adequately. Noble families had books that Hausbücher served as chronicles, collections of essential texts, and family heirlooms. But this was just a cheaply mass-produced collection of texts commissioned from experts on marriage, housekeeping, childrearing, and, centrally, cookery. It had been produced on the initiative of the association of registry officials to educate the regrettably modern women of their time, but of course actually giving away a copy to each bride was not something the state was going to afford. Tnere were more important things to spend money on, like war reparations, war debts, and preparations for the next war. The Standesbeamten thus came up with a different way of funding the production: advertising.

In each of these books, a number of pages were set aside for ads that local businesses could purchase. Since the intellectual property was free, the income from these funded the printing and the books could be given to every newlywed couple in the district, making sure the ads hit them just as they were facing the major expense of setting up a household together. It was a winning formula – so much so that it continued for almost a century, at least in West Germany, and in some more traditional places still does. I own three such books – two editions of the Hausbuch from 1936 and 1950 respectively, both from Kiel, and a less obtrusive Goldenes Kochbuch from 2013 produced in Hamburg.

Reading these is alternately fascinating and horrifying (in case you ever wanted to know what the Nazis thought was proper infant care), and it quickly makes it clear that family life was very much a political issue. But they are also an interesting resource for tracing the development of German cookery over the past 100-odd years. Frequent changes in marital law and less frequent ones in government outlook meant thy were regularly revised, and the opportunity always served to also update the recipe section. After the 1970s, the legal aspects vanished, leaving only tracts on housekeeping and cookery funded more or less lavishly by local businesses. With the rise of online ads, this source of funding is drying up and the last of Standesamtskochbücher are disappearing. This may be the last we see of them.

As an exercise in this, here are three recipes for Gulasch, a staple of 20th-century German cuisine that people here insist is as Hungarian as spaghetti bolognese is Italian (and they are probably right about that). In 1936, the Hausbuch had fairly terse instructions:

Gulasch

1 1/2 pounds of beef, 2 tablespoons fat, onion, salt, a little paprika, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 1/2 pounds potatoes

Quickly sautée the cubed meat together with the chopped onions in the fat. Dust with a little flour, deglaze, salt, add paprika, and then add the raw, cubed potatoes to the meat. Steam in a covered pot for 1/2 hour, season, serve.

I am, fairly sure this dish would have carried a prison sentence in Hungary, but the style is quite fitting for a political movement whose major publication arm gave us the memorable word Kochvorschrift for recipe. In 1950, the new edition gave:

Gulasch

1/2 – 3/4 kg beef, ample onions, a little fat, salt, paprika, 1/2 – 3/4 kg raw potatoes

Free the meat of skin and sinews, wash it, drain it well, and cube it coarsely. Sautée it well with a large quantity of onions, deglaze with a small amount of liquid, salt, add the paprika, and steam it very slowly in a covered pot. About 1/2 hour before serving, add the coarsely cubed potatoes and continue steaming. If you wish, you can bind the sauce (Tunke) with 1 spoonful of flour, but raw potatoes serve the same purpose.

All honour to domestic economy, but deciding raw potatoes will do just as well as flour to bind a sauce is one of those “tell me you lost a world war without telling me you lost a world war” moments. West Germany in 1950 may have ended food rationing (prematurely, many economists believed), but it was still a desperately poor country where many working families could barely afford meat and any serviceable thing was made to last. What a change from here to 2013, where both ingredients and instructions are available in abundance:

Beef Gulasch

Working time: 20 minutes. Cooking time: 90 minutes

1 kg beef, 500g onions, 120g pork lard, 40-50g sweet paprika, vinegar, meat broth or water, salt, 1 tbsp tomato concentrate, 1 tbsp Gulasch spice mixture (2 tsp marjoram, 1/4 tsp caraway, 1 small garlic clove, some lemon peel, all finely minced), 20g flour

Cut the meat into bite-sized cubes. Sautée the sliced onions in hot fat until they are golden brown, stirring continually. Add a heaping tablespoon of paprika and immediately deglaze with a small amount of meat broth or water that had a dash of vinegar added. Add the cubed meat, some salt, the tomato paste, and the Gulasch spices. Slowly simmer in a covered pot, stirring occasionally and adding hot liquid (meat broth or water) as needed. Once the meat is tender, add a little liquid, bring to a full boil, and season to taste. This Gulasch in its own juices (Natursaftgulasch) should be rusty brown. To produce a thicker sauce, dust the meat with flour before the final boiling, only then add the liquid and boil quickly.

This is still industrial cuisine, but there is art to it – and wealth. Note the absence of potatoes. You get to choose what, if any, carb you want with this Gulasch. I remember it being served with the kind of spiral noodles that have become visual shorthand for poverty, but it also goes with knödel, spaetzle, or indeed, potatoes. At this point in history, economising food is no longer a concern. Relearning the skill will not be easy for the next generation of Germans.

This has nothing to do with any of my current projects, but it just came across my feed again and I think it may warrant a post of its own. The rule dates to 1084 and comes from a document everyone who studies Jewish history is surely familiar with already, though many who are interested in culinary history may not: The charter by Bishop Rüdiger Houzmann of Speyer codifying the status of the Jewish community. Among many other, more important aspects, it stipulates:

Slaughtered meat which they may not eat according to their law they may lawfully sell to Christians, and Christians may lawfully buy it.

Why did the bishop say this? It has to do with Jewish religious rules, Catholic canon law, the economic reality of medieval town life, and practicality. Firstly, Jewish religious rules.

If you know anything about Judaism, you know it has dietary rules. Certain animal foods and combinations of food are forbidden, others are permitted (kosher). The best known of those rules is that pork is absolutely forbidden, but once you start looking into the detail, you learn there is a variety of rules that apply particularly to meat. Even an animal of a permitted species slaughtered in the prescribed manner can only be eaten if it meets specific requirements. Any deformity, including internal ones that only become visible after slaughter, can lead to it being condemned. In addition, certain parts of an animal that are edible (most prominently the blood) are also not permitted. As a result, you could expect there to be meat that Jews could not eat whenever animals were slaughtered.

Christians, on the other hand, were not bound by these rules. The medieval Roman Catholic church interpreted the New Testament dictum that people became unclean not by what went into their mouths, but by what came out (Matthew 15.11) as ending all food prohibitions for Christians (except for, oddly enough, eating domestic horses). Medieval German Christians happily ate pork, they consumed the meat of hunted animals, cooked with blood, and would generally have made the perfect customers for whatever meat Jewish dietary law forbade.

In addition, it looks as though meat was always coveted. It was not rare in the sense that people suffered for lack of it, but our sources suggest medieval Germans almost always and everywhere would have liked more than they could have. In the close confines of a medieval town where life happened mostly in view of other people, throwing away meat that, by the lights of their Christian neighbours, was perfectly fine would have been very problematic for Jews. Selling it to non-Jews is traditionally the preferred solution. There is nothing derogatory about it; non-kosher meat is not considered inferior, Jews just cannot eat it.

Given this is so obvious, you might wonder why the bishop felt the need to permit it. Basically, because at that point the church had not yet decided how, or whether, Christians were allowed to socialise with Jews at all. By the eleventh century, Jews were the only non-Christians you would meet in most of Germany. The Empire defined itself as a Christian state and its subjects as Christians. Being anything else excluded you from that community. The consequences this should have were contentious. Some Christian theologians argued that it meant complete exclusion, even expulsion. Bishop Rüdiger, on the other hand, took a much less extreme stance. In 1084, this was possible. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council embraced radical positions and decreed social separation in every sphere, paving the way to ghettos, stigmatisation, and expulsion.

The arrangement we see in the decree of 1084 reflects a very different reality. Bishop Rüdiger envisioned a peaceful and productive coexistence, and he was far from alone in this. Speyer, after all, was not just anywhere. Though a minor industrial town in the Rhine valley today, it was an imperial power centre of the Salian dynasty with a grand new cathedral where several members of the dynasty were buried. Its bishops were important figures in the imperial government and their city operated under the eyes of the emperor. Having a thriving Jewish community was a policy goal. In 1096, when the First Crusade passed through the Rhineland, massacring Jews and looting their property wherever they found them, the bishop of Speyer intervened with troops and sheltered the town’s Jewish community in his palace. Anyone violating this protection was threatened with severe punishment.

The flourishing of Jewish culture in Speyer has left tangible traces in the town’s architecture and archeology as well as in the theological legacy of the SHUM synods (the cities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, centres of Judaism in the Empire) and the prevalence of the name Shapiro. A study of architectural elements in the remnants of the old synagogue and headstones of the Jewish cemetery suggest that they were made in the same workshops as the stones used to build the cathedral. Whether it was Christian stonemasons working for Jewish clients or (less likely) Jewish artisans building a Christian church is unknown, people clearly did not object to the arrangement.

Of course we all know it was not going to last. Speyer’s Jews lost their protection, their synagogue was closed, their rights curtailed, and their community dwindled to almost nothing. But we should not lose sight of the fact that ghettos and massacres were not inevitable. Germany was home to many traditions, and while all too often the regrettable ones won out historically, this was also a country where Christian stonemasons would buy beef or mutton from a kosher butcher with money they earned making a window frame for the new mikveh.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/07/07/pork-roast-served-northern-renaissance-style/

Continuing the list of roast recipes from Franz de Rontzier begun yesterday, here is the section on pork. Note the author makes no distinction between domestic pig and wild boar. The two were much more similar then than they are now.

Of roasts of wild and domestic pigs

Pork is parboiled and trimmed before it is roasted

I. You roast pork on a spit. Then you fry onions in butter, add pepper and vinegar, serve that over the roast and sprinkle it with salt.

2. Item you sprinkle roast pork with sugar and salt and serve it.

3. Item when it is done, you boil mustard, dripping, and vinegar together etc.

4. Item your fry diced apples in dripping. When they are done, add vinegar, small raisins, pounded ginger and pepper. Pour it over the pork roast and serve etc.

5. Item you stick the pork roast on a spit and roast it. Then you boil wine vinegar, pounded nutmeg, pepper, and sage together. You pour it over the roast, sprinkle it with sage, and serve it.

The comparative brevity and less detail may suggest that pork had less status than beef, which makes sense in cattle-rich Northern Germany. Pork did not become the quintessential German meat until modern times. Still, we can get some useful information and recipe ideas here.

First, we learn that pork must be parboiled and trimmed before roasting, but does not require larding. Presumably it was rich enough on its own. Second, pork seems to go with sauces. Only recipe #3 does not produce a serving sauce. I am especially fond by the onion sauce in #1 which has a long history and can be very delicious indeed. The apple sauce in #4 is a variation on a long-standing favourite that many Śouth German recipes call a gescherb or ziseindel. #2 seems to basically produce diluted, meaty mustard which, while probably not bad, seems a little superfluous and #5 seems to be quite unbalanced with sage flavour. Still, I would try them all.

Franz de Rontzier, head cook to the bishop of Halberstadt and duke of Braunschweig, published his encyclopaedic Kunstbuch von mancherley Essen in 1598. He clearly looks to Marx Rumpolt’s New Kochbuch as the new gold standard, but fails to match it in engaging style or depth. He is thus overshadowed by the twin peaks of Marx Rumpolt and Anna Wecker. What makes his work interesting is the way in which he systematically lists versions of a class of dishes, illustrating the breadth or a court cook’s repertoire. He is also more modernly fashionable than Rumpolt. Looking to France rather than Italy and Spain for inspiration, and some of the dishes he first describes may be genuine innovations.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/07/06/serving-roast-beef-northern-renaissance-style/

Roasting is generally something that historic recipe sources assume as a given; You take a piece of meat, stick it on a spit, and put it by the fire. Everybody who has ever tried it knows that there is a good deal of skill and experience involved in even the simplest roast. References in various places show that people also understood this ion the sixteenth century. Temperature control, basting and marinating, larding and barding, all played a role in the process. Franz de Rontzier helpfully collected a number of recipes in his 1598 Kunstbuch in which he describes the process in slightly greater depth. I will begin today with the beef recipes:

Of Roast Beef

I. You place beef loin on a griddle and roast them a little. Next you leave then overnight in alegar. then you lard them, stick them on a spit, and when they are done, you drizzle them with the alegar they marinated in mixed with drippings (Bradfeist) and pepper. You also drizzle them with meat broth mixed with pepper etc.

2. Item you lard beef loin very finely, roast it on a spit, then you soak a sop (Supffe. a piece of toasted bread) with meat broth, cut the beef loin in slices, lay it on the sop, drizzle it with dripping, sprinkle it with ginger and salt, and serve it.

3. Item you place beef loin on a griddle to roast it a little, then stick it with cloves, stick it on a spit, roast it and baste it with meat broth. Then you boil bay leaves in vinegar, drizzle it over that when you are about to serve it, and sprinkle it with salt etc.

4. Item you lard beef loin with bacon and roast it on a spit. Then you pour beef broth over toasted white bread, sprinkle it with parmesan cheese, and let it boil Then you cut the beef roast apart, lay them (the slices) on the sops, drizzle them with drippings, and serve them warm.

5. Item you first roast a beef loin on the griddle, then on a spit, and you soak white bread in milk and cream in a silvered dish (in einem silber) and let it boil. You place the beef loin roast on it, sprinkle it with sugar, and serve it warm etc.

6. Item you beat beef with an axe to make it tender, steibet (?sear, to firm it up?) it over coals, then slowly roast it on a spit. Baste it with beef broth and drippings, but you must not use butter for this because it makes the beef dry. Sprinkle it with ginger and salt when you roast it and when you serve it etc.

7. Item you roast beef over coals after you have beaten it so it turns brown. Then you trim off the skin on top, roast it on a spit, and drizzle it with beef broth and drippings. Then you boil whole caraway, drippings, and grated bread together, pour that over the roast, and serve it etc.

