Weckle/Weck

At a bakery chain in Heidenheim, on the Ostalb, the filled-roll shelf lists a Fleischkäse-Wecken: a Schlosswecken split open, buttered, packed with a slab of Fleischkäse and finished with a sliced gherkin, for €2.35. The chain, Gnaier, runs about thirty branches around the town, and the plain Schlosswecken is its best seller, baked fresh through the day. When the halves part, the warm, peppery smell of the baked meat loaf comes up first, then the sour snap of the gherkin cuts through the fat, and the cold butter underneath has already started to soften where it touches the meat. The slab is cut thick enough to reach both ends of the roll, so the first bite and the last carry the same weight of filling.

The roll is shaped like its name. Weck goes back to Old High German wecki, a wedge, and Swabian adds the diminutive -le. A Weckle is long and tapered at both ends, scored along the top. The plain Wasserweckle is flour, water, yeast and salt, and it bakes to a thin crust that crackles under a thumb. The Laugenweckle takes a dip in lye first and comes out mahogany, with a glossy skin and a salty bite that stands up to the pepper in a meat loaf. Either one splits cleanly along its length, and the cut face takes butter edge to edge without tearing the crumb.

A Weckle bought at seven carries a crust that gives with a small shatter and a crumb that closes softly around the filling. By the afternoon the crust has turned chewy and the crumb dry, and the butter has nothing soft left to sit against. That short window is why Swabian bakeries bake in the early hours and sell filled rolls from the first morning rush. The same roll turns up on a Swabian breakfast plate, two of them beside butter, a fruit spread, quark, cheese, salami and Fleischkäse, and at the Vesper, the mid-morning or evening snack where a roll and a cut of meat are eaten without anyone leaving the table.

Ask for the meat loaf version at a counter and the word depends on where you stand. East of Stuttgart it is a Leberkäswecken or Leberkäswegga. In the Saarland it is a Fleischkäsweck, and across the south the joking abbreviation is LKW, the German for a lorry. Fleischkäse and Leberkäse name the same baked loaf of finely ground meat with a brown top. The Stuttgart version is coarser and boiled, with liver required in the mix. A warm slice about a finger thick goes into the buttered roll, and the browned top of the loaf and the crust of the Weckle give against each other at the first bite.

Other fillings stay close to the bakery counter: butter and a slice of cheese, ham, a ring of sausage, a spoon of Fleischsalat that melts a little into the buttered crumb. Leftover loaf goes cold into a Wurstsalat or is fried and laid under a fried egg. A bigger roll can also go into the oven, as in a home recipe that bakes eight Weckle with ham, cheese, onions, egg and crème fraîche until the tops brown and the cheese blisters. Warm from the oven, the cheese stretches between the halves and the crust rattles faintly when the tray is set down.

The word shifts at the edges of the region. Baden has Weckerle, Switzerland has Weggli, and Franconia has Weggla, the roll that holds the three small grilled sausages of a Nuremberg Drei im Weggla. Alsace shares the root, and a filled roll ordered there across the Rhine from Baden arrives under a cousin of the same name. The steam from a fresh slice of meat loaf softens the crumb of the roll just enough that the first bite gives without tearing the crust, and the butter turns glossy where the two meet.

The wedge, and a Berlin bakery counter

The Old High German wecki meant a wedge, and the sense survives in Alsace, Switzerland and Styria as the word for the wood-splitter's tool. The Duden ties the bread to its shape, a wedge-like loaf of wheat flour. By about 1300 the word was in use across both upper and lower German regions; in the north it later gave way to Brötchen, Schrippe and Semmel, and in the southwest it stayed.

No record dates the first Weckle split and filled with meat loaf or cheese. What survives is the habit: a roll sold already buttered and filled at the counter, as at the Heidenheim bakery, and a spread of dialect names for the roll with the loaf inside it. The wedge-shaped roll also traveled north with its eaters. At the turn of 2012 to 2013 Wolfgang Thierse, the longtime Bundestag vice president and a resident of Prenzlauer Berg, said in a newspaper interview that his bakery sold Wecken where he wanted Schrippen, and the argument over Swabians in Berlin ran on for weeks.

The loaf that goes inside the Stuttgart version has its own date. In July 2014 the Stuttgarter Leberkäs was entered on Slow Food Germany's Ark of Taste, with a required liver share of at least five percent, and the butchery of Reinhardt in Nagold-Iselshausen is among the producers named for it.