Weggla /veg – lʌ/
Hochdeutsch: Brötchen
English: Bread Roll/Bun
Last week was International Bread Day and tomorrow is German Sandwich Day (Tag des Deutschen Butterbrotes) so let’s talk about…
Bread Rolls, or as North Americans call them – Buns.
Germany, being what it is, even has a national bread day. And why not? After all, bread is one of our most common foods, rooted in many cultures and believed to be the first food baked by humans back when we had just stopped hitting each other over the head with the bones from our lunch and learned how to farm the soil.
But, of course, Germans never agree. Certainly not about how to bake bread, what it should contain, what it should look like, and so forth. (Though they do all agree that baguettes are not real bread because they are way too long and soft.) And so it came to be that what English speaking denizens typically know as a bun or a bread roll is known in Nuremberg and the surrounding area as a Weggla.
Now, there is no one Weggla. They can contain, or have all sorts of things on top of them, like peanuts, pumpkin seeds, sesame and poppy seeds, and probably – in the olden days – rat droppings. (Though the latter is quite out of fashion nowadays.) Sadly, the word’s origins are lost to time itself, but some other words for the everyday bun have survived the aeons, like Semmel and Brödla. At least, the German word Brötchen, is easy to explain: it is simply a small bread, thus the addition of the diminutive -chen.
If you’re in Nuremberg and happen to see a little shop or stall that sells grilled sausages, you should definitely try the good ol’ Dra im Weggla, which are three small Nuremberg sausages in a bun. Do not, for everything that is holy, put ketchup on it; when it comes to sausages, Franconians only use Senf (mustard), and rightly so.
!! © Alice Lucas
