[Sca-cooks] Anyone into Hanseatic traditions?

[Volker Bach]

"Hanseatic" is a shorthand thing describing the Low German speaking cities that stretched from the lower Rhineland all thew way to the Eastern Baltic. There is considerable debate as to whether such a thing as a Hanseatic culture existed (I doubt it did). However, there are some cultural continuities between Hanseatic cities ranging from their demographic core (Westfalia) to their farthest eastern reaches (Riga, Tallinn, the Novgorod Kontor). As far as I can tell these are not culturally unique (the culture of the Hanseatic cities is the culture of the Low German speaking environment), but in much of their Baltic environment they are not native. So there is (or at least, at this stage in my research there seems to be) a link that ties cities in the Baltic to cities in the Rhineland not only by language (Low German, at that point a literary and administrative language of high status) and law (typically the Lübeck or Magdeburg law), but also by material
 culture, religious practice and culinary practices. The picture I am getting is that what you could call Hanseatic cookery has the hallmarks of a regional cuisine, but the distribution pattern of a sociolect. There is really no reason why people in Reval or Riga should cook in three-legged cast metal pots and eat oven-baked rye bread and hard cheese while the rural population around them cooked in suspended pots, ate flatbread and soft cheeses. The way the citypeople ate would have seemed perfectly normal to countryfolk from the Westfalian or Wendish quarter, but here, it was an alien artifact, and one that people went to some effort to sustain, importing cheese from Götaland and millstones from the Eifel mountains.  

What 'Hanseatic Cookery' isn't is a form of specific culinary identity. It adopts foreign influences readily along the familiar southwest-northeast cline. But it seems that it acted as a kind of conduit, with the cities defensive against local influences and quick to adopt and disseminate metropolitan ones (though these words are, of course, anachronistic). 

There is considerable dispute about hgow influential the traditions of the Hanseatic cities were in Scandinavia and the Baltic and how much is bog-standard cultural diffusion, and my money is largely on the latter. But for themselves, the cities had a cultural identity that extended to eating and drinking patterns (the communal Höge, the traditional feasts, red and white beer, bread-butter-and-cheese snacks and apparently certain dishes, too, though I'm still trying to tease out whether this is actually supportable or just wild conjecture). 




________________________________
 Von: Stefan li Rous <StefanliRous at austin.rr.com>
An: SCA-Cooks maillist SCA-Cooks <SCA-Cooks at Ansteorra.org> 
Gesendet: 5:00 Freitag, 7.Juni 2013
Betreff: Re: [Sca-cooks] Anyone into Hanseatic traditions?
 

Giano asked:
<<< Is anyone here (other than me) pursuing research into Hanseatic cookery? I got a copy of a museum catalogue (Die L?becker K?che,. L?beck 1985 covering medieval to contemporary, with strong emphasis on 1350-1600) looking for a good home.? >>>

I'm not, but can you define for me what you mean by "Hanseatic cookery"? I thought the Hanseatic League was a set of different cultures and groups spread across the Baltic that was more a trade organization than a single culture. What is unique among these groups to be a culture? How far back from the coast did it extend?

Thanks, 
   Stefan

--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
   Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marksharris
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****






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