The sausage that awakened a nation: the Carniolan sausage in the Slovenian national imagination, 1849–1918

ABSTRACT

The article is based on the argument that the Carniolan sausage (kranjska klobasa) played an important role in the formation and development of Slovenian national awareness in the period between the Spring of Nations and the end of World War I. The Carniolan sausage was an integral part of a unified field of exchanges which enabled the collective recognition of the members of the nation. The article then discusses its place in ‘banal nationalism’ – the daily nationalism that slips from our attention and daily reminds people of their nationality. As a banal national symbol, highlighting national differences and significance, the Carniolan sausage was a constant reminder of the nation. In the last part, the article analyses its role in ‘nationalism from below’, or everyday nationhood – the reproduction of nationhood by ordinary people in everyday life. The Carniolan sausage demonstrates that nationalism is not merely the result of a political programme or ideology, but primarily a network or collection of people, objects, practices, places, institutions, ideologies, technologies, ideas, symbols etc. which define the subjectivity of the people, and form their actions and imagination.

KEYWORDS:

• Nationalism
• ethnicity
• food
• Slovenian nation
• Austro(-Hungarian) Empire
• Carniolan sausage

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions. I would also like to acknowledge that the article was written in the framework of research core funding for ‘National and Cultural Identity of Slovenian Emigration in the Context of Migration Studies’ (P5-0070) and project ‘Made in YU: How Nonhumans Activated Yugoslavia’ (N5-0134), financially supported by the Slovenian Research Agency.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The importance of special food items to national identity is neither historically nor geographically limited. For example, Ben Rogers (2003), shows that it was in the 18th century, during the continual wars against France, that the English learned to contrast their supposedly hearty diet with the elaborate and ‘artificial’ cuisine of the French. By the mid-18th century the eating of beef in huge quantities became a kind of patriotic duty, an infallible sign of Englishness. Steve Penfold (2008) demonstrates how the donut was presented in the Canadian media as American food until the 1970s (they were actually even imported from the US). In the seventies, several restaurants began advertising donuts, primarily in order to attract American tourists, and by the eighties they had already become a powerful symbol of the Canadian way of life. Ben Orlove (1988) demonstrates the role of beef in the formation of Chilean identity at the begging of the 20^th century. Avvieli (2005) discusses the importance of rice production and consumption for Viennese identity from the late 18^th century.

2. The essence of the Carniolan sausage was not always easy to detect. The use of pork and its production within the Slovenian-speaking territory were usually the main and probably the only markers. However, since 2008, the Carniolan sausage has been a ‘traditional Slovenian product’, with a protected national geographical indication, published in the Specifications for Carniolan Sausage, which was approved by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Food in 2008, in which the ingredients (at least 75 to 80% pork, at most 20% bacon and 5% water, with salt, garlic, and black pepper; no other ingredients are permitted), production processes and quality control were precisely defined. In January 2015, it was entered in the register of protected geographical indications (PGIs, one of the three European Union schemes of geographical indications and traditional specialties), despite objections from Austria, Croatia and Germany (see Mlekuž 2020).

3. There are no studies that might confirm this hypothesis. It is a subjective assessment based on a survey of a large number of newspaper and magazine articles.

4. For example, national brands (DeSoucey 2010); national food discourse (Takdea 2008); national cookbooks (Appadurai 1988); special national meals (O’Connor 2013). However, as stressed by Ichijo and Roland Ranta (2016, 1), the relationship ‘between food and nationalism has not been systematically investigated in the study of nationalism despite the recent rise in interest in “everyday nationalism”.’

5. According to Rogers Brubaker (1996), ‘nation-building’ should be differentiated from the process of ‘nationalising’ a nation, which is a process of constructing a nation-state of and for a particular ethno-national group, which is presented as ‘natural’.

6. Politician, writer and physician Josip Vošnjak (1834–1911) recalls his childhood in Šoštanj: ‘In our house we usually spoke German, but we knew how to speak Slovene as well. But we didn’t feel German or Slovene, because nobody even talked about nationality until 1848ʹ (Cvirn 1994, 67–73).

7. Like newspapers, cookbooks were widely disseminated texts which cut across class boundaries and which have been a very important part of nation-building projects. Massimo Montanari (2004) shows how cookbooks united Italy by disseminating local and regional food practices and knowledge nationally. Apparadui (1988) gives examples of how Indian and colonial cookbooks linked the diversity of ethnic and regional cuisines to the nation. Similarly, Sarah Bak-Geller Corona (2019) demonstrates how the cookbooks in Mexico were the ‘founding documents of the modern nation’. No analysis of Slovenian cookbooks before World War I has been made yet (for a short and incomplete review of this period see Ilich (2004) and Tominc (2017, 81–84)). However, in the first original and the most popular Slovenian cookbook in the period in question, Slovenska kuharica ali navod okusno kuhati navadna in imenitna jedila [The Slovene Cookbook or Instructions to Cook Tasty Ordinary and Elaborate Dishes], written by Pleiweis (1868, followed by many updated editions and reprints), the Carniolan sausage is nowhere to be found among 932 ‘eminent and less eminent recipes’ (and 4 different types of meat sausages). Ironically, the oldest mention of the Carniolan sausage in a cookbook is in Katharina Prato’s (1896) German cookbook Süddeutsche Küche [Southern German Cuisine]. The Carniolan sausage (finally) found its place (among 17 different types of meat sausages) in the Slovenska kuharica [The Slovene Cookbook], written by Sister Felicita Kalinšek (1912), who thoroughly revised and altered Pleiweis’s book and who would through her cookbooks become a synonym for quality cooking, not to be missed as a wedding gift even well into the late 20^th century (Godina Golija 2005, 198).

