Landsgemeinde Chrempfli
A small white half-moon pastry filled with hazelnuts, whose top keeps the print of a wooden mould. Appenzell's bakers make it above all for the Landsgemeinde, at the end of April.
Each year, on April’s final Sunday, the citizens of Appenzell Innerrhoden gather on the square of their cantonal capital to vote. That day, the windows of the bakeries nearby fill with white half-moons.
Origin
The assembly is old: it has met in Appenzell since the 14th century. The pastry that bears its name may not have kept it company for so long. According to Culinary Heritage of Switzerland, its first written trace is a folklore survey from the 1930s, which mentions “Kloster-Chrempfli”: the Capuchin nuns of Appenzell and Jakobsbad baked them for sale, and the survey says not a word about the Landsgemeinde. The village bakeries are thought to have taken over from the convents in the second half of the 20th century. Either way, it seems always to have been a craftsman’s work, never a household recipe.
Making
First the eggs are whisked with the sugar, then flour, water and a raising agent go in: it is the dough of aniseed biscuits, but without aniseed, a flavour too strong for many customers. Rolled out to about 4.5 mm, it yields discs of some eleven centimetres, cut with a finely toothed edge. Each one is pressed by hand onto a carved wooden mould, filled with roasted ground hazelnuts, water, a little sugar, biscuit crumbs and lemon, then folded in two. The pastries spend the night in a warm, dry room: the sugar crystallises into a crust, so the pattern survives twenty minutes in the oven at 220 °C. Once the pastry is closed, only half of it remains in view.
At the table
It is eaten in the afternoon with coffee or tea, or as a dessert, and keeps for about a week. Until the early 1990s the Landsgemeinde was for men only, and many brought a box of chrempfli home to their wives and children. Together with Leckerli, flat gingerbreads without a filling, they make up the “Landsgmendchrom”, the sweets of assembly day.
Today
Demand has grown, visitors included, and the season with it: some bakeries sell them all year round, others from March to May. The days of the assembly remain the peak: a baker interviewed by Culinary Heritage of Switzerland then goes from 250 pieces a day to 500, even 700. The patterns vary from shop to shop; his include a pair of cherries, a pear, a fruit basket, a swan or a dove. Its cousins in central Switzerland, such as the Gubel-Krapfen of Menzingen, are round and sold in every season.
Sources: Culinary Heritage of Switzerland, entry “Landsgmendchrempfli”.