…then a steaming bowl of barley soup is the perfect thing to warm you up inside. Barley soup is one of our typical wintertime dishes. It is a hearty dish that warms you from the inside out. It’s filling and tastes simply delicious. And it’s easy to prepare. The soup has a long tradition in country kitchens, where primarily home-grown ingredients from the field and garden were used. Barley used to grow on every farmstead, and it was customary to preserve the meat of slaughtered pigs by means of pickling and smoking. Today, the spicy pickled pork can be obtained from butcher shops in the winter months.

The recipe

"They came from Vienna, and wanted to take my grandfather along with them back to Vienna so that he could show them how to make hard tack from our village bread," explains Maria Perkmann. Her grandfather was Peter Fulterer, a baker in Völs am Schlern / Fiè allo Sciliar and Purveyor to the Imperial Court of "Breatln“ (bread). And even if the Imperial certificate got lost at one time or another, Maria believes that the story shouldn't be forgotten. After all, it was no one less than Emperor Franz Joseph himself who had developed a taste for the "Schüttelbrot" ("schütteln" = "to shake") which her ancestors baked, and her grandfather had even sent his bread from Völs am Schlern via Venice to Egypt. Until 1912, the water needed to make this thin flat bread had to be fetched from the village well, and the work of a baker was arduous and difficult. Even in the year 2005, buns and loaves are still baked at night (and that's not likely to change anytime in the near future). Fulterer's famous "Schüttelbrot" is still as popular as it ever was, and it's still "shaken, not stirred...

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