The Invention of Trdelník and Prague’s Culinary Past
By Anna Parker
Tourists can be seen holding out trdelnik, a puffy chimney of dough wrapped tight in a napkin and filled with a swirl of soft-serve, framed against a background of grey cobblestones. Photo courtesy Benreis, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The stalls started to appear everywhere. Every time we returned to Prague, there were more, growing around the mouths of metro stations or in the center of squares. Tourists would gather nearby, small clusters of people with the time to stand around, stopped in the cold. They could often be seen in the same pose. One arm would be extended, holding out a puffy chimney of dough wrapped tight in a napkin. In the other would be a phone, framing the cake against a background of grey cobblestones, forming the perfect Instagram shot. When we passed through the heady haze of warm sugar and toasted nuts, dodging past elbows crooked for photographs, my Czech family would quietly mutter.
“I don’t know what that is, Anižko. But it is not traditional.” Mum shook her head.
Trdelník is a cake made out of a sweet dough rolled around a spit (the trdlo, which also happens to be a very gentle word for a foolish or idiotic person) and grilled until its sugared surface melts and cracks. It is then rolled in more sugar, crumbled walnuts or almonds, sometimes cinnamon too, and, finally, its center is filled with soft serve ice cream. Cakes cooked on a spit appear in a number of Central and Eastern European cuisines: Hungarian, Austrian, Polish, Lithuanian and Romanian. It is an ancient way of cooking dough. Perhaps much of trdelník’s success among its consumers comes from the irresistible, deep-seated pull that an open fire has: the smoke, the heat, the hypnosis of the rotating spits.
The sellers of trdelník certainly encourage these archaic associations. Every stall sign is written in the same German Gothic script, which declares that this delicacy is “Old Bohemian.” Despite the claims of its marketers, trdelník is not a Czech food tradition. It is not a dish that has been cooked for generations. Rather, it is an invention for tourists, a food novelty that raises questions about nation, tradition and belonging.
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Small, old and densely built, Prague is a city that seems designed to appeal to travelers. Pastel townhouses are patterned with Art Nouveau plasterwork, baroque statues rise up through the early morning mist and, at night, intricately wrought iron streetlamps stand in a pool of their own orange light. Trams rumble along rattling rails, powered by a lattice of electrical wires, a fisherman’s net slung up between street and sky.
The historic center lies in the deepest cradle of a flood basin, surrounding a wide, flat and slow-moving river. The suburbs are higher up in the surrounding hills, where brightly colored, Communist-era apartment blocks have been thrown up next to sheer limestone rock faces. Here, the city becomes very green and very quiet. Residents bend double in their riotously frothy front gardens and speed over the hills straddling flashy mountain bikes, while, at the city’s myriad outdoor pools, crowds of tanned and wrinkled over-60s can be seen gently poaching in bubbling jacuzzis.
In my experience, none of these people eat trdelník.
Trdelník is a food phenomenon driven only by tourists. For better or worse, tourism has transformed this city. The question of how to balance the industry with the rights of inhabitants to feel like the city belongs to them has become a central issue for this new, small state. Prague buzzes with visitors who feed along a single artery, making their way from Wenceslas Square to the Old Town Square, across Charles Bridge, and who end their circuit by looking back the way they came from the steep hill on which Prague Castle is placed.
Trdelník’s emergence in the last ten years or so has correlated directly to the numbers of visitors walking along this path.
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International tourism only really began in Prague in 1989, with the fall of Communism across the Soviet Union. This began a period of dramatic national remaking, and the Czechs separated from Slovakia (to which they had been joined since 1918) not long after, establishing their own independent nation of the Czech Republic in 1993.
The Czech Republic’s entry into the EU in 2004 was a further spur to tourism, a political change that also did much to shift popular perceptions of Prague from somewhere in the East to a city right in the middle of Europe.
Now, the numbers are dizzying: In 2019, a total of 22 million tourists (both domestic and foreign), visited a city home to 1.3 million inhabitants. The coronavirus pandemic has inevitably put a pause on travel, but it is expected that travelers will be quick to return once restrictions are lifted.
Tourists shape a city by setting out certain demands. The most consistent expectation of visitors, wherever they turn up, is for the past, and—ideally—one that is continuous. This is unsurprising. When making sense of somewhere, or yourself, it is natural to look for what is invariable. This is a need that the infant nation of the Czech Republic, just rebranded as Czechia, must somehow meet. In the search for authenticity, what could be more satisfying than food? It ties generations to endless cycles of shopping, cooking, eating, cleaning and excreting—all processes deeply touched by politics and ideology, and therefore, seems to offer up an easily consumable piece of history.
But the history of Czech food is complex, because Czechia’s national history is knotty. Located at the center of Europe, the site of kingdoms, empires and quickly abandoned nation states, Czechia’s food could be described as a patchwork of cuisines. To take one example, tartar sauce, the epitome of the 1800s French love affair with Russia’s Far East, is served not alongside delicate fish, but in a puddle next to Eidam cheese deep fried in a crisp breaded shell— if it is a patchwork, it is a haphazardly made quilt, squares not quite sewn along the seam.
