u/VolkerBach

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/2026/07/05/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/2026/06/30/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/2026/06/23/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/2026/06/20/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.

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…