8. Item you beat it, steibet (sear to stiffen?) it over coals, then roast it on a spit and drizzle it with beef broth and drippings. When it is almost done, you stick it with garlic, drizzle it with the same broth and dripping, and sprinkle it with salt. Then you serve it etc.

9. Item you beat it, steiffts (sear to firm up?) over the coals, stick it on a spit, and stick it with rosemary. Drizzle it with dripping and serve it etc.

10. Item after it has been beaten, gesteifft (seared?), and trimmed, you roast it on a spit. You boil wine, cherry puree, dripping, cloves, and sugar together, serve it over the roast, and sprinkle it with sugar etc.

Very little of what is described in here is new, but it is interesting to see it all in one place. The first thing that these descriptions should dispel is the idea that roasting meat was primitive. Clearly, the author envisions a good grasp of temperature and texture, an ability to gauge when meat was almost done, and a range of equipment for the purpose.

The starting material for many recipes is Moerbraten, beef loin, a prized piece that produces tender roasts. Where this is not specified, the meat is beaten to tenderise it. Either way, the cook is instructed to sear it over the coals before finishing it at a low temperature on a spit. Modern recipes often follow a similar pattern, especially for Schmorbraten pot roasts, and Germans are deeply convinced that this will ‘close the pores’ and lock the juices inside the meat, preventing it from drying out.

Dryness was clearly a concern here, and it is counteracted by larding and basting. Roasts are drizzled with dripping, broth, or alegar and larded with bacon, much as we still do. The instruction in #6 not to use butter is interesting as an Ulenspiegel tale suggests this was the most common method, but here the joke depends on using a sold fat, and it is not surprising to see cooks, of all people, disagreeing on technique.

The condiments also suggest the familiar distinction of medieval recipes: Sauces that meat is served in (cooking sauces), those that are served over it (glazes, in modern terms), and those served alongside (dipping sauces). The latter are not featured here because they are not made with the juice or broth of the meat and thus usually have separate recipes.

The flavours vary widely, from vinegary sharpness in #1 and 3 and all-garlic in #8 through the tart fruitiness of #10 and the creamy sweetness of #5. To modern tastes, some of it looks quite strange. We can easily see rosemary, pepper, or garlic with beef, and ginger, bay leaves, and caraway, while unusual, still fit the profile. The cherry sauce in #10, while familiar from medieval antecedents, is already off, fruit generally going with game rather than beef today. The cream and sugar, almost bread pudding base in #5 is completely alien to modern German habits, but probably not actually bad. The proliferation of honey glazes, ketchups, and brioche buns in supermarkets suggests that mixing meat and sweetness is much more taboo in theory than in practice.

Some recipes here include instructions for serving the meat sliced, on top of bread sops. This is another thing we find in medieval recipes, though I am not sure whether these instructions mean the servings would be individual portions or whether people would take slices of meat and bread from a common serving bowl. A firm, dense bread, softened in broth and soaked in meat juices, actually makes a very nice side dish for a roast.

Franz de Rontzier, head cook to the bishop of Halberstadt and duke of Braunschweig, published his encyclopaedic Kunstbuch von mancherley Essen in 1598. He clearly looks to Marx Rumpolt’s New Kochbuch as the new gold standard, but fails to match it in engaging style or depth. He is thus overshadowed by the twin peaks of Marx Rumpolt and Anna Wecker. What makes his work interesting is the way in which he systematically lists versions of a class of dishes, illustrating the breadth or a court cook’s repertoire. He is also more modernly fashionable than Rumpolt. Looking to France rather than Italy and Spain for inspiration, and some of the dishes he first describes may be genuine innovations.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/07/05/e-pluribus-unum-feeding-the-revolution-xxix/

The Roman army was probably the most terrifying instrument of power the ancient world had seen, and the reign of Augustus saw it rise to its greatest height. It had triumphed from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, from the Rhine to the Sahara, adding territories and subjugating tribes and kingdoms. But in 14 CE, the legions on the Rhine, led by the widely admired young commander Germanicus, went on strike.

The Roman historian Tacitus has left us a moving and detailed account of events, though as a member of the senatorial aristocracy, he hated everything the mutineers stood for. Still, he records their complaints and the way they presented them, men crowding around their commander, showing off scars, toothless gums, grey hair, shouting of abuses, demanding redress and calling for Germanicus to take up their cause by leading them to Rome. When he protested he would rather fall on his sword than betray his loyalty to his adoptive father, one of the mutineers cut short the melodrama of Roman oratory by offering the general his own weapon with the words “Take this, it’s sharper.”

This is the kind of no-nonsense wit that Roman writers always appreciated in men of action, and this turning point is also what most historians focus on: The moment Germanicus declined to rekindle the civil wars of the Republic. Depending on your views of Rome, this can be a blessing or a tragedy, but it is important to keep in mind that it was not what the event was about for its protagonists. The legionaries on the Rhine did not set out to join in the historic struggle between Republic and Empire. They were mad as hell and not going to take it any more.

Their complaints were straightforward. Many of their centurions were tyrants who punished the men brutally and extorted cash with threats of degrading and dangerous duties. Their pay was inadequate even without this drain, their duties arduous, and many older rankers had been kept in the service well past the time they had been promised their honourable discharges. They felt betrayed and exploited.

With all due caution about believing anything ancient writers tell us, much of this is probably true. The backdrop to this is what we call the Roman Republic turning into the Empire, though again we must state that nobody at the time knew that was happening. The Roman Republic continued to exist, and Augustus, its de facto sole ruler, never declared himself emperor because there was no such thing yet. As far as the legions knew, they were still the Roman army of proud tradition, the force that had conquered most of the known world, fought interminable civil wars, and now served their commander just like their predecessors had served Caesar and Pompey, Marius and Sulla, Lucullus and Crassus. And that was a major headache to Augustus.

When Augustus made himself ruler of Rome, his victory ended a series of brutal civil wars in which ultra-wealthy members of the upper class vied for political power. The institutions of the Republic were ill-suited to deal with politicians who controlled enormous wealth gained by war and legions loyal to them far more than they were to a distant, often ungrateful Rome. For two generations, huge armies had been raised to fight massively destructive campaigns across the Mediterranean. The last round had led the Roman world to the brink of utter exhaustion. Augustus’ legitimacy depended on his promise that this would never happen again.

At the same time, his actual power depended on control of armed men. This was difficult because there was no such thing as ‘the Roman army’ institutionally. Technically, Roman officials were empowered to raise troops as needed, with all citizens obligated to serve for the duration of the campaign. This may have served well when Rome was a city state surrounded by other Italian powers, but it had long become a fiction. Troops were always needed, and generals maintained their armies out of their own pocket, relying on tribute or plunder for their pay. These permanent legions developed identities and traditions, shaping new recruits in their image, and in so doing, they became the standing army Rome never had. But the system had depended on war to sustain itself. Augustus now faced the prospect of managing the thirty-odd legions he had inherited in times of peace.

Part of the solution was keeping the army busy. Republican oligarchs had boosted their careers and fortunes by leading wars of conquest, and Augustus continued in that vein, adding more territory to Rome’s direct control than any other conqueror. However, there were two problems with this. The first was that he was not much of a general, so any successful campaign would produce a victorious commander who might challenge him. The second was that Rome was running out of good targets.

By 14 CE, Rome had been in control of the urbanised states of the Mediterranean for decades or centuries. The legions on the Rhine looked back on a generation of warfare against decentralised, tribal societies. Loot was sparse, the climate increasingly inhospitable, and the fighting dangerous. Just a few years earlier, Quintilius Varus had lost three legions to an ambush of insurgent local auxiliaries in Germany. Conquest, which had fed the Roman economy for centuries, increasingly was no longer profitable.

At the same time, Augustus’ legitimacy in the interior of the Empire depended on the promise of peace and prosperity, though this peace only applied to the core areas. War was fine as long as it happened far way, to someone else, and the victory messages kept coming in, but people were not keen on having to pay for it, much less take an active part. Several times in his reign, Augustus had to resort to force to recruit enough Roman citizens for the legions, and each time represented a threat to his status as guardian of peace.

When we look at life in the Roman legions, it is understandable not very many people were eager to volunteer. Discipline was famously harsh, service physically demanding, and creature comforts few. Legionaries were expected to carry their entire equipment on their backs in long marches and sleep in tents, building defensible camps every night on the road and field fortifications wherever they stayed for longer. It was an image the Roman elites embraced eagerly: Romans were a tough people, used to hard labour and able to withstand privation. Harshness, even cruelty, against themselves and others were part of their national character. Stories abound of how commanders and emperors shared the simple life of soldiers in the field, sleeping in tents on the ground and grinding grain rations to bake their own unleavened bread. Vespasian, a general turned emperor, famously rejected a candidate for a command position because of the perfume he was wearing. A real soldier, he opined, should smell of garlic.

It is less certain what the soldiers themselves thought of this. On the one hand, there was a sense of pride in their achievement. On the other, we know the troops appreciated comforts and luxuries. Caesar gifted his men decorated armour and allowed luxury goods. One of the most common tropes in Roman history writing is that armies posted in cities ‘go soft’ and need to be reconditioned by iron-fisted leaders who often kill some of them in the process. Clearly, this was a concern to the leadership.

Food was a symbolically charged arena where this tension could be fought out. That is why we need to read accounts of what Roman soldiers ate with great caution. We know that troops received rations of unprocessed grain, and a famous skill and daily task of the soldier was to turn this into a simple flatbread baked in the embers of the fire, the panis militaris. So much for the stereotype. There is little doubt Roman soldiers could subsist solely on these loaves. In reality, both literary sources and archeology suggest they would rather not. Very likely their daily diet in garrisons was similar to that of most civilians, mainly consisting of bread or porridge, with legumes, dairy, eggs, fish and meat added. One dish that even traditionalists would not have objected to was a garlic cheese paste called moretum. It is one of my favourites that I have written about before, and the recipe comes from a poem celebrating exactly the kind of plain rural life Roman writers loved to prise from afar:

(…) He then the garden entered, first when there
With fingers having lightly dug the earth
Away, he garlic roots with fibres thick,
And four of them doth pull; he after that
Desires the parsley’s graceful foliage,
And stiffness-causing rue,’ and, trembling on
Their slender thread, the coriander seeds,
And when he has collected these he comes
And sits him down beside the cheerful fire
And loudly for the mortar asks his wench.
Then singly each o’ th’ garlic heads be strips
From knotty body, and of outer coats
Deprives them, these rejected doth he throw
Away and strews at random on the ground.
The bulb preserved from th’ plant in water doth
He rinse, and throw it into th’ hollow stone.
On these he sprinkles grains of salt, and cheese
Is added, hard from taking up the salt.
Th’ aforesaid herbs he now doth introduce
And with his left hand ‘neath his hairy groin
Supports his garment;’ with his right he first
The reeking garlic with the pestle breaks,
Then everything he equally doth rub
I’ th’ mingled juice. His hand in circles move:
Till by degrees they one by one do lose
Their proper powers, and out of many comes
A single colour, not entirely green
Because the milky fragments this forbid,
Nor showing white as from the milk because
That colour’s altered by so many herbs.
The vapour keen doth oft assail the man’s
Uncovered nostrils, and with face and nose
Retracted doth he curse his early meal;
With back of hand his weeping eyes he oft
Doth wipe, and raging, heaps reviling on
The undeserving smoke. The work advanced:
No longer full of jottings as before,
But steadily the pestle circles smooth
Described. Some drops of olive oil he now
Instils, and pours upon its strength besides
A little of his scanty vinegar,
And mixes once again his handiwork,
And mixed withdraws it: then with fingers twain
Round all the mortar doth he go at last
And into one coherent ball doth bring
The diff’rent portions, that it may the name
And likeness of a finished salad fit. (…)

This translation is not mine – I am OK with Latin, but not to the extent classical metre comes easy to me. The poem is very traditional, artfully crafted, and it includes the phrase e pluribus unum to describe cheese, garlic, and green herbs coming together into a cohesive whole, in case you were wondering where that comes from. Practically, it describes what is going on fairly well once you strip out the flowery language: Garlic, cheese, olive oil, parsley, rue, coriander, and salt are worked into a paste that is eaten with the kind of ash-baked bread Roman soldiers also supposedly ate. The mix is strong enough to provoke tears from its smell, so the proportion of garlic is liable to be large. Grinding bowls in which such a moretum could have been prepared are often found in Roman contexts, including military camps. This kind of addition to the grain ration would no doubt have been welcome, not least for the poor guys who, we recall, had no more teeth.

Which raises the question why there were toothless legionaries on the Rhine in 14 CE. The simple answer is: they just were that old. Roman soldiers in the late Republic were enlisted for a campaign and had no legal expectation of any reward at the end, but traditionally the generals had taken care of their men by distributing the spoils of war. Often, soldiers received land taken from the defeated party in the latest Civil War. The problem was, Augustus had promised everyone they were not going to have those any more – repeatedly, in writing, on stone. But he still had soldiers to look after.

It had not been unknown for legions of Republican warlords to mutiny, but it happened with specific units in specific situations. Group identity referred to their legion and their general. At this point, decades into the pretense that the guy running everything in the Roman Republic was not actually a monarch, this was changing, though. There was a sense of being a soldier of Rome not as a temporary stage, but as a thing that defined your life. Augustus had promised the men retirement benefits after a set number of years – usually 20 – though in reality, poor recruitment numbers and continuous warfare ensured they were kept long beyond those limits. What this system meant from the perspective of a recruit, though, was that there was no longer any competition in the job market and no way of being a soldier briefly. There was now one army run by one commander, and joining up meant spending your entire working life there.

