Schwarzbrot Sandwich

The Altbierküche of the Pinkus Müller brewery in Münster lists a dish called Holländer Käse mit Schwarzbrot und Butter: slices of Dutch-style cheese, dark rye bread, and butter, sold at a table where the house Altbier is the usual drink. Put the butter on the bread and the cheese on the butter and the plate turns into a Käsebrot, the oldest kind of German cold supper. The first bite is mostly temperature and texture. Cold butter gives slightly against the crumb, the cheese is smooth and faintly salty, and the rye underneath is damp, springy and sour enough to wake up the whole mouthful.

Schwarzbrot is a loose name. In the Rhineland it is a particular dark loaf sweetened with Rübenkraut, beet syrup; in Westphalia the word often points toward Pumpernickel; in the south it can mean a wheat and rye Mischbrot. What the Münster plate calls for is a dense, dark, rye-led slice, cut thin enough to bend a little and firm enough to carry cheese without sagging. Rye holds moisture for days, so the crumb stays tacky and cool, and it sticks to the teeth in the way that rye does. The sourness is the reason it works under a mild cheese, because the bread supplies the sharpness and the cheese only has to be creamy.

The butter does most of the quiet work. Spread to the edges, it seals the open crumb so the slice does not drink the cheese's moisture, and it makes a layer the cheese can sit on without sliding. Butter straight from the cooler tears a soft slice; butter left out too long turns slick and runs. Young, mild Holländer cheese suits the bread because it takes on a little of the rye's tang and gives back milk-fat in return, while a crumbly aged cheese would shed across the plate. The balance is a thin film of butter, a slice of cheese thin enough to fold, and a bite taken straight through all three layers so the sour, the fat and the salt arrive together.

The same card lists Müllers Biertreberbrot with Griebenschmalz or a house herb cream cheese, cold sliced Mettwurst with Pumpernickel and butter, and Westfälischer Knochenschinken on bread with a fried egg. Together they make a Brotzeit shelf in which each topping is picked to sit beside beer. The ham and the Mettwurst bring smoke and salt, the Griebenschmalz brings pork fat and crackling, and the cheese plate brings cool milk fat and a mild, slightly sweet finish that the rye turns sharp. Diners at the long tables order several of these at once and pass the bread basket between them.

On the Lower Rhine, dark bread turns up on the Niederrheinische Kaffeetafel, the afternoon table of the Lower Rhine, where it is set out beside raisin bread, butter, cheese, Quark and Rübenkraut. At the Voswinckelshof museum in Dinslaken, a house built around 1700, volunteers of the Heimatverein serve a Kaffeetafel in the old kitchen once a month, with regional breads, cheese, smoked ham, Mettwurst and Rübenkraut on the table. Cheese on dark bread with a spoonful of sweet beet syrup nearby is the farmhouse version of the same plate, and the syrup rounds off the rye's sourness the way the butter does in Münster.

Origin and history

No record dates the buttered-cheese-on-Schwarzbrot plate itself; it belongs to the ordinary repertoire of German cold suppers and was never credited to a cook. What can be placed is the house that serves it. Pinkus Müller traces its beginning to 1816, when Johannes Müller (1792 to 1870) arrived in Münster from Hildebrandshausen.

After his marriage to Friederika Cramer, the couple opened a bakery and a brewery together, so bread and beer started in the same building. The bakery closed in 1866 and a malthouse took its place, and the brewery and the pub were expanded over the century that followed.

The Altbierküche card today carries Müllers Biertreberbrot with Griebenschmalz and the plate of Holländer Käse with Schwarzbrot and butter, both set down cold at the table, long after the family's own bakery shut its doors in 1866.