A Christmas Bread, Butter, and the Reformation

A question arose:  Why do you have to pull the dough around to give it that crescent shape?  So I did some internet research.  My favorite answer:  To give the bread the shape of a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes.  A probably more accurate answer:  Since stollen originated in medieval Saxony and the word “stollen” means “mine shaft,” the curve evokes the winding silver, tin, and copper mines that Saxony was known for.  Luther’s father, you might remember, had been a miner.

Interesting, but there was more to the history of stollen.  According to its Wikipedia entry, stollen first made its appearance at Christmas at the Saxon royal court in 1427.  But it wasn’t very good.  It was tasteless and hard.  This is because it had to be made with oil.  Normally, it would have been made with butter, which was more plentiful and less expensive than oil, besides tasting a whole lot better. But Advent was a season of fasting, like Lent, and the church banned the use of butter so as to mortify Christians’ flesh.

So the Prince-Elector of Saxony wrote to the pope asking for a dispensation to allow his people to make their stollen with butter.  The pope refused the request.  After that, every time a new pope was installed, whoever was Prince-Elector would ask him for permission to use butter.  They went through five popes, getting turned down every time.

Finally, in 1490, Pope Innocent VIII replied to the request with the so-called “Butter-Letter.”  He granted the dispensation, sort of.  The Prince-Elector and his household could have stollen with butter.  Other Saxons could also use butter, but only if they paid the church one-twentieth of a gulden, the gold coin that was the main unit of currency.  (Smaller-value coins were made of silver or copper, but their value was calculated in terms of gulden.)

With the Reformation, though, all Saxons, now liberated from their bondage to the pope, could freely make their stollen with butter!

Trivial?  I think not.  The Reformation was largely a debate among theologians, clergy, and universities.  I would argue that issues such as the pope’s authority over whether or not you could butter your bread resonated with the “common people” and contributed to their support of the Reformation.  The stollen rule was doubtless only one of many similar papal impositions on the lives of ordinary people.

Besides, the pope’s ban on butter is illustrative of the larger offenses of the papacy that the Reformers did challenge:  The ludicrously trivial legalism.  The pope’s presumption in claiming authority over temporal matters.  The corruption of doling out dispensations for money (for butter, annulments, requirements for church office, indulgences).

In tracking down a reference for this post, I learned that Luther himself addressed the butter controversy!

In a Reformation Day post for Living Lutheran in 2019, The Reformation and Butter, Jim Mica cites a book on the history of butter (yes, there is such a thing), entitled Butter: A Rich History by the food historian Elaine Khosrova. It is pointed out that Northern Europeans depended on butter as a source of calories during the cold winter months.    Olive oil was abundant in the Mediterranean climes of Southern Europe, as in Rome, but not in the north.  Rome allowed the consumption of olive oil during the fast months, but not butter, since it fell under the prohibition of eating meat, poultry, and dairy products. Not only was baking with butter  prohibited but so was buttering bread! “Khosrova writes that the faithful fasted on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, before certain feast days, during part of Advent and each day in Lent. This amounted to nearly half the year.”

“However, there was a way around this prohibition: by reciting special prayers and making monetary contributions to the church, people could make up for the “sin” of eating butter during fasting times,” says Mica. “This worked in much the same way as the indulgences Luther had vehemently opposed.”

So Luther takes up the topic in his treatise To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520).  He lumps it together with other examples of Rome’s avarice and extortion–“what they have stolen in all lands and still steal and extort, by means of indulgences, bulls, letters of confession, ‘butter-letters’ and other confessionalia”–and later addresses it directly:

Fasts must be made optional, and every kind of food made free, as is commanded in the Gospels (Matt. 15.2). For whilst at Rome they laugh at fasts, they let us abroad consume oil which they would not think fit for greasing their boots, and then sell us the liberty of eating butter and other things, whereas the Apostle says that the Gospel has given us freedom in all such matters (1 Cor. 10.25, seq.). But they have caught us in their canon law and have robbed us of this right, so that we have to buy it back from them; they have so terrified the consciences of the people that one cannot preach this liberty without rousing the anger of the people, who think the eating of butter to be a worse sin than lying, swearing, and unchastity.

So the next time you bake with butter or put butter on your bread, say a prayer of thanksgiving for the freedom you have in the Gospel!

Photo:  Stollen with Candied Fruits By Whitney – originally posted to Flickr as Stollen, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10214494