It is raining outside and the temperature has descended a few notches below zero. But it is warm and comfortable inside the quaint, century-old bakery lit in hues of orange and yellow. Wisps of mulled wine and freshly baked cake come floating along, tickling my nostrils.
I am in Dresden in Saxony, Germany, learning how to bake a 14th Century delicacy, the Christstollen or the stollen, the quintessential Christmas cake. Michael Wippler, the third-generation baker of the Wippler Bakery ushers us into a room where rolling pins and ladles await. Spread on the wooden table are the ingredients — flour, butter, yeast, orange peels, raisins soaked with rum, and spices like nutmeg and ginger. Wippler gently strokes the flour, pours dollops of butter over it and adds all the remaining ingredients. He then massages it with his hands before pounding it hard and bringing it to shape with a thumping finish. He then looks at the bunch of novice bakers surrounding him and beams.
To the people of Dresden, the stollen is not just a piece of cake. It is tradition, a piece of history that they proudly boast of. A royal treat, it was served almost 600 years ago to princes and dignitaries, and it made its presence for the first time in the oldest Christmas Market in Dresden, the Striezelmarkt in the 15th Century. The streets of Dresden have often seen a procession of master bakers and their assistants parading an 18-kg stollen to the palace and presenting it to their kings. It is believed that King Augustus The Strong asked Dresden’s bakers, in the 18th century, to bake a giant stollen for him. Weighing approximately 1.8 tonnes, the mammoth delicacy was made by a hundred bakers of Dresden using eggs for the first time — almost 3600 of them.
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However, the original form of the stollen was a mere austere dish sans all the indulgence. Wippler says it was baked initially during the Advent in the medieval era during the fasting season. Stollen, then, was made of just flour, yeast and water, as the church did not allow butter or spices to be added. However, the ban was revoked eventually, and stollen emerged as a rich delicacy.
Back at the bakery, I play with my two kilograms of dough and attempt to shape it into a loaf but my fingers stick to it. The raisins ooze with rum and the flavour is hard to resist. Wippler says there are more than a hundred stollen speciality bakers in Dresden today, and he alone bakes close to 1,000 kg a day. Each bakery seems to have created its signature style of the stollen, improvising on the original. As my loaf is eventually put into the oven and baked, I am treated to a tray filled with different types of stollen. My favourite is one bursting with poppy seeds.
Ask any long-time resident of Dresden and they will swear that a freshly baked loaf of stollen resembles baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes. Another legend says the hump on our loaves reminds one of the hump on the camels that took gifts for Christ on his birthday. The raisins represent the precious stones in the gifts. But the most charming tradition that I am told is that when a family gathers to cut the first piece of stollen for Christmas, they keep a piece aside, just in case the family cannot afford stollen the next year .
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