Stollen: lumpy, dumpy, stumpy
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Yesterday we had a lot of fun exploring the derivation of Italian "Panettone: augmentative of the diminutive" and beyond. Another Yuletide cake I'm eating these days is German stollen, but its etymology is not so exciting:
Middle High German stolle < Old High German stollo ("post, support"), documented since the 9th century, from the Indo-European root (*stel- "to set up; standing, stiff; post, trunk") and thus related to stable (compare Greek στήλη (stēlē) ("pillar, post"). From "supporting support, post" the meaning "underground passage" (13th century) developed; the meaning "Christmas biscuits" arose from a comparison with the block-like support (18th century).
modified GT of:
mittelhochdeutsch stolle < althochdeutsch stollo „Pfosten, Stütze“, belegt seit dem 9. Jahrhundert, zur indogermanischen Wurzel *stel- „(auf)stellen; stehend, steif; Pfosten, Stamm“ und damit verwandt mit Stall (vergleiche griechisch στήλη (stēlē) „Säule, Pfosten“). Aus „tragende Stütze, Pfosten“ entwickelte sich die Bedeutung „unterirdischer Gang“ (13. Jahrhundert) heraus; die Bedeutung „Weihnachtsgebäck“ entstand aus einem Vergleich mit der klotzartigen Stütze (18. Jahrhundert).
Although this explanation may be academically impressive, it leaves much to be desired in terms of what "stollen" really means. Here I turn to the folkish "Advent Calendar 17 – 'How to gain weight fast'” by Emanuel in YourDailyGerman (2/5/21):
der Stollen
Wow, what a name for a pastry. Stollen. Katchung. Sounds uber German. And it’s actually not only the name for a cake, it’s also what mining tunnels are called. How do these two things connect? Well, the origin of Stollen is actually a word we all know really well: stellen (to put). A Stollen originally had the idea of “thing that stands/makes stand” and before it was used for the mining tunnel itself, Stollen was the word for the rough, wooden posts and lumps that were used in mining.
And that’s what probably inspired people hundreds of years ago to name their cake-bread after it – because Stollen isn’t an elegant, noble cake. Not at all. It’s a bulky lump. And it’s super heavy, too. Like… the average weight of one pound of Stollen is 2.3 pounds. I know, sounds surreal, right?
The rest of Emanuel's post is super entertaining and informative, and even includes a meme about not being able to un-stollen Christmas as well as two YouTube recipes, both under ten minutes, spoken in very clear German, one my a motherly older woman and one by a vivacious younger woman.
Enjoy! But try to limit yourself to one slice of stollen per day. Otherwise, you might end up being lumpy, dumpy, stumpy yourself.
Selected readings
- "Panettone: augmentative of the diminutive" (12/21/24)
- "Stollen history", Dresden Stollen Bakers — they're all sold out for 2024; best to make an order for the 2025 holiday season now
Afterword: Dresden Stollen festival
Every year the Stollenfest takes place in Dresden. This historic tradition ended only in 1918 with the fall of the monarchy, and started again in 1994, but the idea comes from Dresden's history.
Dresden's Christmas market, the Striezelmarkt, was mentioned in the chronicles for the first time in 1474.
The tradition of baking Christmas stollen in Dresden is very old. Christmas stollen in Dresden was already baked in the 15th century.
In 1560, the bakers of Dresden offered the rulers of Saxony Christmas Stollen weighing 36 pounds (16 kg) each as gifts, and the custom continued.
Augustus II the Strong (1670–1733) was the Elector of Saxony, King of Poland and the Grand Duke of Lithuania. The king loved pomp, luxury, splendour and feasts. In 1730, he impressed his subjects, ordering the Bakers’ Guild of Dresden to make a giant 1.7-tonne stollen, big enough for everyone to have a portion to eat. There were around 24,000 guests taking part in the festivities on the occasion of the legendary amusement festivity known as Zeithainer Lustlager. For this special occasion, the court architect Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann (1662–1737), built a particularly oversized Stollen oven. An oversized Stollen knife was also designed solely for this occasion.
