Under the sign of the pretzel

There are not many cities in Ukraine that can boast of confectionery cafes. Lviv is one of them. Arrogant as it may sound, I still say that for this a city must possess a special, centuries-old attitude and a special aura that can only be achieved through the interaction of cultures, which the city residents know how to cherish and carry proudly as their spiritual heritage. Only then does satisfaction bring finesse, rather than quantity.

PLEASURE HORMONES

About a hundred and fifty years ago, in 1841, a writer named I. G. Kohl wrote a book about his travels in Eastern Europe, in which he exclaimed over the endless number of cafes and confectioneries in the city, claiming that Lviv had better and more elegant cafes than his native Dresden or other same-sized cities.

This is probably the reason why entire treatises and historical studies have been written about Lviv’s cafes. The Lviv-based historian Franciszek Jaworski, a great connoisseur of the city, devoted the first chapter of his 1910 book Old and Yesterday’s Lviv to the cafes of Lviv because they played an important role in the lives of burghers.

Trying to characterize this phenomenon with an aphorism, Jaworski writes: “I think the catchiest phrase is the one that Mr. Fritz, ‘the old Fritz,’ a well-known frequenter of the Viennese Cafe Museum, said about 20 years ago. ‘A cafe is an appointment that we do not fix beforehand but actually keep’ or ‘A rendezvous not only with others but also with yourself, perhaps the only opportunity ‘to come to your senses’.”

This is especially true of confectionery cafes, for if you taste something sweet, delicious, and nice-looking, all the barriers that customarily crop up between you and other people are dismantled, and your face assumes a natural and unrestrained expression. You begin to smile involuntarily, i.e., enjoy life. The sweets inebriate you better than any wine or, to use modern parlance, it produces pleasure hormones.

YURASHKY MADE OF GINGER, VANILLA, AND ORANGE

Lviv’s first confectionery cafe was opened in 1803 by the Swiss confectioner Dominique Andreolli at 29 Marketplace Square. The cafe quickly became so popular that the road from this building to Theater Street was dubbed Andreolli Passage. The business was in operation until the late 1880s, and no other confectionery cafe could boast of such a long lifetime: the owners changed, but it continued to entertain its regular and occasional patrons, treating them to new pastries every year.

The writer Jan Parandowski, reminiscing about his Lviv childhood, writes: “A country of wonders began from Karol Ludowik Street. Large confectionery cafes would turn their windows into enchanted woods, magical castles, and bewitched caves. Chocolate trees would give birth to sugar fruits, glittering gold fish swam in aquariums that shone like rainbow-colored liqueur, and a ginger-toothed dragon stuck its red maw out of a grotto of stalactites. Meanwhile, St. Nicholas would walk up a steep mountainous path or down the Milky Way, or peek into a small house, where he could see a sleeping child through the window.”

Another Polish writer, Stanislaw Lem of Wysoki zamek fame, left Lviv in 1947, never to return. He even refused to attend the launch of one of his books on the grounds that he did not want to stir up memories of his childhood. He used to frequent confectionery cafes as a true gourmet at first with his father, and then with his friends or on his own. He knew where to find the best halvah, where to taste a luscious honey pastry, which confectionary sold freshly-baked buns, and what to offer his friends. In his School No. 8 there still is a gymnasium with stall bars where he would stand alone during a social, while others were dancing. Chubby and not very adroit, he was a poor dancer but he knew all about sweets.

For centuries on end, the first thing a true Lviv burgher would do in the morning was have a cup of coffee and a kaizerka bun, but if a person was too lazy to make coffee (by no means a rare case), he would go to Zakopane or to Matei Kostecki’s place, where the cream of society gathered. But Kostecki “could not rival the very popular confectionery cafe of Mr. Rotlaender on Karol Ludowik St., which ‘frazzled his nerves’ for four decades.”

Here is what Yurko Vynnychuk, a contemporary cafe buff, writes. “Both establishments attracted the Lviv elite: artists, journalists, and men of letters. It is here that reporters would fish out the latest material for the extremely popular local gossip column. It is here that the brilliant satirist Jan Lam would sit over a glass of cognac.”

For decades Rotlaender’s confectionery cafe was the favorite haunt for Lviv’s well-to-do. All the city’s distinguished guests would make a point of visiting the cafe at least to satisfy their curiosity, because pastries here were even tastier than in Warsaw.

“Rotlaender is said to have been the last romantic among confectioners. Although of Swiss origin, he spoke fluent Polish and was a true patriot: he funded and took part in the 1831 uprising, he gave money for Smolka to build Lublin Union Hill, the hill at the top of Vysokyi Zamok from which we all love to feast our eyes on Lviv.”

Actually, the city’s first confectionery cafes were opened by the Germans, but Lviv had such a rich culinary history that it would be a crime no to mention this. In the Middle Ages bakers pampered Lviv burghers with delicious cookies. In 1425 bakers were high on the list of dozens of trade guilds. Like other guilds, they maintained a defense tower, had their own emblem (a pretzel), and their own trade holiday — the feast of St. Anthony, the patron saint of bakers. Rigid guild rules regulated the range, number, and prices of products. The official limited number of guild masters led to the emergence of so-called partachi (non-guild bakers), who were authorized to bake only confectionery items, i.e., buns and honey-breads. If a partach broke this rule, he had to pay a fine, and the confiscated products were sent to a hospital for the poor.

At the time the apothecaries’ guild manufactured and sold sweets. Besides elixirs, tinctures, medicinal roots, and pills, they also sold oriental spices, marzipan, jam, citrus fruit, and gingerbread.

