Halve Hahn

Cologne

Illustration

Time: 5 minutes

Researched: Researched from 1 source in the brief

The Brauhaus snack, named by a joke whose oldest telling is a 1913 reader's letter. The roll is a Röggelchen, Cologne's rye roll, and the cheese is Dutch by custom, which is the river's trade on a plate. The quantities are by the roll and not by weight, and that is how it is ordered.

by Cologne

Himmel un Äd, heaven and earth, is apples from the sky and potatoes from the ground, with fried blood sausage, which in Cologne's dialect is Flönz and is tied to the city's slaughter trade. The potato reached the Rhineland in the eighteenth century at the earliest, so the dish cannot be older than that, and no source dates it. Halve Hahn, the half chicken, is a half rye roll with butter, a thick slice of medium aged Gouda, gherkin and mustard. The oldest source for the name is a reader's letter in the Kölner Tageblatt of 13 July 1913, in which a 72 year old Wilhelm Vierkötter says that at his birthday on 18 April 1877, in Wilhelm Lölgen's inn at Hohe Pforte 8, he ordered fourteen "half chickens" and had fourteen cheese rolls served; a rival story has a guest who wanted only half a roll, and a third derives the name from poor people's hand cheese. The letter is the oldest written source and it is a man telling his own story 36 years on. The Gouda is Dutch, which is the Rhine's trade with the Low Countries, EU-22, sitting on a Cologne plate.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Makes one. Five minutes.

Ingredients

The tradition's method, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them.

1 half Röggelchen, the Cologne rye roll
as needed butter
1 to 2 thick slices of medium aged Gouda
to serve sour gherkin
to serve mustard, medium hot
for garnish onion rings, if wanted
a pinch sweet paprika, if wanted

Method

Split the half Röggelchen and butter it.
Lay on the Gouda, a thick slice or two.
Serve it with the gherkin and the mustard beside, and the onion rings and a shake of paprika if the house does that.

What a modern chef changes

Left alone

Rung 2

Method

There is no elevation of a cheese roll that improves it; the only question is the cheese. A Gouda aged twelve months has the crystals and the bite the roll is built for, and a young one has neither.
A rye roll with a real crust, from a baker and not a bag, is the second half of the dish.

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