Westphalian loaf of whole rye grain and rye meal, steam-baked for sixteen hours in a lidded tin until almost black
Origin: Münster & Westphalia, Germany
From the journey of Rye.
True Westphalian pumpernickel contains rye, water, and salt, and very often nothing else. Its colour, which is close to black, and its sweetness, which is pronounced, are not added. They are produced by time. The loaf is packed into lidded tins and baked in steam at a low temperature, around 120 °C, for sixteen to twenty-four hours. Over that long bake the grain's own enzymes turn part of its starch into sugars, and those sugars and the proteins of the grain undergo the slow browning known as the Maillard reaction until the whole crumb has darkened through. German food law sets the minimum: the Leitsätze für Brot und Kleingebäck require pumpernickel to be made from at least 90 per cent rye, as meal or whole grain, and baked for at least sixteen hours. A loaf that is coloured rather than baked dark is not pumpernickel under that definition, and this is the difference between the Westphalian bread and the North American one of the same name, which is usually a wheat and rye loaf darkened with cocoa, coffee, caramel, or molasses. The name was in use as a term of abuse for a person, roughly a lout or a clod, before it attached to the bread. The usual derivation joins pumpern, to break wind, with Nickel, a goblin or rogue, a pet form of Nikolaus, and the bread is supposed to have earned it by its effect on the digestion. That derivation is plausible and widely accepted. The story that Napoleon, served the bread in Westphalia, pronounced it bon pour Nicol, good enough for his horse, is folklore outright, and the chronology alone disposes of it: the word is far older than Napoleon. Rye suited Westphalia for the same reason it suited the whole sandy north German plain. On poor, acid soils where wheat failed, farmers grew rye year after year on the same fields, feeding them with turf and manure, and the dark, long-keeping, wholegrain bread of the region grew out of that cultivation.
If the oven cannot hold a steady low temperature overnight, a slow cooker set on low will steam a smaller loaf in a lidded tin sitting on a trivet in water, over the same sixteen hours. Wrapped in foil and refrigerated, pumpernickel keeps for two weeks; commercial loaves are pasteurised in their packaging and keep for months, which is how the bread travelled so widely. In Westphalia it is eaten thinly sliced with butter and Westphalian ham, with strong cheese, and as the black layer in Westfälische Quarkspeise, a dessert of quark, cherries, and pumpernickel crumbs.
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