Today, the festival takes place on the Saturday before the second Sunday in Advent, and the cake weighs between three and four tonnes. A carriage takes the cake in a parade through the streets of Dresden to the Christmas market, where it is ceremoniously cut into pieces and distributed among the crowd, in return for a small payment which goes to charity. A special knife, the Grand Dresden Stollen knife, a silver-plated knife, 1.60 metres (5.2 ft) long weighing 12 kilograms (26 lb), which is a copy of the lost baroque original knife from 1730, is used to cut the oversize Stollen at the Dresden Christmas fair.
The largest stollen was baked in 2010 by Lidl; it was 72.1 metres (237 ft) long and was certified by the Guinness Book of World Records, at the railway station of Haarlem.
See here for a large photograph of the Grand Dresden Stollen knife, escorted by a pastry chef with an appreciable stollengirth.
Philip Taylor said,
December 22, 2024 @ 9:45 am
"Like… the average weight of one pound of Stollen is 2.3 pounds." — ¡¿ Que ?!
AlexB said,
December 22, 2024 @ 9:54 am
What Philip Taylor said.
Does that mean that Stollen is also composed of Dark Matter?
Martin said,
December 22, 2024 @ 9:57 am
But which weighs more — a pound of Stollen or a pound of feathers?
Robot Therapist said,
December 22, 2024 @ 10:16 am
The denseness is amazing!
Robert Coren said,
December 22, 2024 @ 10:31 am
The title of this post led to me to expect something about additions to Disney's collection of dwarfs.
PeterB said,
December 23, 2024 @ 12:43 pm
Don't want to go too far off-topic, but I have been puzzling over an etymological question for some time, and this is that closest I've come to a plausible excuse to ask it: Are the theories at Wikipedia about the origins of the word "pretzel", and about pretzels themselves, as implausible as they seem to this non-linguist?
Just about every culture in the world that has bread has some kind of "twisted" bread, so stories attributing pretzels to a specific creator, or assigning some theological significance to them, seem contrived to me. I'm also dubious about derivations from Latin or Italian of a word that seems to be used only in German. Surely something like "bröt-zl" is more natural?
On the other hand, amateur etymologies like "brötzl" run aground on the fact that the word is not from modern German, but at best from some regional dialect of some medieval Germanic language, after a history of sound changes–that is, I do understand that real linguistics requires real linguists. So, what's the deal with "pretzel"?
David Marjanović said,
December 23, 2024 @ 5:30 pm
No, because 1) keep in mind it's die Brezel, while the rare suffix -sel (in Standard German there's Rätsel "riddle", and I think that's it) is neuter; 2) Brot had /ɔː/ in Middle High German, so any *Bröt- would have /ɛ/ in southeastern dialects like mine, but Brezel has /e/ instead. (The Standard /eː/ in this word does not help because it could have numerous other origins as well.)
Bracchiola (neuter plural misunderstood/reanalyzed as feminine singular*) works both semantically and phonetically.
* Like French feuille f. "leaf" from Latin folia n. "leaves".
David Marjanović said,
December 23, 2024 @ 6:03 pm
…I should go into a lot more detail here. For example, there are late Latin and early Romance loans in High German specifically; numerous towns south of the Danube and west of the Rhine continued to speak Romance well into the Middle Ages. The reason I put an asterisk before *Bröt-, when Brötchen is such a widespread word for "breadroll", is that this word is absent from the linguistically Bavarian dialects; instead, we use Semmel, which is specifically from early western Romance: its Classical Latin ancestor was simile "fine wheat flour", which is what you make the things from (in contrast to black bread), but the word had undergone the western Romance merger of Classical /ɪ/ and /eː/ as /e/, as seen in the French outcome semoule and the Italian diminutive semolina (both shifted in meaning); following vowel rounding caused by the /l/, Semmel has /ø/ in the Central Bavarian dialects (like mine) now, but its (much more common) diminutive did not undergo this rounding and has /e/.