From the 17th century on, the square next to Lviv’s St. George Cathedral hosted traditional fairs in January, April, and October. The first documented fair dates to 1679.

An indispensable attribute of St. George fairs were yurashky, extremely popular honey-breads mentioned by all researchers of Lviv’s history. There was a large assortment, at least for those times: at the turn of the 19th century vanilla, coffee, orange, and ginger yurashky were baked. The St. George fair of 1841 displayed fancy gingerbread in the shape of hussars, swaddled babies, little baskets, and hearts.

THE DIFFICULTIES OF ACQUIRING RECIPES

It is clear why confectionery cafes occupy the leading place in the hierarchy of restaurants, for true cuisine is an art that requires not only manual dexterity and the right recipe but also talent, which like any other, rests on a miracle and is bestowed only on the initiated.

You can imagine how much food the owners of Lviv’s Confectionery Cafe spoiled, how hard they worked, and how many tears they shed before they could offer their customers the right kind of strudel. Ms. Genia (Yevhenia Klos), who gave them the recipe, first made sure that the cafe owners were competent and would not wreck the recipe. When an elderly Lviv lady taught me how to bake cheesecake, she admitted, “People will, of course, give you the recipe, but if they have any pride, they won’t tell you a certain tiny detail, and you’ll keep wondering why things didn’t go the way they should have. And once you have collected a pile of recipes and spoiled dozens of kilos of flour and cheese, you will understand who didn’t tell you what.”

There you are. Just imagine how complicated it was to make sure that at least 25 small pastries were available at your confectionery. Lviv residents remember that this was a customary thing to do under the Austrians and Poles, and sometimes some students would argue over who could eat more pastries. Once, two students held a competition at Julian Werbycki’s confectionery cafe situated at 5 Akademichna Street in 1888-1906: each of them first ate 25 identical pastries and then 25 different ones. The pastries were so perfect (like the young men’ stomachs, perhaps) that the exploit did no harm to their health. Mr. Werbycki proudly recounted this story for years.

Today, in the confectionery cafe at 3 Staroyevreyska Street, you can savor nearly 40 varieties of pastry. When people come here the first time, they feel an embarrassment of riches. Only regular customers know what they want today and what they will enjoy tomorrow.

You will agree that, given such a glorious history of confectionery cafes, it is not easy to dare establish one of your own today, or, to be more exact, six years ago, after a long and shameful period of “culinary stagnation,” during which there were no confectionery cafes as such in Lviv for almost 50 years. Only at the Intourist Hotel could you taste gingerbread. All the rest, by all accounts, was beyond criticism, and it would be simply ludicrous to compare this to what the Confectionery Cafe offers today.

There are at least five similar establishments in Lviv now, but the business founded by two ex- engineers is really up to the mark. When Liubov Fedorenko and Svitlana Roma decided to open their confectionery business, they had to prepare for this “red-letter date” for two and a half years. They first bought a ground-floor apartment and then gradually renovated and decorated the premises, at the same time collecting recipes for pastries and poppy-seed and honey-breads. Fortunately, both women’s families are of old Lviv stock, and they had heard from their grandparents what a confectionery cafe is all about. They also traveled abroad to do research in archives and leaf through old magazines.

On their very first day at work they decided that a confectionery cafe is not simply about sweets, it also implies a certain level of communication. You should not talk too loudly; it is out of the question to use foul language, guests should behave properly, and the topics being discussed should be dignified. Interestingly, politics is also discussed here, but not as avidly as in other cafes. Patrons gossip to their hearts’ content, although they usually talk about pleasant things, as the cafe’s atmosphere requires.

APPLES “IN DRESSING GOWNS” FOR CONNOISSEURS

“People often bring their children here to relax and influence their tastes. Young lovers constantly drop in because small tables provide a kind of privacy; old colleagues come in to discuss everything under the sun,” Roma says. “We do our best to make sure that customers derive joy, even light giddiness, from everything: well-served coffee or tea or any other delicious thing. By the way, no alcohol is sold here. In other words, a confectionery cafe is above all pleasure. Although pleasure is considered only a pale version of happiness, these two feelings are sometimes side by side. You can agree with Michel de Montaigne, ‘Real joy comes from doing something useful’.” We fully agree with this.

“People come here to breathe in the atmosphere of Old Lviv, for we have only antique furniture here. At first we used to bring pieces from home; then anonymous Lviv residents began to bring them. At times the furniture was in such a poor state of repair that it was difficult to believe that they might be converted into this,” says Liubov Fedorenko, inviting me to sit on a small, ideally upholstered couch that gleams with fresh varnish. “The pictures are also from the inter-war period. And, of course, here are collections of old boxes in which candy and biscuits used to be packed. Here are coffee and sugar jars. This is a real object of art, isn’t it?”

“Did you really become popular overnight? Didn’t you have time to get into the swing of things?”

“No! The secret was that people saw this place the very first day and told their friends that everything that we have is genuine. The quality of natural foods coupled with the soul of confectioners produced such a wonderful result that we were appreciated immediately. Last year’s ‘Halychyna Knight’ festival named us the best Lviv business.”

We are talking at one table, while at another one a middle-aged man is courting a gorgeous lady, “Please taste this strudel. Such things were made in the era of Emperor Franz Josef. Look at the apple ‘im Schlafrock,’ i.e., in a dressing gown. And what a poppy roll! People used to know how to do things!”

Thank God, there are still people who know how to do things. And their numbers are growing.