Pumpernickel

A Dutch retailer sells Mestemacher's pumpernickel as 500 grams of rectangular slices, each a few millimetres thick, and pitches the pack as a base for individually topped snacks. Out of the packet the slice is a flat, near-black sheet, cold and slightly tacky, that bends before it breaks. A thin film of butter goes on edge to edge, one topping goes on top, and the result is eaten with a knife and fork or folded by hand. Tear the plastic and the first thing in the air is molasses and toasted grain, sweeter than the colour promises, and the butter spreads in a single pass because the surface is so flat.

The toppings that suit the slice are the loud ones. Smoked or soured herring, a sharp aged cheese, smoked salmon over cream cheese and chives, roast beef with pickles and mustard: each carries enough salt or acid to stay audible against a crumb that tastes faintly smoky and leaves a honey-like aftertaste. Rye has no gluten network, so the slice chews dense and a little sticky and clings to the molars. A mild topping vanishes into it. A wet one stays where it was put, because the crumb is tight, and a spoonful of sour cream with radish sits on top without sinking.

The colour comes from the bake. The dough is coarse rye meal and water, worked stiff and wet, and it cooks in steam and low heat for sixteen hours or more, depending on the producer. That long cook turns the crumb from tan to black and draws out its sweetness, and some commercial loaves add molasses to deepen it. The Westphalian version, which the EU registered as a protected geographical indication in 2014, calls for at least 90 percent coarse rye. At the cutting board the density pays off: a sharp knife takes a clean thin sheet that holds its edge, while a thick slice becomes a brick that swamps the topping and tires the jaw. Sealed and pasteurised, it keeps for months.

Dutch kitchens already had roggebrood, the dark steamed rye that takes butter and cheese, and pompernikkel sits next to it on the shelf as the blacker, thinner, German-sounding choice. A Belgian recipe cuts the slices into rounds for drinks, spreads each with herbed cream cheese and crowns it with a rolled strip of smoked salmon, while the full rectangles take cheese or smoked fish at lunch. The bread is strong, so a small portion satisfies. Two or three bites carry the whole salt-and-sweet exchange, and a plate of squares empties more slowly than a plate of white-bread canapes.

The slice belongs at a cold table. A dark beer, a port or a herbal tea with a squeeze of citrus sits comfortably beside it, since the smoke and sweetness echo roasted malt and fortified wine while the fish or cheese on top brings the salt. A knife drags through the chewy slab with a faint tearing sound. Because the slice comes straight from the packet, it works on a buffet, and it stays pliable on the plate for the length of a long lunch.

Origin and history

The loaf is Westphalian, and the Dutch borrowed both the bread and its name from High German. Van Veen and Van der Sijs date pompernikkel in Dutch to 1768, in the sense of Westphalian rye bread, and read the word as pumpern, an imitative verb for breaking wind, joined to Nickel, a short form of Nikolaus. One suggestion is that soldiers coined it for a heavy bread they blamed for digestive trouble. The Napoleon story, in which the loaf is "good for Nicole", the emperor's horse, was in print before he was born and is a legend.

Dutch writers used the word well before the dictionaries did. Pieter Langendijk worked it into his plays in 1714 and 1715 as a comic oath, a sense that lasted through the eighteenth century. A song titled "Van de Hollantsche Pompernikkel" is mentioned in a work of 1721, and a comedy called Kloas Pompernikkel played in 1856. Dutch newspapers printed the word about forty times between 1850 and 1900 and some 285 times after 1900, as the bread moved from a stage joke to a shop item.

The earliest picture of the bread as food is a poem. In the 1793 De ridder Knevelbaard, pompernikkel appears in a list with ham, sausage and tobacco, pantry stock that keeps for months. That list already puts the bread among the cured and smoked goods that go on top of it today, and the long shelf life that suited a bundle of provisions in 1793 is what lets a packet of slices wait in a Dutch cupboard until lunch.