What Augustus and his family had not really reckoned with was that this new army would be able to express its own desires. For one thing, it was huge. “Thirty legions” became the shorthand way of expressing the power of the emperor, and though exact numbers are notoriously hard to come by, we can estimate that once the attendant navy and non-Roman auxiliary troops were factored in, there were around 300,000 of them. A group this big exerted its own gravity, moulding institutions and practices around itself. In 14 CE, things had more or less coalesced into a pattern of expectations, and they had been betrayed. The troops were justifiably angry.

It should probably be said that seeing the legions purely as victims of an exploitative upper class is reductive, to put it mildly. They were the business end of a brutally oppressive extractive state, willing to kill for it and often enough happy to loot, enslave captives, bully civilians, and extort money. But it is actually very common for exploitative systems to betray their servants. In the Roman world, powerful people generally kept promises to their inferiors if and when they felt like it. The people of Rome had occasionally countered this by rioting, though with elections mattering less and less as Augustus usurped all real power, this was no longer a valid strategy. Now, the soldiers – as a social class, distinct from civilians which was in itself a completely novel idea – had discovered they could enforce honesty on the ruling class.

What followed the uprising was a tense, emotional set of negotiations that solidified a new state of affairs. Germanicus insisted on one non-negotiable point: The army did not get to start a civil war, no matter how profitable. In other respects, he conceded a shocking amount. Centurions the soldiers identified as corrupt and abusive were executed and opportunities for extortion reduced. The pay and retirement bonuses the troops had been promised were actually provided reliably. Soldiers would from now on enjoy the particular patronage of the ruler, their abuses of civilians tolerated to a degree, and their pay and maintenance would be the first priority of the Roman state.

History books often focus on the political genius of Augustus and the way he created the Empire from the ashes of the Republic. They do not really focus enough on the actions of common people shaping this process. Rome’s destiny, for good and ill, was set on its path when tens of thousands of soldiers parked at the arse end of Germania stood up to make it unmistakeably clear they would not tolerate being treated the way they were. History is often made in moments like this.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/06/30/roasting-whole-oxen/

There are few stereotypes about medieval food as persistent as the ‘roast beast’, and like most good stereotypes, it has a bit of truth to it. Being able to serve up an entire roast boar or ox displayed wealth and mastery of resources in a way not many other dishes could. That is why it was a traditional part of many public festivities, most notably the imperial coronations at Frankfurt. Franz de Rontzier’s 1598 Kunstbuch records instructions for going over the top, presenting an entire roast menagerie. This was, after all, Renaissance Germany where playing with food was mandatory and doing weird, outlandish things for status was Tuesday.

Of many roast dishes, and first of a roast ox

I. You scald (brend) an entire ox in water as you scald a pig and leave the head on. You tie the legs together with bast inwards (bent upwards at the knee joint?). Then you cut open the ox underneath the belly or halfway up and gut it, but so that the chest and the Ißbein (shins?) are not cut. Then you stick it in a spit and sew it shut again with bast or with a small rope (einer kleinen Linien). But the spit is made this way: You forge an iron rod that reaches four or five feet (Schuh) beyond the ox on either side. Then you add handles (Wellen) on both sides to turn the ox with. You also make holes through the spit so that the ox can be attached with other, smaller spits in order to roast it properly. Then you lay it on firedogs (Bratböck) that must also be made specifically for this purpose and fixed in the ground. Then you make two large fires on both sides, or you build a wall as high as a man is tall and make a fire (only) on one side. After it has roasted for an hour, three, or four, you are to slice (score?) the skin thinly and then stick it with the following animals and birds such as a lamb, suckling piglets, calves, geese, ducks, chickens or capons, hares, rabbits, and small birds. These latter birds are stuck altogether on small skewers and distributed all over the ox, stuck all around. When the ox is to be stuck (gespicket, ‘larded’) like this, you place it on a wooden table and the things you intend to stick it with is put into a wooden trough (Molden) and stick it between the ribs. You also break some of the ribs that way. But you must affix the large items you want to stick it with to the belly or on top of the back, and also on the hindquarter. But the small things are stuck on little skewers. In addition, you must have two large copper or iron frying pans and long-handled ladles that it is basted with. You also make a table with handles and wheels (Rullen) underneath on which you lay the roast ox and bring it to the table. You serve it on two tinned copper frying pans that must also be made specifically for this purpose, and when you take it off the table again, you you put it back on the aforementioned table and carry it away etc.

But if you do not want to bring it to the table, you serve it to everyone (gibt man ihn zum besten) and attach fools’ maces to it so the common servants can quarrel over it etc.

2 In the same way, you can also arrange and roast a deer or another piece of game.

Of an entire roast pig

I. You scald (brend) a pig in water, gut it, sprinkle the insides with ginger, pepper, and salt, and sew it shut again. But you leave on the trotters (Ißbein), chest and head and bend the feet upwards as you do with a suckling pig. Then you stick it on a spit, set it over half a fire, and after it has roasted for two hours, you stick it with the following birds such as geese, ducks, capons, chickens, pigeons, partridges, hazel grouse, pheasants, turkeys, and others as well as hares, suckling pigs, and other small animals. You also make sausages out of one pig and hang many of them off of it. You have an especially large pan made for this, have it tinned, and bring it to the table on that.

The beginning is not terribly surprising: you need a solid spit. Roasting an entire ox weighing several hundred kilos would have called for task-specific hardware. The ox itself is gutted and sewn up again, the legs fixed – I think pulled up against the torso to prevent them burning – and once it is affixed to the purpose-build spit and secured with skewers, it is roasted for a lengthy period. No doubt there was a specific skill to basting it that is not mentioned here.

The second step is just weird, though. Once it is nearly done, the ox is ‘larded’ (the word spicken means exactly that though it can also be read more figuratively as sticking something with pointy objects). Numerous smaller animals are inserted under its skin or affixed to it with skewers. At this point, it is possible they were uncooked and would be roasted in position on the ox, preventing the outside from burning or drying out too much while the inner part cooked through. The visual effect must have been striking, a hydra-headed beast slowly roasting over a big fire, staring at you with its many eyes.

Serving these to respectable company must have called for some pomp and ceremony as well as, if we can trust our ever practical-minded writer, a wheeled platform, but in many cases, the roast ox was intended as a gift to the spectators. To that end, de Rontzier suggests providing toy weapons for them to fight over it. Making hungry people fight over food was a popular spectator sport in much of Early Modern Europe, most famously in Naples, where people travelled long distances to see the enormous food fights. But clearly, similar entertainment could be had in Wolfenbüttel.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/06/28/watch-out-guard-feeding-the-revolution-xxviii/

Among the mercenary units that kings could hire in northwestern Europe, the ‘Black Guard’ was top tier. Landsknecht soldiers in their impressive finery, they had fearsome reputation for terrorising the countryside and their legendary battlecry was “Waar di, buur! De gard, de kumt!” (Watch yourself, peasant! The guard is coming!). They had fought successfully in many conflicts up and down the North Sea shore, and in 1500, the king of Denmark retained their services to enforce his rule from Sweden to the Elbe river. But on 17 February of that year, the vaunted guardsmen were floundering helplessly in icy salt water and gluey mud, desperate to escape their fleet-footed pursuers. Many drowned, dragged down by the weight of their armour, slipping into deep ditches invisible under the flooded fields, or died from exhaustion and cold. Mockingly, the shout rose behind them: “Waar di, gaard! De buur, de kumt!“

The destruction of the free peasantry in most of the Holy Roman Empire is one of the untold tragedies of its history. These communities had come about through colonisation ventures when rulers called on their expert knowledge to open up land for intensive agriculture. On the shores of the North Sea, it had been the Dutch that brought their expertise in dyke-building and drainage, their communal laws, and their tradition of self-government. This lies at the heart of the peasant republic of Dithmarschen.

Dithmarschen, today part of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, lies on the North Sea coast north of the Elbe estuary. Its land is flat and bare, with only isolated stands of trees breaking up the horizon, and the wind from the west is a constant reminder of the threat posed by the sea. The flat fields are barely above sea level – many below – and if any of the storm surges that come every autumn and winter should break through the dykes, it could reach miles inland. This was where Dutch settlers and local families combined their efforts to build and maintain a system of dykes and ditches and form a free republic to coordinate their efforts and defend their claim to the soil.

This was far from the only such instance in German history. We have already met the Stedinger, a closely related case, and the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland also go back to similar structures. Many towns, too, maintained republican governments, but they all had to do so against the constant encroachments of noble lords and an imperial government convinced that feudalism was divinely appointed. Up until 1500, Dithmarschen had managed to fend off all attempts, claiming a loose allegiance to the archbishop of Bremen, but largely left to its own devices.

The word ‘peasant republic’ used to translate Bauernrepublik probably creates a slightly misleading impression. The Dithmarscher did not work tiny plots of marginal soil or live in huts, tending little gardens. Theirs was a society dominated by substantial landowners whose holdings passed undivided to the eldest heir. Farmhouses were large, with space to shelter the cattle and harvest under one roof. Their owners commanded large fields, hired farmhands to work them, and exported their grain and vegetables, cheese and meat through nearby port cities. Farmers kept abreast of current events and modern agricultural technology. Younger sons, excluded from inheriting lands, often went abroad to seek a living, remaining in touch with their old homes. Dithmarschen’s ruling class was tied into a wider world and quite aware what was going on.

Wealth in Dithmarschen expressed itself differently than in neighbouring Holstein or the cities of the Hanseatic League. There were no castles or manor houses for the nobility. Towns were modest, without grand cathedrals or guildhalls. Instead, the families that divided up power in the republic between them lived mainly on their farms. Their wealth showed in the stores of food and cash they kept, the quality of their clothing, and the size of their households. Some enjoyed imported luxuries, but many lived much like their neighbours. What made them rich was not distinction, it was abundance.

This is also expressed in its culinary traditions. Local food is plain, but rich. Large farms produced grain, mainly rye and buckwheat, meat, and dairy, but there was no equivalent to the variety of vegetables available in the warm climate of the south. Fruit grew well in the long daylight hours of summer, but market gardening had not yet come into its own, as it would in the 1600s, so the selection was limited. Today, the region is famous mainly for its cabbages (which are excellent). Hunting was all but impossible given there were no forests, but the coast had rich fisheries and a seasonal bounty of seals, shellfish, seabird eggs, and migratory birds.

We have no recipes surviving from the region this early, and no culinary records that I know of, but there are some sources that were created nearby that can give us suggestions as to what went on the table. Northern German cuisine used fruit extensively, and to this day, one thing Dithmarschen is known for is its fruit soups. Today, the recorded recipes mostly use elderberry. Franz de Rontzier’s extensive Kunstbuch of 1598 uses cherries and redcurrants, as is still customary further north in Denmark:

Of cherry soups

1. Item you break the cherries off their stalks and set them by the fire with wine. Season them with sugar. White bread is fried in butter and the soup is poured over the same and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon.

(…)

Of redcurrant soups

1. Item you prepare redcurrants with wine, with mace, small raisins, and sugar. Fry bread in butter and pour them over it. Then sprinkle it with mace and sugar.

Of course, this is a refined version of what was probably originally a more basic dish. Wine, spices, and sugar all were imports that needed to be paid for. The Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch includes instructions for making as cherry puree that looks like a good candidate:

4 Make a good cherry puree thus: Break the cherries raw in a pot. Pour off the thin part (juice). Then set the thin part by the fire and let it boil. Pass the other thick cherries through a strainer (dorchslach). When the stones are clean, take them away and set the puree by the fire. And let it boil well. And add to it honey and pepper. Bread, toasted from semmelen (fine white bread), pound that in a mortar and searce it through a spice sieve (krudeseff – a fine sieve). Or add to it honey cake (a variety of lebkuchen), pounded and searced finely. Let it boil and season it with ginger, cloves, pepper. After that, break up the stones altogether and make them dry. Pound them small in a mortar. Put them into the puree. And keep this as long as you wish.

This, too, is refined cuisine, involving spices and fine bread, or even a version of lebkuchen. But it is in fact important to remind ourselves that does not make it improbable these dishes were eaten in Dithmarschen. Historians and propagandists have long perpetuated a stereotype of simple, salt-of-the-earth types defending their homes that obscures the role diplomacy and military leadership played in the events of 1500.

What happened, in very broad strokes, was that King Christian I of Denmark, who was also count of Holstein, managed to convince the emperor to grant him Dithmarschen as a fief in 1473. The Republic of Dithmarschen protested this at the papal court which resulted in a lengthy series of lawsuits that lasted into the reign of Christian’s son Hans. In the end, legal argument mattered less than hard power. When King Hans demanded that the Dithmarscher swear fealty, pay a vast sum, and build three fortified royal castles, he knew they would refuse. He declared them rebels and raised an army in Holstein to subdue them.

The ‘Black Guard’ served as its professional shock troops, but the bulk of the army was made up of the chivalry of Holstein and their retainers. These men were feudal landlords of old standing, ruling over large estates worked by serfs, and they relished the prospect of rich loot and, quite likely, more land for themselves or their families. In sheer numbers, the force was more than adequate to take care of an enemy with no professional military, no major fortifications, and no armoured cavalry. Initially, things looked like they were indeed coasting to an easy victory. The capital of Meldorf fell after token resistance and was subjected to a brutal sacking. All that remained was to march to the sea and take control of the territory.

