Before it became known as pumpernickel, this dark, coarse bread was known in Germany as crank broat, literally meaning sick bread, a name suggesting it was once fed to the infirm. In the mid seventeenth century, the bread lost this name and came to be known as pumpernickel, a word that has long been a source of etymological consternation. According to one theory, the name arose when Napoleon, rejecting a poor peasant’s offer of bread, said, “C’est du pain pour Nicole,” French for “That’s bread for Nicole” (Nicole being Napoleon’s horse). The poor peasant, never having studied at the Sorbonne, assumed that pain pour Nicole—which he mistakenly remembered as pumpernickel—was a fancy name for the bread, and soon the word spread across Europe, even to countries the peasant had never heard of. The trouble with this explanation is that pumpernickel had been used in Germany as a synonym for fool for about a hundred years before Napoleon was born. A more likely derivation of pumpernickel is that it originally meant devil’s fart: the word pumpern had developed earlier in German as an imitation of the sound heralding that odoriferous, gastrointestinal phenomenon (just as, in English, burp arose as an imitation of another noisy eructation); the word nickel, on the other hand, had long been a German word for demon (just as, in English, we sometimes refer to Satan as Old Nick). A German fool would therefore be called a pumpernickel (or devil’s fart), just as an English fool might be called a horse’s ass. The word was then transferred to one of the “dullest” sorts of German bread, the pumpernickel, after which, in the mid eighteenth century, it was adopted by English.
A grainy and rough-textured bread, usually dark-brown or black in color, prepared from unrefined rye flour, and characterized by a robust, pleasant, and faintly acidic flavor. This bread has its roots in Westphalia, Germany, but has gained popularity in the United States. It is also commonly known as Schwarzbrot or black bread.