Notable Sandwiches #100: Kaisers Jagdproviant
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the series where I drag my long-suffering editor David Swanson through the bizarro, shifting sands of Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week—number 100!—is an Austrian finger food: the Kaisers Jagdproviant.
One hundred sandwiches!
They said I couldn’t make it! That it couldn’t be done! Many scoffed—You’ll never reach one hundred! You’ll give up after ten, they said, all those people I definitely haven’t made up for the purpose of a triumphal declarative column! Today, faithful readers, we prove our naysayers wrong! We have achieved sandwich ascendancy, gluttonous, glutinous glory! I would like to thank my parents, all of you readers, and my many haters for bringing us to this triumphal moment.
…shame about the actual sandwich, though. The kaisers jagdproviant is one of those entries on the list that makes me close my eyes, sigh deeply, and wonder why I embarked on this journey in the first place. It doesn’t even sound good! I mean, it sounds fine. It’s yet another ham and cheese sandwich variant, with the addition of pickles, eggs, and, optionally, anchovy paste and mustard, served in a hollowed out loaf of French bread; by most accounts all those ingredients are chopped up and combined into an egg-salad-like filling. (Our intrepid fellow travelers at The Sandwich Tribunal blazed this trail before us). I mean, okay, I’d definitely eat it. But the most interesting thing about it is its six-syllable name, which—given that we’re discussing a finger food probably designed as a snack for hunting parties—may be more of a mouthful than the actual sandwich.
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I told David I planned to write some sort of impassioned defense of democracy, based on the notion that, in an autocracy, you are forced by propagandistic saturation to learn overmuch about the ruling figureheads. Why should we know the kaiser’s favorite hunting provisions (which is what “jagdproviant” roughly translates to)? Why must our faces be smashed into the proverbial finger sandwich of the cult of ruling personality? This kind of thing is—besides all the super blatant statements and attempted insurrections—why I know Trump is an autocrat: there is no reason I should know this man misses ‘80s style hairspray, has weird hangups about shower pressure and windmills, loves Diet Coke, has a gold toilet and managed to tank a casino, et cetera. I even know his preferred sandwich (a Big Mac)! The absolute saturation of this tyrannical schmuck is exhausting; so much of my brain is taken up by knowing facts about this hideous personage that could be taken up by nicer things, like cephalopods, or all the varietals of rosemary. It’s like knowing the toilet habits of the court of Louis XIV (they pooped behind curtains and pissed all over Versailles) or about Kaiser Wilhelm’s penchant for wearing a profusion of military decorations. The things you’re forced to know to understand your government tell you a lot about its nature.
That being said: my proposed impassioned defense of democracy as a form of government in which you don’t have to know your dear leader’s favorite sandwich is somewhat undermined by two things: it’s not entirely clear which kaiser inspired this sandwich (a quest for knowledge admittedly hampered by my inability to read German, though in fairness it doesn’t even have its own German-language Wikipedia article). Also, I can’t really take the Habsburgs seriously? I mean I know they ruled Austria and its environs for eight hundred years—Emperor Charles V ruled more of Europe than anyone between Charlemagne and Napoleon. I know they intermarried with every royal dynasty in Europe and led countless wars and oppressed many serfs. But they mostly just married other Habsburgs, and at this point, they’re mostly a punchline about inbreeding and unfortunate, slab-like jawlines.
In fairness to the jagdproviant, during said eight hundred years of rule and very serious relevance, the Habsburgs really, really loved hunting. It was kind of their thing. Also, their subjects hated it, because the right to hunt was generally restricted to the nobility, not to mention their enormous aristocratic hunting parties, had a tendency to trample the shit out of peasants’ crops. Just witness this impassioned guilt trip from a court priest in 1689:
“But from the hunting and chasing the fields are trampled and laid waste, such that the poor peasant finds on his land not corn to reap but nothing except misery.”
Not corn but misery! These are the fruits of empire!
In 1889, as the New York Times wrote, “Crown Prince Rudolph, heir to the throne of the Austro‐Hungarian Empire, was found shot to death in the hunting lodge at Mayerling, a small village southwest of Vienna. Beside him lay the naked body of the 17-year‐old Baroness Maria Vetsera.” It was a murder-suicide, the Habsburg heir apparent having used the cover of a hunting trip to end his life, and that of his mistress—and, in the process, plunge Europe into a crisis that would climax with the First World War. Another time a Habsburg prince with bad eyesight shot one of his hunting companions in the face by accident, presumably mistaking him for a fox on a horse or something. There’s also a sausage called kaisers jagdwurst (hunting sausage), which, according to one sausage company, is the perfect opportunity to “Snack on this coarsely ground sausage and enjoy the way the subtle hints of leek and mustard seeds open up as your teeth bite into the meat.” Perfect for winter soups!
The very name of Habsburg is, according to legend, derived from this dynastic obsession with the hunt. In 1073, the founder of the future House of Austria, a man whose actual name was actually Radbot, Count of Klettgau of the High Rhine in Swabia, purportedly saw his hunting hawk settle on a high and forbidding escarpment, and decided to build a castle there. In Old High German, “Hawk’s Castle” was “Habichtsburg,” shortened to Habsburg by his many and distinguished heirs.
O to be a hawk on an escarpment, freed from the wrist of Radbot. O, to feel the wind of Swabia in my feathers, to taste the flesh of prey in my red beak!
Instead I am a lowly scribe of sandwiches.
More recently, Arnold Schwarzennegger served these at his 2003 California gubernatorial inauguration, lest anyone confuse him for a man of little ambition.
And with that, I lay this small yet triumphant column to rest. Today, may you be like the hawk of Radbot: flying free, yet with great consequence, your every move like a knife gliding through the wind toward destiny.
Happy Habsburg Hundred, and happy hunting!
Love,
Talia