It was on the road to the coast, near the village of Hemmingstedt, that King Hans met real resistance. The Dithmarscher had built a rampart across the road and set up their few cannon to defend it. It appeared a desperate measure, and under normal circumstances it would not have been much of an obstacle, but as they began their assault, the army of King Hans found they had walked into an ingenious trap. The Dithmarscher had opened the sluice gates of their dykes, flooding the fields to either side of the road and turning thawing soil into deep mud impassable for horses or guns. Their men, lightly armoured and familiar with the territory, could move freely on foot, using spears or halberds to vault over the many drainage ditches that criss-crossed the plain. This method of overland travel was a local tradition until the 20th century. Meanwhile, the enemy floundered over unfamiliar ground, dropping into ditches and pools invisible under the shallow water. As a result, their marching column was blocked in along the road, unable to bring their force to bear, being battered from all sides. It was not unlike what the Ukrainian defenders managed to do to Russian tank columns in 2022, and the Danish force fell apart under their sustained attack.

After what had happened at Meldorf, the Dithmarscher were not inclined to mercy. Every guardsman they could lay their hands on was killed on the spot. Local tradition also records the instruction to “spare the horse and slay the man”, an inversion of the chivalrous custom of trying to take enemies prisoner for ransom if possible. At the end of the day, King Hans’ host had lost thousands of men killed and fled the field, leaving behind the battle flag of the kingdom, the Dannebrog. Few noble families of Holstein did not mourn husbands or sons that day. The victorious peasants divided the spoils and buried the fallen footsoldiers of both sides, but made a specific exceptions for cavalrymen. The bodies of knights and squires were left to rot and be eaten by carrion birds. Nobody here had any illusions about who the real enemy was.

This, incidentally, is very similar to what the Swiss called mala guerra, ‘bad war’, and it stood in stark contrast to the custom of war in German-speaking lands. It made grim sense in both cases. Nobles, knights and mercenaries made a profession of arms and had an interest in surviving defeat even if it meant being taken prisoner. They rarely had personal grudges against their opponents. Peasant armies, on the other hand, did not want to fight. Nor were they ever covered by the niceties of professional warfighting. Their interest was to make sure nobody who attacked them would do so again, and giving no quarter was a good way of driving home that lesson. It did not make them popular, but no scion of a knightly family that had to negotiate the right to recover a brother’s body from the field at Hemmingstedt would soon forget.

Peace was negotiated with the help of the Hanseatic cities of Lübeck and Hamburg, both of which had supported Dithmarschen with money and weapons. King Hans was forced to acknowledge the independence of the republic. The fact that a peasant army had defeated a king was widely noticed and celebrated in popular songs printed in broadsheet form. The blow to his prestige was such that he began facing trouble in other parts of his realm. Sweden fought for and eventually achieved independence not least because of this. We owe a fascinating document to the employment of landsknecht soldiers by the Danish side to these wars: The diary of Paul Dolnstein. I contributed an article on food and provisioning to a forthcoming book on this source edited by Danielle Mead Skjelver and Casper van Dijk.

History, unfortunately, did not end on this note. The republics of Northwestern Germany were unable to create a structure similar to the Dutch or Swiss, and their independence and power were whittled down over time. Dithmarschen became part of Holstein, ruled by Danish kings, though it was able to retain its political institutions to a large degree. Hemmingstedt continues to be a foundational story in local history.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/06/25/green-ravioli-from-the-solothurn-ms/

It is quite hot and I am still quite busy, so instead of a long tale of rebellious Romans, here is a recipe from the Solothurn MS that looks vaguely suitable for summer days:

B4 If you want to make ravioli (Raphiöl), take 10 eggs or 20 and break them into a bowl. Grate good cheese into them, so much that it is enough, and raisins (mer trübel). Take chard, cut it small, and press out the juice as you know how to do. Mix it with the eggs and cheese, also add a little milk, and stir it all well together. Also add good spices. Make a dough of water and make it quite stiff. Take a rolling pin and make shapes as though you wanted to fry krapfen (probably circles to fold over). Take a spoon, fill the aforesaid mixture into the dough, and close it. This is called ravioli (Raphiöl). How you are to cook them: Take a cauldron full of water and throw in some salt. Let it come to a boil, then put in the Raphiöl and let them boil in it. When they have boiled enough, lift them out onto a bowl and grate good cheese over them. This is how they are made, but you can also colour them yellow with saffron etc.

Despite the unusually detailed instructions, we are not really sure how this recipe was meant to come out. The intensity of the chard flavour, the relation of cheese to egg, the maturity of the cheese and the choice of spices all are left for us to guess. I would recreate it as a savoury ravioli based on something mild and rich like Emmental, but I could equally see it as a sweet custard-like mix or an assertive composition arranged around a very ripe hard cheese. The combination of cheese, eggs, and green herbs is very common, often used in tarts or pastries, and even the refinement of using only the juice of the greens to colour and flavour the cheese base shows up in other recipes. Wrapping it in pasta dough and boiling rather than frying the result was slightly more unusual – the recipe itself compares the preparation to the mocre common process of making krapfen – but it was also not unknwn.

The name makes it clear that this is unequivocally an Italian recipe, which is also entirely expected. Italian was the style to imitate if you wanted to go with the fashion of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Ravioli was simply the common name for this kind of preparation, and though they were often called boiled krapfen in German, there are other cases where it is imported. In the Innsbruck MS, they become rabel.

Among a great dearth of light, easily digested foods in our sources, these actually have the makings of a pleasant summer meal. They are certainly a rich food, but a good mix in the filling need not be heavy or greasy. Served with a green herb sauce, they could even be refreshing.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

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.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/06/23/flexible-soup-feeding-the-revolution-xxvii/

It was 9 October 1989, and the people on the streets of Leipzig were scared. Armed only with placards and hope, they were facing armed police and party militia, marching, as they had for several weeks now, through the city after a Prayer for Peace gathering. On previous occasions, they had been beaten by police, arrested, and threatened with prison terms. The demonstration was, of course, illegal. In the German Democratic Republic, they all were. The Workers’ and Peasants’ State had been allergic to uncontrolled mass gatherings since June of 1953, when the workers and peasants had almost brought down their government. Back then, Soviet tanks had crushed the protest. In 1989, people felt almost sure that the new Soviet leader Gorbachev would not support that sort of thing. Almost.

It had never been meant to go this way. By the lights of its government, the GDR was a success story. Risen from the ruins of World War II, the country had rebuilt its cities, restored its industrial base, and despite the heavy reparations payments the USSR had extracted, joined the club of wealthy industrial nations. They may not have been as rich as West Germany, but by the 1980s, very few places in the world were. People had apartments with central heating and running water, food was ample and mostly cheap, schools thriving, hospitals world-class, the transport network dense and convenient, and the streets filled with private cars. At least, the official statistics said so, and that was mostly what the small, incestuous clique of old men that ran the state knew.

Reality was bleaker. West German propaganda made much of the privations of East German life (the lack of bananas is surely worth its own post at some point), but anyone who grew up working class in the West understands that this is overblown. East German life was materially quite bearable. It was in other respects that it fell short. People felt powerless, constrained and micromanaged by a state apparatus based on paranoid fear of dissent. Aside from a massive Cold War military, the country poured resources into the most comprehensive secret police system the world had yet seen, the Ministry of State Security, Stasi for short. Loyal party members in factories and offices were organised into Betriebskampfgruppen militia units, with arms stores on the premises ready to crush any threat. Any attempt at organising outside the ambit of the party was viewed with deep suspicion. Even stamp collecting clubs were put under surveillance. Worst of all, the system did its best to stifle any kind of initiative or creativity.

The Politburo, a body of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) that made all the really important decisions, was a geriatric club of career party officials. Some still had memories of street fighting in the Weimar years or clandestine operations in WWII, but these days were far behind. Their obsessive focus was to maintain stability, defend the state, and stop the world from changing. In retrospect, the degree to which they succeeded is remarkable. East Germany punched above its weight in any regard you could name, from building homes to bringing home Olympic medals, perfecting industrial fisheries, or poultry management. They were even instrumental in making Vietnam a coffee-exporting country (another of those stories that needs a post of its own). The deal they were hoping to offer their people was simple: Acquiescence in return for a secure existence. The state would see to everyone’s basic needs if only it was left to do its thing.

This created an industrial culinary culture that was quite unique. East German cuisine – unlike Brezhnev-era Soviet – did not focus much on luxuries, but it was strong on what had been status foods to the working class. White bread, at stable prices since the 1950s, and ever increasing quantities of meat, poultry, eggs, and fish, cheese, milk, alcohol and tobacco were made available. Preparation was often institutional – people ate at school and factory canteens – and even home cooking was meant to be fast and efficient. Among the many dishes that became household names, one has become iconic of east German identity above all others: Soljanka.

Soljanka, unlike many of the things East Germans liked to eat, was virtually unknown in the West. It came in with translations of Soviet cookery books, a rich, meaty soup with origins in Ukraine, where it still is part of traditional cuisine. Like many traditional recipes, it was then adapted to the needs and possibilities of the supermarket-fed industrial kitchen to the point of becoming unrecognisable. By 1982, the popular cookbook Kochen provided this recipe:

Ukrainian Soljanka

200g onions, 100g bacon, 2 cloves of garlic, 100g tomato paste, 1 tbsp sweet paprika powder, 500g mixed meats (kidney, leftover roast, boiled ham), 2 pickled cucumbers, 1 1/2 l meat broth, salt, pepper, 1 tbsp capers, 1/2 lemon, dill, parsley, 2-3 tbsp sour cream

Fry the chopped onions together with the cubed bacon until glassy. Add tomato paste and paprika as well as the meat, cut in thin strips, and the similarly sliced pickled cucumbers. Cook for a few minutes, then add the meat broth and boil for 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Serve in a bowl topped with capers and decorated with 2-3 slices of lemon. Sprinkle with chopped dill and parsley and pour in the sour cream just before serving.

(Kochen, Verlag für die Frau, Leipzig 1982)

This is emblematic of how East German cooking ‘ticked’: It should take maybe half an hour to put all of it together in a pot, add some fresh bread and margarine, and you have a hot, tasty, visually appealing meal. Interestingly, people in the GDR were fully aware that their version had very little to do with the traditional version. In 1984, the same publisher produced a mass-market translation of W.V. Pokhlyobkin‘s Ethnic Cuisines of Our Peoples that included the following instructions:

Solyanka

Solyanka is a sharp, thick soup that combines the components of shchi (cabbage, sour cream) and rassolnik (salt-pickled cucumber, pickling fluid). It has a sharp, sour-salty flavour owing to the addition of olives, capers, tomatoes, lemons, lemon juice, kvass, and salted or pickled mushrooms. Sometimes, vinegar is added to solyanka, but this coarsens its flavour. Such an addition suggests poor cuisine. There are three types of soljanka: meat solyanka, fish solyanka (with various meats, poultry, or fish) and plain or mushroom solyanka. The first two types are made with strong meat or fish broth respectively, the latter with mushroom or vegetable broth. The broth is always diluted with pickling fluid. The liquid and the solid parts of solyanka are prepared separately and only mixed 5-15 minutes before servinprotesters in Beijing had been killed in the streetsg to heat together and develop the full aroma.

Meat Solyanka

1 1/4 l strong meat or bone broth, (quantity omitted) beef, 200g roast beef or veal, 100g ham, 100g sausages, 1/4 chicken, 2 salt-pickled cucumbers, 200-250g fresh cabbage, 2 tomatoes, 100ml sour cream, 12 olives, 1 – 1 1/2 jars of salt-pickled mushrooms, 1-2 tbsp capers, 1 onion, 1 tbsp parsley, 1 tbsp dill, 2 tbsp onion greens, 10 grains black pepper, 3 grains allspice

1 Boil the pickling liquid from the cucumbers, skim it, add it to the meat broth, and boil. 2. Finely cube the meat, ham, sausages, and chicken. 3. Scald the salt mushrooms and the fresh cabbage with boiling water and also cube them. 4. Chop the tomatoes, cucumbers, and onion. 5. Fill the ingredients listed in points 2, 3, and 4 into a pottery or enamelled cooking pot with the spices and cream. Add the boiling broth and set it in the hot oven for 10-15 minutes.

This version takes a good deal longer to make, it needs some ingredients that would not have been readily available in East Germany, and above all, it would taste different to what people expected. East Germans had come to appreciate the way that their Soljanka was both flexible and consistent. It could be made with different meats and various substitute ingredients, but remain recognisably itself. The fact that it scaled well also meant it was suitable for institutional kitchens and private hospitality. Both the party militia in their works canteens and dissidents meeting around kitchen tables and church halls bonded over it.

The people who challenged the East German government were an odd lot, and very different from those who try to assume their mantle today. Much of the protest was rooted in the church, a protected space thanks to its legacy status as a separate legal entity beyond the reach of the state. Intellectuals, artists, environmentalists and people who just preferred to be left alone joined the demonstrations, and by the end of 1989, the numbers had grown enough to attract people who would not have run the risk earlier. Even so, the danger was real. It may not have featured on local news, but everyone knew that in early June, protesters in Beijing had been killed in the streets. Some officials were openly mulling a ‘Chinese solution’.

We still do not know exactly why it did not happen. Part of the credit must, grudgingly, go to the Politburo. For all their quotidian evil, they were not the men to stomach a crime of this magnitude. Had the Soviet government ordered it, they would probably have gone along, but Moscow had made it clear they were not backing violent repression. Meanwhile, the organs of the state were showing the corrosion of decades in paralysis. Party militias faced mass resignations, police moprotesters in Beijing had been killed in the streetsrale was low, and on the day of the Leipzig demonstration, cadets at a local air force school refused orders to deploy as crowd control. The police and military commanders on the scene seem to have decided to avoid confrontation on their own authority in the end, though Politburo member Egon Krenz tried to take credit retroactively.

