Rye Bread

Passionate memories of rye bread echo through many cities that once had Jewish bakeries and delis. Remembered flavors include the taste of "tzitzel" rye from Pratzel's Bakery in St. Louis (which was my family's favorite bakery when I was growing up there), "tsitsel" rye from Zingerman's bakery in Ann Arbor, "Shissel Rye" in New York, and sissel or cissel rye (which is named for the frequently-used ingredient, caraway, for which the Yiddish word is "sissel") Are you confused? I was a bit surprised to learn of all these similar-looking and sounding words. 

The head of Zingerman's bakery in Ann Arbor, which has brought many of these breads back to life, wrote about the early days of Zingerman's bakery, founded in 1992 and still baking a wide variety of breads:

"The most important breads we needed to master were Jewish Rye in all its forms—seeded, not seeded, chernuska and tsitsel (a round loaf with a slit in the top made from a caraway-free dough; the Yiddish word means “breast”) and pumpernickel." (Amy Emberling, 2016, https://blog.bakewithzing.com/jewish-rye-bread-history/)

Some of these are still available at Zingerman's Bakehouse (a few miles from my home) and at their online store, though tsitsel rye is no longer on any of their lists (link). Clearly, there are a huge number of Jewish rye breads, including the several types I remember from my childhood (that is, from Pratzel's bakery) and from the current time here in Ann Arbor.

I started checking out this linguistic and culinary tangle by looking for "tzitzel" rye, which seemed to be unique to Pratzel's. This round rye bread was coated in cornmeal. It was the pride of the bakery's founders, who opened the bakery in around 1913, and of their successors who operated the bakery until 2011. A diligent google search, however, turned up a bit of older history, prior to the founding of Pratzel's, that illustrates that it was more traditional than the bakery admitted:

"Many bakery workers were leaders in the 1909 strike, among them Yosl Rosenbach of the Jewish Bakers’ Union, Local 104, whose members baked a Galitsyaner bread that was called tsitsel broyt. I had met him in 1894, when he arrived from Przemysl, Galicia, where he had been a baker and a member of the Austrian Social-Democratic Party. He was a fine public speaker, and he joined the same party in America. He died at the age of 61 in April 1929." (Source: The Jewish Unions in America: Pages of History and Memories by Bernard Weinstein. A note on tistsel broyt translates: "Yiddish: nipple bread.")

New York bread lovers especially remember "corn rye" (which is not made of corn, and not coated with corn meal, but refers to the Yiddish word "kern," meaning wheat flour) and Shissel Rye, as explained in an article from Eater. The author Andrew Coe explained:

"You may have never heard of Shissel Rye before—it's a bread that didn't survive the softening and blandification of the New York rye tradition. "Shissel" means bowl in Yiddish, and maybe it's so named because the loaf looks like an inverted bowl. From the outside, it's easy to mistake it for a corn rye, because it has a similar leathery crust. But it's made from wetter dough than corn rye, which gives the loaf a denser crumb and more pronounced sour twang." (link)

In trying to learn more about rye bread, I also read a book about Jewish food in the Midwest in the 19th and 20th century: From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways by Ellen F. Steinberg and Jack H. Prost (published 2011). Included in this book is a long interview with the descendants of Max Pratzel, with particular fervor about the tzitzel rye, which also appears in many other food memories about this bakery. (p. 134-135)

According to the interview, Max Pratzel claimed to have made up the recipe for the bread as well as the name. His contribution, evidently, was using cornmeal to coat the bread, though in fact this was done in other bakeries as well. As for the name, I suspect he didn't want to admit that it was a cognate with an English word for the same part of the female anatomy -- and thus a family legend was formed. The somewhat clueless authors of the book seemed unable to find the history and meaning of the Yiddish word or of the bread, though at that time Zingerman's was already baking it under a slightly different spelling, and already explaining its Yiddish meaning.

Additional web searches reveal that several home bakers claim to have found a recipe that comes close to the taste of Pratzel's rye, and that descendants of the Pratzel family now have a bakery in Wisconsin where they continue to use the original sour dough starter from their family's St. Louis bakery. I'll just conserve my memories of my father ordering a rye bread at the glass-fronted display cases at the bakery a few blocks from where I grew up, and I'll continue enjoying the rye bread that Len is now baking.

Blog post © 2020 mae sander.