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In part, trdelník is a product of this same bricolage. In the 19th century, it was eaten in Slovakia, in the 20th century in Moravia, Bohemia’s neighboring kingdom, and half of present-day Czechia. In Slovakia, in 2004, the year it joined the EU, a civil association was founded to protect open-fire trdelník production.
A sudden push to protect a tradition betrays the fading of the practice from the day to day of national life. By stopping a custom from changing or fading, the act of preservation robs it of its essential aliveness – nothing lives unless it also dies.
Conservation politics aside, Slovakia’s efforts show that, despite Czech food’s many overlaps, trdelník is not Bohemian, as claimed.
It makes sense that trdelník’s sellers have manufactured an ancient history for it. Authenticity is often thought to reside in consistency, a linear tracing from one point to the other.
But, in the case of Czechia, perhaps it makes more sense to understand tradition not as a clearly identifiable object, but, rather, in an attitude of resilience, a refusal to compromise despite endless national change. You don’t need to reach back into the past to observe this invariable: It is a history that is there in the present, and which is always at work. In its rawest form, resilience is a quality that is often accompanied by, or, perhaps, requires, a capacity for resistance—and Czech food certainly resists easy translation to meet the tastes of others.
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Most Czech cuisine is very heavy even for the English palate. A table of friends visiting me in Prague all looked down at their large dinner plates with undisguised trepidation. While interest in Eastern European cooking has grown in recent decades, Czech food is yet to have its English-speaking culinary translator. There is no equivalent of what Darra Goldstein has done for Russia, Olia Hercules for Ukraine or Zuza Zak for Poland. Even the most determined translator would probably have a hard time. Although there is plenty of folklore surrounding food, kitchens and eating, Czech cookbook writers rarely attach stories to their dishes. Nor can poetry or romance be found in recipe instructions, which are delivered with brisk curtness (a communication style which, I can say with love, is very Czech).
The saccharine inoffensiveness of trdelník is, perhaps, an attempt to offer something translatable, something that fits into a globalized food culture, where the same ways of eating are expected everywhere you go. Take street food, for example, an industry-changing trend that has seen homogenous outdoor eateries popping up in all major cities.
There is no street food in Czech culture. Traditionally, you should really eat your lunch and dinner in a pub where an auto rally blares on a TV, a car crashing, flames erupting, just as the waiter unceremoniously plonks down your dish. The air should be steamy and yeast-scented from beer, each glass half full of foam, half amber liquid and—before the recent smoking ban—writhing with petrol-blue curls of cigarette smoke.
If you do have to eat on the go, you have limited options. A sausage accompanied by a slice of rye bread and a dollop of mustard; a frankfurter in a hollowed-out pillowy roll with a squirt of ketchup, or a schnitzel made at home and pulled out of someone’s handbag, wrapped in kitchen towel turned translucent from grease. Should you have a little more time to waste, perhaps could choose an open-top sandwich that you eat standing up in a café where no chairs are provided.
These examples show that Czech eating determinedly follows its own practice, and, until trdelník, few concessions had been made to adapt to new and uniform expectations of eating. I love the uncompromising heft of Czech food. Take the national dish, svíčková. Slow-cooked beef is served with sticky orange sauce made of sweet root vegetables (carrot, parsnip, celeriac) and double cream. It is garnished with a slice of lemon, its face topped with a spoon of redcurrant jam and, on top of the jam, a squat, crouching curl of squirty cream.
When I show someone around Prague, I feel an intense sense of affirmation when my visitor doesn’t shrink back from the plate but picks up their fork and makes their way through thick soups, plates of organs and heavy slices of bread dumplings. I am hurt when they only pretend to like it. This secret assessment model of mine has proved a strikingly reliable guide to the quality of my relationships, separating the friends and boyfriends from those I feel truly love, know and understand me, from the ones who do not, will not. I associate visiting my family there with being full, slightly sick, heavy and slothful. I enjoy seeing how my body changes to reflect where I am; that I acquire a thin film of grease, a shine to my skin.
Any visitor who attempts to lighten this heaviness is met with a hard-headed response. There is a sense that there are ways that things should be eaten. A nutrient-starved friend who tried to order spinach with his fried Eidam was met with incredulity. The server stepped back in horror and put one hand, in which she gripped her notepad, up towards his face in a stop sign: no, you don’t do that, no, that doesn’t go, no. He chose chips instead.
There is a whole tradition here in this stopping gesture, and it is one that relates very closely to history. This inflexibility about eating comes, no doubt, as an engrained response to constant external change. This creates a sense of, well, this is how we do things, despite what you want to do. It is an attitude which is always at its most strict and determined when it is applied to food, the most precious of all cultural artefacts. In its attempt to present a linear history of Czechia, trdelník doesn’t fit into this pattern. It is the resistance to compromise that is Czechia’s most authentic food tradition, although it may not taste very sweet.