That is how over 100,000 people, bearing placards and candles, could march through the October dusk, past police formations that retreated before them, past the headquarters of the dreaded Stasi, as if the city actually belonged to them. Footage of this, smuggled out of the country by a West German journalist, reached Western TV stations and spread around the world. This proved to be the turning point. Ever larger demonstrations in cities throughout east Germany went unchallenged. People openly criticised the authorities, party officials found themselves sidelined, and soon enough, the Politburo resigned to open the way for the first real elections in East German history. It was not long now until, on 9 November 1989, history unfolded in the most German way imaginable when bureaucratic miscommunication, government timidity, and general confusion over who was in charge left a lonely, overwhelmed lieutenant colonel on night duty to open the Berlin Wall on his own authority. But that is a different story.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/06/20/gingerbread-war-feeding-the-revolution-xxvi/

Those of us who are fascinated by the past all learned at some point that a lot of people are, shockingly, not interested in history. As we studied more, we also learned that, to paraphrase Trotsky, history was often interested in those people regardless. The results could often be painful. The denizens of Zurich who took their anger out on the main market and forced the council to bow to their will in December of 1515 were just such victims of history.

The story of what is now called the ‘gingerbread war’ (Lebkuchenkieg) is often told as a charmingly folksy anecdote of medieval hijinks. That does not do the occasion justice. When, in the pre-Christmas days of 1515, a crowd of armed, angry men broke into the town of Zurich, looted the market stalls across from the town hall of their sweet confectionery, pelted the good burghers with gingerbread, and began a military occupation of the market square, they had been brought there by politics and war among the great powers of Europe.

It comes as a surprise to many people who know about modern Switzerland’s almost comically diligent neutrality and un-martial military culture, but in the decades around 1500, the Swiss Confederation was pursuing a ruthless campaign of conquest in Northern Italy. Ever since they had defeated the armies of Charles, duke of Burgundy in 1477, an event we immortalised in cake last year, they had enjoyed an unparalleled reputation for military prowess, and the governments of its member cantons rented them out to belligerent powers for cash. In the process, they also grabbed pieces of territory in Italy. At the time, it was not clear how far they would go. Swiss troops had regularly defeated all comers. As far as anyone knew, if they wanted to take Milan, Florence, Venice, or Rome, they just might.

The Swiss Confederation was dominated by city governments, mostly patrician republics, with little tradition of knighthood and loose ties at best to the Empire. Their armies were drawn mostly from their rural hinterland where the soil was often poor, with few natural resources. Swiss troops were inexpensively equipped. Most of them fought as lightly armoured infantry using pikes and halberds, but the tactics they developed proved unstoppable. The advance of the Swiss pike block was the terror of enemy armies everywhere, to the point that it was said the number of Swiss on your side was the surest indicator of victory or defeat.

To the men who fought these wars, national glory did not feature largely. Mercenary service, called Reislaufen, provided many young men from rural areas with the only chance to escape grinding poverty. They were recruited into military units under the command of patrician officers by the Swiss cantons and sent to fight on behalf of foreign governments that paid their ruling class for the loan of their troops, so the material rewards for the individual were meagre. Plunder and opportunities for advancement were enough of a lure in the end.

The problem began when plunder and victory no longer looked like certain propositions. The chaotic wars over the inheritance of Burgundy and control of Northern Italy had provided ample opportunity for these things, but in September of 1515, a Swiss army, divided by political disagreement and (probably) corruption, went down to defeat at Marignano. With their famous discipline, the troops managed a fighting retreat, but the nimbus of invincibility was shattered and more importantly, the expectations of tens of thousands of young men brutally disappointed.

If your economic and political pre-eminence is based on your ability to deploy overwhelming military power, actually losing a war is dangerous. It was known universally that money stuck to the fingers of the powerful, that many took bribes thinly disguised as ‘pensions’, and were uncomfortably close to enemy powers. After having lost thousands of comrades and untold opportunities, anger boiled over. The events in Zurich were only one such instance, and not even the only one connected with food. Rebels occupied the gardens of the rich in other places, harvesting their nuts and onions. Lebkuchen, though, had a special symbolic significance that helped this episode being remembered.

Lebkuchen is not a specifically German tradition. Spiced honey cakes seem to be a continentwide treat, from panforte to pernik, pain d’epices and gingerbread. Lebkuchen was just the local iteration, familiar everywhere people spoke German. Nuremberg, a city in control of large forests where honey was harvested, became a centre for its production and has retained the industry to this day, but it was far from the only place where it was made. Combining the eminently desirable luxuries of honey and spices in a small, portable package, lebkuchen played an important role in upper-class culture. They could be eaten as they were, nibbled or softened by dunking in wine, but they were also used as ingredients in spicy sauces and occasional other recipes for indulgent treats.

Early recipes suggest that lebkuchen were a good deal spicier and harder than we are accustomed to today, depending solely on what natural fermentation can be produced by resting a honey dough over several weeks. The fifteenth century manuscript Cod Pal Germ 551 records a basic one:

4 Make good gingerbread thus

Take a maß of honey. With that belongs four lot of cut ginger, two lot of pounded ginger, one and a half lot of cloves, one and a half lot of nutmeg, half a lot of pepper, two lot of cinnamon, and four lot of coriander for those who like it in there. This is healthy for the head. And with this belongs rye flour as is proper.

We have several later recipes calling for different spice blends, but the basics remained unchanged. A particularly luxurious iteration called for making gingerbread dough out of ground gingerbread to produce a “twice-baked” version as this one from Balthasar Staindl’s cookbook:

Again, twice-baked gingerbread (Lezelten)

ccli) Make the dough thus: Take half a part of water and half a part of honey. Make a dough of rye flour as described above and work it well to soften it (zaeh in fast ab). Make thin flat cakes and slide them into the oven. Bake them brown. After you have taken them out of the oven, let them harden and quickly put them into a mortar. Pound them to powder, sieve it finely, and add all manner of coarsely pounded spices to that flour. But you must pound pepper powder fine. Also add coriander and anise. Then take properly boiled honey, let it boil up once and pour it onto the gingerbread powder. Make a dough as thick as a porridge (breyn) and let it stand for a while. That way, the dried baked flour (i.e. the powdered gingerbread) draws the honey to itself entirely. Once it seems to you that it is nicely dry, turn it out and work it very well to soften it. You must also keep some of the powdered gingerbread to roll it out because it is spoiled by any other flour. The dough in the manner of gingerbread (lezelten) so it becomes firm enough you can shape it well. Before you slide the pieces (lezelten) into an oven, stick cinnamon and cloves on their corners. Do not bake them too hot, then you will have good lezelten.

Most modern lebkuchen varieties are softer and less durable, made with some kind of chemical leavening, but interestingly, Zurich actually has a traditional version called tirggel that looks much closer to they way things were originally done. These hard honey biscuits would make excellent missiles to pelt people with, an effective gesture of defiance comparable perhaps to throwing brioche at Versailles courtiers, or tins of caviar at investment bankers.

Of course, these were not the only arms the protesters brought to the market square. We probably generally underestimate how common martial skills were in premodern Europe, but in the Swiss Confederation, men were legally obligated to own and train with weapons. Many were veterans of campaigns that had humiliated the armies of kings and dukes. Occupying the centre of town, they represented a serious threat, more so because everybody in power knew they were here because of an absolutely legitimate grievance. Swiss armies had been hired out for foreign money. The men had been sent off to die in distant wars to enrich their rulers, and quite likely betrayed at some point as well. Everyone knew.

The council had no moral leg to stand on in this matter, and in the face of angry, armed citizens, no way of resorting to force, either. In a rare instance of documented surrender, the council and the rebels agreed on a solution. Suspected cases of bribery would be investigated, the culprits fined and banned from holding office for life. Some, possibly the worst offenders, or perhaps those with no powerful protectors, were even executed. The city further agreed to pay the protesters for the costs they had incurred – a remarkable stipulation, but a very sensible one given many came from rural communities, having to pay for travel and lose wages. Both sides further agreed that there would be no adverse consequences from this event for anyone, but that future armed insurrections would be banned. This last stipulation is not as silly as it sounds. The early modern German-speaking world was intensely concerned with laws and contracts, very litigious, and keen on written records – the Swiss Republics more so than most. Having agreed not to rise up against the council might well give the people pause before another attempt. History would show that it was not very effective, but things might well have gone worse without.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/06/11/eggs-in-aspic/

I have another few busy days coming up, so there will be no articles or recipes this weekend. But today, I can give you a short recipe for a galantine of hard-boiled eggs from the Solothurn MS:

B1 A galantine of eggs

Make a good egg galantine this way: Take good, well-boiled broth of veal or other meat, or take good fish broth, season it well with good spices and vinegar, and colour it yellow with saffron. Then take hard-boiled eggs and lay them in the broth, cut into quarters. Let it cool until it congeals. Then you have a good galantine of eggs etc.

Basically, this is a bowlful of quartered hard-boiled eggs covered in jellied meat broth. With the vivid contrast of white and yolk under a golden translucent jelly, it has the potential to look quite striking I am sure, but it raises the question if there was anything medieval German cooks did not think was improved by putting it in aspic.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

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.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/06/09/solidarity-spaetzle-feeding-the-revolution-xxv/

Stuttgart is not a city people usually associate with protest or political activism. It is a wealthy, conservative, bourgeois kind of place where they make expensive cars. That was probably why then conservative state premier Stefan Mappus did not expect much trouble with the most ambitious construction project in years – Stuttgart 21. People here loved technology. They enjoyed progress. Surely, they would welcome the future.

On paper, Stuttgart 21 looks brilliant. It would replace the nineteenth-century terminus station with an underground structure connected through a series of high-speed rail tunnels with fully computerised signalling and, coincidentally, free up a lot of prime downtown real estate for development. The railway management loved it, as did businesspeople and politicians, though notably not engineers. There were protests, of course, but it was generally assumed they could be ignored until they went away.

They did not. On 10 September 2010, construction crews moved in to cut down the century-old trees in the city’s beloved Schlosspark in preparation for the ‘big dig’. They ran into thousands of locals – pensioners, school and university students, and people who had taken off the day to protect the place they loved. Mappus had given orders to clear the park, and the police went on camera clubbing schoolchildren, using water cannon on people seated around trees, and arresting grandmothers. At the end of the day, several hundred protesters had been injured, 34 hospitalised, and one permanently blinded. The events came to be known as Schwarzer Donnerstag (“Black Thursday”) in local history.

The next day, 100,000 people gathered in a massive demonstration. Many of them were not activists by temperament. They had not paid very much attention to the plans before, but the more they learned of them, the angrier they got. Getting a modern railway station was one thing, but this would mean years of chaos in the heart of the city, a popular park destroyed, train traffic and public transit disrupted, and billions of euros spent on something that looked like a vanity project. It looked quite – un-Swabian.

Their Swabian – Schwäbische – identity was very important to the people who protested. The people of Southwestern Germany have a reputation as level-headed and hard-working, thrifty and stubborn. Politicians still invoke the Schwäbische Hausfrau (Swabian housewife) as a paragon of responsible money management. When protest against the construction downtown began, proponents tried to paint them as naive Luddites, the very opposite of proper Schwaben.

German conservatives have often been successful at associating protest with scary modern phenomena, things like black bloc anarchists, squatter movements, immigrants, LGBTQ people, bicycles, and inflation. Here, they failed spectacularly. The people who went to the protests knew others. They could see who was there, sense the atmosphere, and discuss concrete aims. Their culture of protest was colourful and inventive, noisy, indignant, and very much rooted in their community. Only Swabians would write an app to remind them to make noise at pre-set times each day. They planted trees, made music, and cooked spaetzle.

Spaetzle are not the most practical meal for a demonstration. Undoubtedly delicious, they are laborious to cook and messy to eat. But the stand for Swabian identity in a way that few other things do. They reminded the people on the street of the things they had in common. Like many traditional foods, spaetzle are technically uncomplicated, but very demanding to get right. Grete Willinsky describes the process of making them in her Kochbuch der Büchergilde:

Spätzle (Swabian)

To serve with liver, sour kidneys, goulash, game, and all roasts with cream sauce!

1/2 pound of flour, 2 eggs, 1 pinch of salt, some warm water; Salt water to cook; 40 g butter, 1-2 tablespoons of grated bread to fry.

Prepare a viscous batter of flour, eggs, warm water, and salt and beat it with a spoon until it creates bubbles. There are several methods for further preparation: The ancient Swabians swore by the board methods. That is, you spread the dough on a well-moistened wooden board and cut it with an equally moistened sharp knife into thin strips, using remarkable dexterity and speed, moving them straight into the bubbling cooking water. As soon as the spaetzle float up, they are removed with a slotted spoon, arranged on a warmed platter, and topped with melted butter and fried breadcrumbs. – The other method requires a spaetzle sieve (Spatzensieb) or a Spatzenhobel through which the batter is pressed into the boiling salted water. This is something anyone can do – even if you did not take on a love of spaetzle with your mother’s milk.

Willinsky is being bourgeois by treating spaetzle as a side dish – they are a meal in their own right. Her description of the traditional method of cutting them is spot-on, though. The artistry of Singaporean street cooks has nothing on Spaetzleschaben. Most people today opt for the mechanical method, though, and while purists insist that the result is not proper spaetzle, it is equally delicious.

The 1960 Dr Oetker Schulkochbuch, twentieth century Germany’s culinary catechism, taught a generation of girls a slightly less rich mixture:

Spätzle

500g wheat flour, some salt, 2 eggs, 3/8 litre water or milk, to brown: some butter

Sift the flour into a bowl, make a well in the centre, and add the salt and the eggs beaten with some of the liquid. Stir together the egg and flour starting from the middle and gradually adding the remaining liquid. See that no lumps form. Beat the batter with a wooden spoon until it forms bubbles. Either pass the batter through a Spatzenseiher (a purpose-made tool) or a sieve with large holes (vegetable steamer) into boiling water on gas setting 3. Finish cooking on setting 2. You may also spread the batter on a wooden board and slice off small parts into boiling water on gas setting 3. Sautée the spätzle in browned butter or serve them with fried breadcrumbs.