Also, the umlaut of */a/ caused by */iː/, */ɪ/ or */j/ is OHG/MHG and current Bavarian /e/ in the absence of blocking factors, and there aren't any in bracchiola; when there are any, the outcome is MHG /æ/, modern Bavarian /a/ – never /ɛ/.
Around the end of the MHG period, most of German lengthened all vowels in stressed open syllables and all vowels in monosyllabic words that ended in only one short consonant; many dialects also shortened vowels in stressed syllables that ended in too many consonants. Afterwards, Central German (or something like that) redistributed [e] vs. [ɛ], [ø] vs. [œ] and [o] vs. [ɔ] according to the new lengths (closed for long, open for short), and this became a feature of all Standard accents (or "reading pronunciations" I should say for that stage) because a single letter was and is used for each pair. The Bavarian dialects participated in both lengthening processes, but not in the reshuffling of open vs. closed vowels; instead, vowel length became nearly predictable and is no longer phonemic in most of these dialects. (Instead it works like in Russian, but I really digress.) Therefore, absent the usual complications (mostly Standard influence), the distribution of [e] vs. [ɛ] and [ø] vs. [œ] in Bavarian dialects today remains informative of things that happened 1000 to 1500 years earlier. ([ɔ] is lost, but that's yet another story.)
PeterB said,
December 23, 2024 @ 6:48 pm
Thank you! I was pretty sure my "theory" was not sound (fwiw, I was thinking about the south-German diminutive "-l"), but was suspicious about an Italian derivation for a stereotypical German bread.
But my more basic mistake was to forget that "Germany" and "Italy" are both 19th century creations, and that "Italian" cultural elements in this part of the world, a millennium or more ago, are not all that remarkable. That is, I'm no more a historian than a linguist.
Thank you again for your patient and cogent explanation.
David Marjanović said,
December 23, 2024 @ 7:06 pm
That would get you to */brɛdl/ and not to /bred͡sl/.
However, the word has indeed sometimes been interpreted as a diminutive (…which it actually was in the original Latin…), and a new full-size form has been backformed from it: /bred͡sn/ (identical in singular and plural in the dialects). You can sometimes buy Laugenbrezen.
Also, I was wrong in postulating the overly Italian form bracchiola, which has no hope of explaining the short z; it should be brachiola or maybe even a fully Classical brachiula.
PeterB said,
December 23, 2024 @ 7:21 pm
And as you so patiently explained, /bred/ is the wrong root for the time and place anyway. So I was wrong at multiple levels!
Thank you again for indulging me by responding in such detail.
Victor Mair said,
December 24, 2024 @ 5:51 am
Given to me by a Jewish friend of Ukrainian extraction, in the spirit of the season:
Mandelbrot cookie
A crunchy, almond-flavored cookie that is a staple dessert in Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine. The name comes from the Yiddish word mandlbroyt, which means "almond bread". The cookie is made with oil, flour, sugar, and eggs, and often includes almonds, walnuts, cinnamon, chocolate chips, or candied fruit. In Ukraine, the cookie is called kamishbrot, and the two terms are often used interchangeably in the United States.
(source: AiO)
VHM: It is cooked in a long loaf and cut into slices. Looks like biscotti, but is not. Not hard, but soft and friable. Looks like a kind of bread (brot), but many people who love it insist that it is a cookie.
Philip Taylor said,
December 24, 2024 @ 6:36 am
What a shame — I had confidently expected that a Mandelbrot cookie would be a 3-dimensional structure which , when viewed under increasing magnification, would reveal infinite levels of recursive similarity …
Victor Mair said,
December 24, 2024 @ 6:58 am
Not a shame. Just increases the joy.
Philip Taylor said,
December 24, 2024 @ 10:48 am
Alternatively, a Mandelbrot cookie could be a small computer program which lodges itself in the non-volatile memory of a web browser, and which, when examined in detail, appears to contain numerous small copies of itself, each of which on inspection appear to contain …
Rodger C said,
December 25, 2024 @ 11:11 am
Thread won.