8. In the second half of March 1848, Matija Majar Ziljski (1809–1892), the chaplain of Celovec (the Slovenian name for Klagenfurt, Austria), was the first to call on his Slovene countrymen to ‘stand among free nations as a free nation’, and demanded the introduction of the use of Slovene in schools and offices, and increased his demands a little over a month later. Independently of Majar, just a few days later, Slovene intellectuals and students living in Vienna pledged to defend Slovenian nationhood and linguistic equality, and strove for the unification of the Slovenian national territory into a single, Slovenian country. They established the Slovenija Association in Vienna on 20 April 1848 and codified their ideas in a programme (the establishing of the ‘Kingdom of Slovenia’, which would be a part of the Hapsburg but not the German Empire, with linguistic equality with the German language). Similar programmes were undertaken by Slovenian associations established in Graz (Austria) and in Ljubljana, and in Zedinjena Slovenije [United Slovenia], Majar drew the borders of the national territory (Vodopivec 2006, 53–54).

9. An unrealized political programme of the Slovene national movement, formulated during the Spring of Nations in 1848 (in Slovene Zedinjena Slovenija). The programme demanded the unification of all the Slovene-inhabited areas into one single kingdom under the rule of the Austrian Empire, equal rights for the Slovene language in public, and strongly opposed the planned integration of the Habsburg Monarchy with the German Confederation. The programme failed to meet its main objectives, but it remained the common political programme of all currents within the Slovene national movement until World War I. (Vodopivec 2006, 55–56).

10. At the beginning of the Slovenian national movement, numerous place-names were Slovenicized, but did not survive in their Slovenicized forms. Frankfurt was called Frankobrod in the article and by Slovenes, and München [Munich] was called Monakovo.

11. A more in-depth framing of this topic is provided by Löfgren (1989, 5–23).

12. For more on the construction of national identities in the food industry see Belasco and Scranton (2001); Ichijo and Ranta (2016).

13. Although comparisons of the symbolic power of things is a thankless and questionable task, in comparison with Teran wine and the aforementioned potica and other culinary items, the Carniolan sausage definitley had a more visible place in the formation of the Slovenian nationhood. For instance, entering individual words in the Digital Library of Slovenia (www.dlib.si, accessed 9 September 2020) brings noticeably different results: in the entire scanned materials in an unlimited time period, Carniolan sausage is mentioned 44,885 times, potica 29,723 times, and Teran 25,209 times. A detailed examination of individual texts, menus, etc. also indicates the central position of the Carniolan sausage. Among the numerous causes for the Carniolan sausage’s central place in the Slovenian culinary canon is the fact that Carniolan sausage is a meat dish made of pork, which has a special place in Christian (and Slovenian) culture. For more on the roles of various culinary and other items in the formation of Slovenian nationhood and the difficulties in making comparisons of them see Mlekuž (2015). For more on the role of the Carniolan sausage in the contemporary process of reconstructing the Slovenian nation see Mlekuž (2020).

14. The symbolic ambiguity of food in nationalist projects is well documented. For example, in France, couscous has the role of both a popular French ‘national dish’ and an exotic ‘foreign’ delicacy associated with North Africa (Poole 2014).

15. Billig’s idea of banal nationalism is not a bottom-up approach as the article may seem to suggest. A recent evaluation of Billig’s contribution to the study of nationalism is provided by Skey and Antonsich (2017), and Sophie Duchesne (2018).

16. As we can read in various sources (see for example Makarovič 1988/90), in the 19^th century, for the majority of the population, meat (i.e. the Carniolan sausage) was on the table only on holidays (if at all).

17. One of the powerful things about food history is the ways in which it can bring women back into debates about political discourse, via the kitchen. It seems that this article contains a missed opportunity, as it develops an argument about everyday nationalism through food without so much as alluding to the possibility of a gendered reading. However, the Carniolan sausage very seldom appears in the quite rare cookery columns in magazines or newspapers aimed at female readers. The reason is that Carniolan sausage was mainly served boiled, without requiring any special culinary skills or additional ingredients. Furthermore, making Carniolan sausages was and is mainly considered men’s work. So the newspaper articles and ads in which the Carniolan sausage appears are mainly aimed at a general audience – both male and female readers.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Slovenian Research Agency (Javna Agencija za Raziskovalno Dejavnost RS) under grants [P5-00706] and [N5-0134].

Notes on contributors

Jernej Mlekuž

Jernej Mlekuž is a research fellow at the Slovenian Migration Institute at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His research focus is on migration theory and methodology, cultural aspects of migration processes, popular culture, media, nationalism, food studies, material culture, epistemology, epiphenomena, water level and hydrometric measurements, and other. He is the author of Burek: The Culinary Metaphor (CEU Press, 2015, awarded by Gourmand International in the category Best Food Writing (2016), published also in Slovenian, Serbian and Albanian), co-editor of Going Places: Slovenian Women’s Stories on Migration (Akron Press, 2014) and Go girls! When Slovenian women left home (ZRC Publishing 2009) and the author, sole editor or co-editor of many books published in Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian. His latest book on Kranjska sausage and its role of the formation of Slovenian consciousness from the spring of nations onward (in Slovene, Beletrina, 2017) was awarded by Gourmand International as the best book in the category Culinary history (2018).