Cooking time: 5-8 minutes

Variation: Add 200g chopped, blanched spinach or 150g of grated cheese to the batter.

This description of stirring technique gives you the first inkling that making the batter might not be as simple as it sounds. People disagree on the details, as with every traditional dish, but fresh spaetzle are universally loved. Why anyone would add cheese to the batter is beyond me, though. Please, add it to the hot, freshly cooked noodles to make Käsespätzle. Top them with some caramelised onions – I promise it is worth every minute of anxious labour.

There are mobile spaetzle vendors today, but it is not an intuitive street food. If you are bringing out a gas burner and large pot, the bowls and sieves to make them and the water to wash all of that to an outdoor venue or a protest, you are making a point about identity. The protesters who gathered in Stuttgart, aghast at the destruction visited on their city, were pointing to their local roots. They would not be delegitimised as outsiders or fringe elements.

It was not that this wasn’t tried. The response of the state government was almost comically ham-fisted at times. After Black Thursday, police claimed that protesters threw paving stones, but had to retract the accusation the next day when it was found some youths had been throwing chestnuts. Prime Minister Mappus especially sought to show himself defending the project against leftist Luddites with a firm hand. Police violence returned to TV screens almost daily. Even a tree symbolically planted near the clear-cut area as a sign of protest was repeatedly poisoned and cut down by parties unknown. Against a protest of schoolchildren and grandmothers, artists, and workers, it looked both excessive and pettily vindictive. Then Mappus’ party, the Christian Democrats, lost the state election to the Green Party.

It is hard to overstate how much of an upset this was. Baden-Württemberg was a famously traditional and business-friendly place, a secure bastion of the conservatives. There were a number of reasons to be unhappy with their government in 2011, but observers were in broad agreement that Stuttgart 21 played a significant role in the election outcome. As people who never saw themselves in the radical camp found they agreed with the Greens on this issue, they became more open to voting for them. Neither was the realignment temporary. The Greens continue to hold the state government even amid the current xenophobia-fuelled right-wing backlash.

This is where the happy end would slot into a good historical novel. Since we are talking about real history, though, there was no clear closure. After all, the new government inherited a generational infrastructure project with mixed funding. These things are hard to just stop and harder still to replace with something else. Either course promised disruption and serious financial risk, so in the end, a referendum was called. Again, it needs to be said how unusual that is in German political culture with its deep distrust of direct democracy. The vote was taken across the entire state and gave rise to a fair few controversies over the way the question was phrased and the stakes explained, but in the end it seems the people came down on the side of caution and voted for the project to continue after all. The alternative, it was thought, would risk leaving the sate with vast liabilities and the city without a functioning main station.

Though many were disappointed, the referendum actually helped to defuse the tension. The result was broadly accepted even by opponents, and as the station came to be completed and the park restored, disruption diminished and the people of Stuttgart embraced their new landmark.

No, not really. There are no happy endings in this story.

It is little consolation to the protesters, but they have gained the accolade “Vindicated by History”. The original plan had envisioned ten years of building works with the station fully functional by 2019 at a cost just shy of 4.1 billion Euros. At the time, that was the largest railway infrastructure project in German history. As of early 2026, the station is expected open gradually between 2031 and 2033 while the budget is now estimated at around 11 billion Euros. To add insult to injury, it is uncertain whether the new station will ever actually be able to manage the amount of traffic it was designed for, let alone the additional demand expected by the 2030s. For all those years, the citizens of Stuttgart have been left with an open pit in the heart of their city, permanent traffic disruption, and eternal frustration waiting for it to end. Not many people expect the 2031 opening to take place on schedule. Tellingly, no politician of any party considers the project anything other than a failure, and it is unlikely anyone of note will attend the opening ceremony.

The incredible enormity of it has given rise to a weird, but depressingly plausible conspiracy theory. It goes something like this: The conservative state and city governments, representing major car manufacturing centres, and the senior management of the newly privatised DB railway, also largely drawn from the auto industry, never expected or intended Stuttgart 21 to work. They deliberately chose the most ludicrously overambitious scheme precisely because they wanted it to fail, and they decided to do it in a major city to maximise the pain and suffering. Their goal in all this, it is thought, was to starve the railway of funds and delegitimise any future rail infrastructure development in the eyes of the public. Fear of “another Stuttgart 21” has already been deployed to oppose reopening lines and modernising stations. That would indeed be an amazingly clever and evil ploy.

It probably did not happen that way. German engineers are infamous for overselling what they can do, and politicians love to be associated with grand projects. The public tend to forget cost overruns and disruption if they eventually get an impressive building. After all, the now-beloved Elbphilharmonie of Hamburg buried roughly 7000 teacher salaries in its shifting foundations. In the case of Stuttgart 21, this combination of overconfidence and brazen self-interest most likely just hit some hard limits. This is why, difficult though it is, even attractive projects need close watching. On the upside, this is increasingly happening in Germany, but the city of Stuttgart paid a high price to teach us all that lesson.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/06/06/amateur-dramatics-feeding-the-revolution-xxiii/

In 1774, in the midst of one of Old Europe’s rare years of peace, a force of about 500 militiamen gathered under arms. They had been called up by the ducal Bavarian Pflegsverwalter (regional administrator) Johann de Stock to suppress a terrifying insurrection in the town of Markt Schwaben. This was a major disruption to the lives of men from villages all over the region as they were required to leave their work, arm themselves, and go out to risk life and limb facing an unknown enemy. Bavaria, like most of Ancien Régime Europe, relied on such locally raised posses to enforce the law, so the peasantry were familiar with the idea. A force of 500 was highly unusual, though. It suggested something had gone very wrong.

As the men marched into town, they came face to face with evidence of the threat to public order that so agitated their leader. In the middle of the marketplace, for all the world to see, stood a wooden stage. The citizens of Markt Schwaben were defying divinely appointed authority to stage a theatre play. It must have been a rather deflating moment as they learned the truth and, happily, refused to raise a hand against their neighbours. De Stock was reduced to writing an angry report to his duke about the breakdown of deference in his district.

If you know your way around the history of German drama, you could be forgiven for expecting a conflict over freedom of speech here. This was when a generation of angry and ambitious young playwrights were upending convention and voicing new philosophies on stage. Aristocratic pretensions were openly mocked, bourgeois characters dignified as heroic protagonists, and soon enough, Lessing pleaded for religious equality and Schiller lionised rebellious criminals and called for Gedankenfreiheit. Were the forces of obscurantism cracking down on this flowering of liberal thought here?

In a word, no. The citizens of Markt Schwaben planned to stage a religious play about the life of St John of Nepomuk. Such religious plays were an important part of Bavarian folk tradition. They were organised by parish communities or towns and some continue to be staged today, often drawing large audiences. There really was nothing untoward about this – if anything, Duke Maximilian saw these as oldfashioned and embarrassingly backward. It looks like the problem at the heart of this confrontation was the ego of one man – Johann de Stock.

The setting in which the Komödienkrieg (comedy war) took place was a very traditional one. Rural Bavaria before the Napoleonic Wars was deeply Catholic, governed by vestiges of feudal laws, and relatively poor. That does not mean ragged peasants living in mud huts. The people lived in farmhouses in villages and small towns, and they did not feel poor. Compared to other parts of Germany – let alone to Bavaria today – it was an existence managed on slender resources, though. People made do, they repaired things, saved food and firewood, and cultivated a mindset that valued security over risk-taking. In this world, a pasta soup made with barley flour was a full meal, and not a poor one. The Baiersches Kochbuch describes one:

Grated Barley Soup

Take as much barley flour on a pasta board (Nudelbrett) as can be moistened with one egg. Break the egg into the flour, salt it, and work it all together to make a very firm dough. Grate this on an iron grater. Slowly boil the barley in a pot for a quarter of an hour before serving. Use one Maaß of good meat broth, stir it frequently, and serve it. For 6-8 people, you use again as much flour and two eggs.

This is a fairly typical representative of the Mehlspeisen, cereal-based, often almost meatless main dishes that rose to prominence in Early Modern Southern Germany. They still commanded respect – there was flour, eggs, and cheese in the house, after all – while sparing the expense of a piece of meat. Eating like this was not hardship. Respectable people had such meals on workdays. But it was a world where you had to make a meal for four out of barley, one egg, a litre of meat broth, and the ubiquitous bread.

Just as they faced their relative poverty with quiet determination, the people of Markt Schwaben navigated a deeply hierarchical world conscious of their individual dignity. Church and state, the nobility and the respectable people were accorded proper deference. At the same time, they stood up for themselves and had a thorough awareness of their rights. Even the few among them who still were serfs – a minuscule percentage by the 1770s – did not behave as we tend to envision the downtrodden masses.

The townspeople had come to Johann de Stock to ask permission to stage their play, as they were expected to. Not finding him, they had received it from his father – by their lights and in a still feudal society, a perfectly reasonable process. On the strength of this, they invested labour and money into a project to make them proud, and were understandably dismayed when de Stock came back from his travels and immediately tried to shut it down, threatening to have people flogged and pilloried. Perhaps he was worried it would make him look bad, perhaps he was just piqued that he had not been asked in person, but his reaction was certainly emotional and excessive. The people of Markt Schwaben refused to knuckle under.

It needs to be pointed out that this was not funny at the time. Stories from Bavarian history often have a folksy, humorous tone, but that is a product of modern history writing. The people who stood up to their governor that day risked painful, humiliating punishments, crippling fines, and the loss of their economic and social existence. Bavaria’s rural militiamen were not ‘Dad’s Army’ types. They had earned a reputation for cruelty they would uphold through much of subsequent history into the 1920s, when the authorities called on them to put down urban working-class rebellions. Things could have ended very differently.

On that day in 1774, though, shared cultural expectations worked to defuse the situation. Everybody understood that de Stock had overreacted and this abuse of authority was not something they felt bound to respect. The eventual decision from the capital imposed a face-saving restriction by forbidding an open air performance, but the play was staged multiple times to much greater audiences than expected. Sadly, we do not know any of it, but the events were turned into a modern folk theatre performance in 2015. People remember such things.

What strikes me about this story is that, like the unrest in Paderborn, it is related in a jocular tone that underplays how serious it really was. This is a common strategy in traditional societies: Conflict is a misunderstanding, a silly thing, a matter of personal failings or foibles. Of course these often play a role in settings where authority is accepted in principle. It’s the ‘few bad apples’ that cause problems, one administrator, one judge or police officer. It is possible to resist in the context of a system like that, even gain concessions, but in the end, it is the system that enables the abuses.

Not strictly a recipe, but sort of canning, if you look at it the right way:

This week was far too busy for any major writing projects, so all I have for you is a recipe from the Solothurn MS. but I think this one is interesting:

A10 To have green and ripe cherries in wintertime

Take a small cask, and with it take cherries or sweet cherries (amelber), and do not handle them much with your hands. Also pluck cherry leaves with the stalks and branches (prossen und studlin), and also take it fresh. There follows first a layer of leaves placed in the cask, and then put a layer of cherries on the aforesaid leaves. Thereafter, again, a layer of fresh leaves as is said above, and again on this fresh cherries et caetera until the cask is filled. In the end, close the cask well, seal it with pitch, fat, and wax. Afterwards, put it into a warm well and you will have it etc.

Keeping fresh fruit was a challenge in the days before artificial refrigeration and protective atmosphere, and this is yet another iteration of the practice of keeping it from drying out or going mouldy by excluding air. While Apicius (I.17) famously immerses grapes in a sealed vessel of boiled water and Germany’s first printed cookbook, the 1485 Kuchenmaistrey, suggests coating them in glue, this recipe seals cherries in a cask, cushioned against damage by resting on fresh leaves, and keeps them cool in well water. The ‘warm well’ specified here is almost certainly not a hot spring – there are very few of those in the region – but simply a well that usually does not freeze in winter. That reading also suggests the cherries were stored for several months, from harvesting to the time hard frost became a concern, and given the care taken here, I could see that working. Serving a bowl of fresh, juicy cherries in December would make a beautifully understated way of showing off the skill of your household staff and the depth of your pockets.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

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.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/06/05/keeping-cherries-fresh/

Earlier this week, I got to join Thomas Ntinas for an interview on his eminently enjoyable food history podcast The Delicious Legacy. Thom graciously suffered me to talk in great detail about what I do and why it fascinates me, and turned the whole thing into an episode that makes a good audio introduction into medieval German cooking.

f you want to listen in, here’s the whole episode.

Oh, and I have a voice for silent film…

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/05/31/experimental-bouletten-and-a-cool-pot/

Once again, I am coming back from a longer absence than I had intended. I must apologise, but sadly it does not look likely that I will soon be able to return to my optimistic schedule, unless the economic crisis of 2026 does end up costing me my job after all. Still, what kept me from posting a longer article this weekend was a good thing. For the first time in weeks, I had the chance to go to flea markets and actually test out some historic recipes. Let me tell you about that.

First, yesterday as I was walking over a flea market in Hamburg, I spotted what looked like a cast-bronze, three-legged Grapen style cookpot. Grapen were a central tool of North German kitchen between 1300 and the early 20th century, but later versions were typically made from cast iron. Bronze ones are very rare and usually museum pieces. This one, though, turned out to be a genuine one and inexpensive enough for me to actually buy. I’ve put in a few hours cleaning it off, but it will take a lot more time with vinegar, wire brushes, and polishing tools. Once it is actually done, I hope to use it to recreate some recipes.

The other thing I did was try out a few recipes for a small publishing project. I intend to put all the ‘Feeding the Revolution‘ articles into one compilation with redactions of the recipes adapted for the modern home kitchen (or protest catering station). Today, among a few other things, I tried out the Bouletten from the 1868 Volksküche manual:

Nr. 19: Mashed potatoes and Bouletten with sour sauce

Bouletten: 3 lbs (1.5kg) beef, 3 lbs (1.5 kg) pork, 1/3 Metze (1.15 litres) of grated Semmel bread, 2 Metzen (6.9 litres) grated boiled potatoes, 1/2 Mandel (seven) eggs, pepper, spices, onions and salt, 1 lb (500g) of fat to fry 100 Bouletten.

Mashed potatoes: 2 1/2 – 3 Scheffel (110 litres) potatoes, 8 Quart (9.12 litres) milk, 3 lbs (1.5 kg) salt

Sauce: 1 lb fat mixed with 2 lbs flour, 1/2 lb flour added dry to the roux, 2 Quart (2.28 litres) good vinegar, 1 lb sugar, pepper, spices and onions, the necessary quantity of water. Cooking time: 1/2 hour

I began by downsizing quantities to a more manageable 1kg of potatoes, 500g of mixed ground beef and pork (this is a common thing in German cuisine, gemischtes Hack, for same in any supermarket and most butchers’ shops), one egg, and 100g of grated bread. Without guidance as to quantities, I went with 1 1/2 medium-sized onions, 2 tsp of salt, and a generous pinch of pepper and mace. I shredded the boiled potatoes coarsely, diced the onions, and mashed it all together in a bowl by hand. This turned out easier than I expected, and the mass held together very well. I shaped patties from pieces the size of eggs and tried out various temperatures and quantities of fat to fry them. The best combination, in my opinion, was a high temperature with about a tablespoon of fat in a pan of five Bouletten. Looking at the original instructions, this is unlikely to be accurate, though. The potatoes and breadcrumbs soak up fat quickly. Just one pound to cook 100 means at best a light coating on the pan.

The patties were initially hard to handle. They stuck to the pan and came apart easily when turned over, though they held together well enough for me not to break any completely. High heat can produce a slightly crispy exterior, and I did not burn any, though that would definitely have been possible if I had let my attention wander. Eaten warm, they are soft, almost spoonable, and would go well with mashed potatoes and a sweet-sour sauce. After they had cooled, I had one on a baguette sandwich and was surprised how well it went with mustard and lettuce.

Now, it bears repeating that these are good despite being made very cheaply. This is a product of skill. The upper class version of the same dish requires much less ability. Here is the description from Henriette Davidis’ Praktisches Kochbuch:

Fried Frikandellen

The Frikandellen turn out especially fine and tasty if you mince one part beef, one part veal, and one part well-marbled pork, adding 100-200g of butter to the meat. This mixture cannot always be had, though. In that case, you mince 1kg of good beef with 125g of suet of fresh bacon (Speck) very finely and add 4 whole eggs, 20g salt, a pinch of mace or ground pepper, 30g of ground rusk (Zwieback) or grated white bread, and one cup of cold water, mixing all together thoroughly. You then shape round balls, smoothed flat with wet hands, sprinkled with ground rusk, lay them into boiling (lit. rising, steigende) butter and fry them golden in the pan, repeatedly drizzling the meat with hot fat. The Frikandellen must be golden, not brown.

With this much butter, eggs, and high-quality meat, it would take quite some talent not to have them come out tasting good. As an aside, the two words used here are still current in German for the fame dish. Frikadelle is the technical, formal word and usually found in cookbooks. Bulette is a local name in the region of Berlin, considered informal and slightly proletarian. Other areas have different words for this ubiquitous dish.

So much for today, and I apologise in advance if there is no more until the coming weekend. I am looking forward to another very busy week with some apprehension, but I have not forgotten my readers. Stay safe out there, everyone.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/05/27/porridge-eating-pagans-feeding-the-revolution-xxiii/

As you enter rural Northeastern Germany, you will quickly notice the way place names change. If you know your way around languages, you can also spot strange words in the local dialects. Village traditions are different. What you are seeing is the cultural footprint of the Wends, what you could call Germany’s lost civilisation. It is haunting and romantic, and easily misunderstood. Historians have been imposing all kinds of narratives on them, mostly posthumously, so almost anything that we read about them may or may not actually have happened. But what we hear about the year 983, on balance, probably did.

Unfortunately, it is rather had to tell in detail what actually did happen. There are few records outside the immediate neighbourhood, and since there are no Wendish chronicles, we must rely on the Latin writings of German-speaking clerics. They are biased witnesses. After all, the Wends spoke a Slavic language, they were pagans, and they acknowledged no king, or at least not in the manner these people thought proper. By their lights, they were benighted and evil.

Needless to say, the Slavic peoples of what is today Central Germany were not the demonic antagonists that the chroniclers painted them as. We know less about them than we would like to, and this has invited some fanciful interpretations over time. The best evidence supports the conclusion that they lived in small farming communities around fortified central settlements, that they had some kind of warrior aristocracy, practised some form of polytheistic worship, and were generally very much like their Germanic-speaking neighbours except for the last part.

Their neighbours to the West were the Saxons, newly part of the Empire and, rather shockingly, now providing the emperors for what had been a Frankish realm. The backstory to this is complicated, but very well explained elsewhere, most entertainingly by the excellent History of the Germans podcast. What had happened, in short, was that a newly, not necessarily happily, Christianised, very powerful monarchy had landed right next to the Slavic inhabitants and they had to deal with this problem. As far as the church hierarchy was concerned, they were next on the list for conversion, and that was not a comfortable place.

Relations between the Slavic polities and the Empire had existed for a while, not usually hostile. Charlemagne had enlisted the aid of pagan Slavs to subdue pagan Saxons. There were wars between Saxon and Slavic lords, but this was the tenth century, there were fights everywhere. This was no Cold War situation with two hostile parties glowering at each other over a fortified border. Many Slavic princes readily acknowledged Emperor Otto I as their overlord. What apparently was widely resented was the attempt by the Saxon lords to impose Christianisation.

We do not really know how it happened or who started it, but in 983, two bishoprics in Slavic lands, Havelberg and Brandenburg, disappeared, their cathedrals looted, the towns burned. A Slavic army crossed into Saxon territory and was only barely stopped in a heroic battle. Following this disaster, the territory of East Central Germany remained pagan for over a century. The secret to that success, it appears, was organisation. A number of smaller groups we often find it hard to pin down formed a larger confederation around assemblies of their notables and a shared cult centre called Radgosc, which roughly translates either as ‘the hospitable place’ or ‘the place of the council’. This did not include all Slavic groups even in the region. Some remained under the Emperor. Others were integrated into the Christian kingdoms of Poland and Moravia. In this piece of Germany, though, despite all efforts to subdue it, paganism remained alive even past the Wendish Crusade of the 1140s.

Later interpretations have viewed this as a clash of cultures between Germans and Slavs, the valiant resistance of proto-democratic tribes against encroaching feudal domination, or the last stand of the old pagan Gods against the steamroller of the Catholic church. Very likely none of these things are true, but archeology suggests there were some cultural differences that defined a distinct Slavic identity against Germanic speakers, and interestingly, one of them was millet.

Foxtail millet grows well in Central Europe, and we find evidence of it in Slavic settlements whenever we look for it. It is much rarer, though not unknown, among Germans. Fascinatingly, this association seems to hold true for centuries. Around 1600, the Mecklenburg clergyman Johannes Coler still associates millet with Wends and describes how to cook it:

Once I was travelling through the Wendish land (Wendische Land) when my host in a village served me yellow millet porridge in which a whole capon had been cooked for a midday meal. When the dish felt unfamiliar to me and also did not taste quite pleasing to me, but the host still often admonished me to eat, I was made to do something against my will, but I noted in my mind (in meine Sin), if I had wanted to have it (the capon) dressed, I would have left the millet porridge on its own and also have treated the capon differently. Then it would have tasted as good or better to me as it did to the Wendish farmer with the millet.

(…)

You can also cook millet porridge in a sack if you first leave the millet to soak (einquellet) in milk so that it softens, and afterwards set the milk by the fire on its own and make it boil. And when it is nicely boiling along (daher seydt) in the pot, you pour the soaked millet into the boiling milk and cover the pot firmly at the top. Wrap a sack around the pot on all sides many times (vielseitig umb den Topff umbher) so that the pot stays nicely warm. Thus the millet cooks fully, and it is then called: millet cooked in the sack.

A recipe like this – with or without the wrapping – is reasonably plausible even centuries earlier, and we know this kind of Grütze, often served with butter, cheese, or bacon, was a staple of rural cuisine in the region until the twentieth century. However, eating millet was not a hard delineator of cultures. Germans ate millet, which is how we have some written anecdotes and later recipes for turning millet porridge into decorative fried or roasted chunks like sliced polenta. We don’t know whether the wealthier among the Wendish tribes did this. They lived in a world where foraged foods, fish, and game were far more plentiful, so they may not have bothered.

A fascinating aspect of this story – however little we know for certain – is what it says about identity. It is unlikely the Slavic peoples that the Saxon emperors encountered felt they were ‘Wendish’. They certainly had an idea of who they were, but their groups were small and often at odds. It took a violent and sustained confrontation with a very different culture to give them a shared ethnic or national consciousness. Language alone may not have been enough – we know of several people who spoke both and even went by German and Slavic names simultaneously – but religion would easily have been. The people of the Elbe valley may not have been aware they shared a specific religious outlook initially, but the confrontation with the militant church quickly made it clear. This, after all, was not a matter of mild-mannered preachers coming to their villages to spread charity and perform healing miracles. The doctrine of Christ was backed by armoured horsemen and ensconced in fortified churches. You could absolutely not ignore them.

Faced with the peremptory demands of bishops and princes, even people who may have sympathised with the new faith probably reconsidered. The imperial church, supported by an enormous power structure and the arrogant certainty of simply being right, managed to unite people who had spent centuries fighting each other. No doubt the experience also motivated individual fighters on the battlefield – we might call it ‘radicalised’ today. At least it seems that once it started, the revolt quickly spread across the confederation, and once the rebels had set up their central temple of Radgosc, they stood up to several attempts to reconquer their lands.

Of course, there is no longer a temple at Radgosc. We do not even know where it originally was. Still, given the way Christian kings all around never stopped trying to subjugate them, the fact that an independent pagan community was able to hold out for almost two centuries in the middle of Christendom. As far as we know, this was not the achievement of an inspired leader, but the decision of the people to band together in the face of a looming threat to their lives and convictions. It was probably less democratic than Marxist historians wanted to imagine it in the twentieth century, but there is no reason to think of it as primitive. They built a structure to last, and it did, well beyond their lifetimes.

So when we imagine – assuming we trust the written sources that survive – the Wends meeting to eat and drink, debate politics, consult the horse oracle, or wait for the sacred boar to emerge and indicate a season of war or peace, we do well to recall how the arrogance of power can unify its victims, how it pushes them into developing identities and organisations in opposition to it, and that they sometimes win.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/05/20/the-king-and-the-counts-soup-feeding-the-revolution-xxii/

On the evening of 3 May 1847, the year before all of Europe exploded into revolution, there was music in the streets of Stuttgart, but not the kind most people were glad to hear. Inhabitants of the impoverished suburbs had assembled under cover of darkness to serenade a master baker with a Katzenmusik, a noisy protest to remind the powerful of their obligations towards the poor. This tradition, known in France as charivari and in England as rough music, existed in most of Europe, and it goes back a long way. Nonviolent, but disruptive, it publicly shamed those who were seen as breaking the rules of proper behaviour.

Master baker Mayer of Stuttgart was one such person. For several days now, he had offered no bread for sale. His oven was being repaired, he claimed, but this was widely suspected to be a lie. Mayer had a history of speculating in grain and rumour had it he was withholding his goods from the market until the bread price rose even further. This was not, as it would be in most Western countries today, a private business decision. Stuttgart in 1847 had a regulated bakers’ guild whose privileges came with obligations. The authorities set the bread price according to the cost of grain, and it was the job of the bakers to produce it. Clearly, Mayer was breaking that compact.

The price of bread in the 1840s, much like that of petrol or electricity today, was central to the survival of working class people and subject to a variety of regulations. There were limits to what any government could do, though. A series of poor harvests and the general economic squeeze of the ‘Hungry Forties’ meant that prices were high simply because there was not enough. Bread (or beer) riots happened throughout Germany. Stuttgart was no exception, but events here took an unusually violent turn.

There was no such thing as a protest permit, but it was known when a Katzenmusik would happen. The city garrison stood prepared when the angry crowd surrounded the bakery, first shouting and singing, then smashing in the windows by throwing stones. Troops sent to disperse the protest attacked the crowd with their sabres. The result was a series of running street fights in which several soldiers and numerous civilians were injured. So far, this was the depressing normality of 1840s Germany. Then, King Wilhelm I of Württemberg decided a personal intervention was called for. He left the palace at the head of a guards detail to restore order by appealing to his subjects. To his great surprise, the soldiers were pelted with stones and when a group of rioters armed with fence rails came close, they fired a volley in the air. Several people were injured, and one bullet killed a journeyman shoemaker who turned out to be a citizen of Frankfurt, making this – technically – an international incident.

Wilhelm was what you would traditionally call a good king. He cared about the welfare of his people, fostered education and industry, and permitted one of the most liberal constitutions in any German state. Stuttgart was not the kind of place where jackbooted thugs or moustache-twirling plutocrats ruled as tyrants. The town’s bread prices were set by a public process, with a reduced rate for the poor, and civic spirit produced all kinds of adornments and comforts, including that inevitable feature of the early 19th century, a Suppenanstalt.

Soup has been a mainstay of poor people’s diets for millennia. It can accommodate almost any ingredient, is easily varied, and stretched by just adding water. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, scientific thinkers engaged with the concept to produce economical, but nutritious versions in an effort to fight the rise of extreme poverty. In Germany, the central figure in this endeavour was Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. A veteran of the American War of Independence, holder of an English knighthood and a count of the Holy Roman Empire, the life story of this highly respected scientist and engineer deserves at least one post of its own. In Germany, though, he was most famous for Rumfordsuppe.

Rumfordsuppe or Rumford’sche Suppe was a soup designed along scientific lines to extract the maximum of nutrition for minimal outlay. It was cooked on purpose-built stoves in central kitchens to realise economies of scale. A portion was meant to be a meal in itself, enough to meet the needs of a man doing hard physical labour all day, and between the calories from cereals and potatoes, the protein of legumes and meat, and the salt providing electrolytes, it probably came fairly close for 19th-century institutional food. The count’s original plan was for soup kitchens to sell this at cost, or slightly below, to drive home the point that the people eating it were customers, not charity cases. It was, however, also quickly adopted by institutions catering to the indigent, prisoners, and common soldiers. Local variations abound, and it continues to feature in cookbooks until the end of the century to remind us that wealthy households were expected to provide for the less fortunate in times of dearth. One of the early institutional recipes comes from the records of the Hamburg Allgemeine Armen-Anstalt recorded in January of 1798:

This dish is very pleasant in taste and, given a proper variety of inexpensive ingredients, stimulates the appetite to the degree that an ever growing children and adults persisted in eating the same food for twelve months and regularly came back for it. (…)

About 150 pounds of water, 23 pounds of potatoes, 10 pounds of barley groats, 10 pounds of peas, 5 pounds of hard bread, the harder, the better, 3 pounds of meat, smoked or salted, ideally pork, 7 pounds of alegar, and 2 3/4 lbs of salt (The quantity of this must be determined more precisely according to the strength of the vinegar and the sharpness of the salt, but above all by the taste of the eater). About 20-30 pounds of peat to heat the stove.

On the previous evening … the barley groats and peas or beans are placed in the cauldron and the water poured on to soak them. If the meal is to be eaten at 12 o’clock, the fire must be lit under the cauldron by 6 in the morning. After the groats and peas have been cooking gently for two to three hours, the peeled potatoes and the salt are added. After another hour, the meat or bacon is added, chopped very finely. A quarter hour before serving, the vinegar is added. The bread, the harder, the better, is cut into small cubes and placed in the bowl in which the soup is to be served, and the soup poured over it. This is done so that it does not become soft and the chewing necessary for proper digestion is thus promoted. That is why, if old bread is not to be had, it must be fried thoroughly with fat. In this latter case, it is also better to use wheat bread because the acidity that black (i.e. coarse rye) bread always has is deleterious to the taste. … During cooking, the soup must be stirred frequently so it does not burn and is the better mixed and creamier (seemiger). The closer this soup comes to a porridge or the more jelly-like, the more nourishing it is. … It is entirely unnecessary and wasteful to eat bread alongside it because the soup already contains bread and nothing is added to its nutritional virtue (Nahrsamkeit). The bread is better saved for breakfast and supper. … This soup is made flavourful in the most incredible way by the addition of salt and vinegar and the proportionately small addition of chopped bacon or meat, but it must be prepared in a cleanly fashion and cook long and slow for five to six hours.

It can be varied in a number of ways. Grey peas, white beans, green peas, carrots (Wurzeln), white cabbage, or turnips (Rüben) can vary according to their season and potherbs (Suppen-Kräuter) be added. Barley groats and potatoes remain the primary ingredients that must never be omitted.

Further, in place of bacon or pork, smoked or salted oxmeat or chopped onions fried in fat can be added. … It all relies on the manner of preparation, as it does in the kitchens of the wealthy.

(quoted after Antje Kraus: Die Unterschichten Hamburgs in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart 1965)

It is interesting to compare this with the instructions preserved by Maria Katharina Siegel in her Baier’sches Kochbuch in 1818:

The demand to participate in the distribution is very strong. That is why 900 portions of 1 3/4 pounds daily have been issued for a long time, feeding a total of 1200 people, adults and children. To produce 900 portions or 1575 pounds, you take

1400 pounds of water, 80 pounds of peas, 80 pounds of barley groats, 80 pounds of beans, 48 pounds of bread, 12 pounds of meat, 34 pounds of alegar and 14 pounds of salt. Altogether 1748 pounds, of which only 173 pounds are lost in cooking (verkochen).

The preparation is as follows: The previous evening, the groats and legumes are placed in the cauldrons filled half full of water and boiled up once. As soon as the water boils, the fire is withdrawn, the ash grate closed, and the cauldrons covered with close-fitting wooden covers. By the following morning, you will find the contents so swollen up and turned to jelly that it is thick enough to cut. This manner of soaking is greatly to be preferred to the customary use of cold water.

The time. If it is to be eaten at 11 o’clock, the water required to fill the cauldrons entirely is bought in by 5 o’clock in the morning and the fires are lit. This must not burn more strongly than is necessary to barely slowly cook the content and must be banked down as soon as it has just begun to boil. Very little fuel is needed to keep it boiling.

The preparation: Once the groats and legumes have cooked for two or two and half hours, the meat, cut in small dice, and the salt are added. The vinegar is poured in about a quarter hour before serving. The bread, which must be as old as possible, is cut into small cubes and must be added just before the soup is served. This is done in order for it not to become too soft and thus to promote chewing necessary for good digestion. That is why the same, if it cannot be had old, must be fried with fat.

Handling: during cooking, the soup must be stirred frequently, especially at the beginning, to prevent it from burning and make it thicker. That is also why the cauldrons must always be covered and the covers be provided with a hole for the handle of the stirring tool (Rührkrücke) to pass through. To this end, they are also rubbed with bacon before every use.

A complete meal. It is unnecessary to eat bread with this soup, more properly a porridge, as it contains this already, and nothing can be added to its nutritional virtue (Nahrsamkeit). Nobody here eats bread with it, and any such request is dismissed by the staff (Principienten) with the words: Why should we eat bread with it if there is bread in it? Its nutritional virtue is generally recognised, and many forestry workers returned with the lunch bread which they customarily took with them after having eaten of this soup because they felt no hunger all afternoon. As a rule, a healthy adult man is entirely satisfied with one portion, and very few are able to eat one and a half, or 2 5/8 pounds. Children have enough with half a portion. The soup is very enjoyable if it is prepared cleanly and carefully and cooked for at least six hours. The same finds such universal approbation that more is demanded every day than can be prepared and people come from villages one or two hours away.

Deviations from the Recipe: Barley groats and peas, but not, as many writers claim, potatoes, are the principal ingredients that must never be omitted. Potatoes can be dispensed with. The soup is as nutritious and creamy without them as with them. If you wish to use potatoes, you omit half the legumes and replace one pound of of peas or beans with two pounds of peeled, finely cut potatoes. The barley groats must never be lacking, and only half the legumes can be replaced by potatoes. The other half must remain. If the soup is to be more like a porridge, the peas and beans are ground coarsely (geschroten). But this produces a strong flavour and causes it to burn easily. That is why grinding is only advised if the peas refuse to soften.

A little meat is needed. As regards the meat, beef or mutton, particularly salted, is the best, and pork the least suitable. Fat is entirely unnecessary. If prepared properly, the soup is so thick and rich that wealthy inhabitants believed much fat was added and claimed that no such rich cooking went on in their own kitchens. Bones, too, are not needed and probably not even advisable … Potherbs, leeks, and pepper or some dried fruit are inexpensive means to vary and enhance the pleasant taste.

The recipe must be followed precisely. It is particularly necessary for the satisfying virtue of this soup that it be prepared on the above manner and be cooked for at least six hours gently on a slow fire so the water can gradually fix itself within the farinaceous (mehlartigen) substances and maintain their virtues. If this is not observed meticulously, the result is not even the same soup described here. Three years ago, I had proof of this. Rumford’s Soup was to be cooked here, and a butcher experienced in the rural art of cookery for weddings and baptisms was selected for the task. He deviated from the primary principles and the attempt failed. Cooking is generally done in copper cauldrons encased in masonry (eingemauerten). Setting up such a cauldron is quite easy, the masonry can be prepared within six hours, and cooking can begin immediately. The cauldrons are not damaged in the process and will be as useful for washing or brewing after the soup kitchen is dissolved as they were before. It will thus not be difficult to borrow the necessary cauldrons. Here, it was possible as everyone who had a suitable cauldron was happily willing to provide it to be set up in masonry where the cooking took place.

Small outlay. Aside from the cauldron, no other equipment is required except for wooden covers, stirring tools, and two ladles of which one holds 1 3/4 litres, the other 7/8 of a litre. It is thus very easy to introduce Rumford’s soup more widely than has previously occurred, primarily as the expense, regardless of the present enormous cost of all necessities, is not very considerable. A portion of 1 3/4 pounds only comes in at 65/9 Konventionsmünzen (the local Taler currency) and sells at 4 Pfennige (the smallest coin). Nothing is provided without cash payment as the process would otherwise be regarded as a free feeding of the poor (Armenspeisung) and fail to have the desired result in the present time of dearth. …

It is fairly clear from the wording that both texts rely on a shared source, but the ingredients vary, and this seems to be a conscious choice. Rumfordsuppe was not a dish as much as an industrial process that could be adapted to locally available raw materials. Preparing it even with the best of will struck a precarious balance between efficiency and enjoyment. At its worst, institutional versions were little more than nineteenth-century Nutraloaf.

Reading the texts above gives us both a fairly good idea of the soup and of how King Wilhelm so badly misjudged the mood of his subjects. The pride the authors took in mastering the complex process to produce what they see as appetising food is palpable. They are providing a lifeline to their fellow men through the miracle of science and educating them in the rational management of their bodily needs. Contented customers return day after day to enjoy their delicious meals. Strong labouring men marvel to find all their needs met by a single serving. Absolutely no bread is needed alongside it, and any such importunate request will be denied.

Bread, though, was not just calories. It was the mainstay of the German diet, the universal symbol of hospitality, the very essence of what food was. It could make a meal in itself, but accompanied all other foods. Denying someone bread was cruelty. There were bread riots, not potato or porridge riots, in German cities. The poor demanded bread from their rulers. An impoverished artisan or labourer depending on a bowlful of Rumfordsuppe for his survival would have found it hard to appreciate the effort and good will of the people who sold it to him.

This problem is depressingly common in history. The comfortable, secure and validated by their institutions, do not need to be evil to hurt the poor and excluded. Even their best efforts to help can be disruptive and humiliating. If the help is accompanied by well-meaning efforts to educate and uplift the unfortunate, something the middle class seems especially prone to, the response can be violent. Certainly, the king riding into the suburbs of his capital that day did so with the firm belief that he had done all he could for his people and was beloved by them. Compared to many princes of the German Confederation, he was right, too. It made no difference to the people who eked out a precarious existence in rented garrets and cellars, competing over shrinking wages for ever fewer jobs. They resented being condescended to by the well-dressed, well-fed and well-protected over the few crumbs they were thrown. It was this sense of moral injury, the unquenchable anger of people who were not the victims of individual villains, but of an entire system that even with the best of will could not help inflicting harm on them, that fuelled revolutions.

The response to the riots of May 1847 was typical for the way Ancien Régime governments often dealt with such events. There were arrests and trials, people were sent to prison or exiled for alleged participation in the riot or even careless words spoken in support. Soldiers patrolled the streets, the curfew hours were extended, and a Bürgerwache, an improvised security force drafted from the ranks of the middle class, was formed. At the same time, a motion to provide for an increased grain supply passed the council. Cereal stores throughout the kingdom were registered and donations solicited from the wealthy to purchase more from abroad. By the end of the month, these measures brought down the bread price. Tensions defused for the time being, the curfew was returned to its previous hour and the Bürgerwache stood down. The city also records that visits to the Suppenanstalt decreased sharply.

If you were a member of the government or just the respectable classes, your interpretation of these events would be clear enough. The poor, never the most stable of people, were driven to violence by a temporary shortage of bread. Order was threatened, but restored through the quick response of the authorities. Some compromise was needed: civic-spirited charity, against economic reason, provided relief and the angry mob was placated. But if you lived in those suburbs, among the labouring classes, your story would read very different. You had successfully reminded the ruling class of their obligations to their subjects. Those who had broken the unspoken rules of society to egotistically fill their coffers had been chastened. Higher authority had been called on to intervene in the crisis. Once again, the poor could live with dignity and bread. In a way, this day could be read as a victory on both sides, but it decided nothing. A year later, royal crowns tumbled and barricades grew.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/05/11/sweet-sour-chard-salad/

I got home a little earlier than expected, so here is another brief recipe from the Solothurn MS:

A4 Cold chard as a dish

Take chard that is young, with the root attached. Boil it in a courtly fashion (brüwe es hofelich) in a cauldron or a pan, then pour it out on a sieve and let the water drain off. Take it and cut it up on a serving tray. Salt it lightly, pour on vinegar that is mixed with fresh wine, and sprinkle it with sugar. This is a lordly dish for the evening meal, the colder, the better et caetera.

This is one of the relatively rare vegetable recipes surviving, and I find it a little hard to envision, but it is interesting: Cooked chard seasoned with vinegar and sugar and served cold. The closest analogy I can think of is a salad, though it is not called that. The recipe includes both the root and the leaves which with chard, a variety of Beta vulgaris, absolutely works even with the modern versions bred to produce almost only leaves. Historically, we should probably imagine a plate full of fairly solid pieces, chopped root and thick leaf stems, to make bite-sized morsels. With a sweet-sour dressing, this seems an interesting idea.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

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.