A winter treat, particularly popular during the Christmas season and to about mid-April in Zurich where they are favorites during Sechseläuten festivities, Tirggel have been around since the 15th century at least. They are primarily produced by two large bakeries that supply big distributors and local bakery shops. The Migros supermarket chain produces its own Tirggel.
The cookies have a special relation to the annual Sechseläuten event in Zurich City, when members of the old Guilds (now basically posh men’s clubs) parade in costume, many on horseback, and winter is symbolically bidden farewell to by the burning of the Böögg, a huge snowman made of combustible materials and set up on a pyre on the square fronting the Opera House. The bogeyman is packed with explosives that detonate when he is engulfed by the flames. The Zurich Guilds traditionally used Tirggel for what amounts to a form of promotion, and still do at Sechseläuten, so the cookies have strong Guild antecedents and associations.
Honey Is The Dominant Taste In Tirggel
The basic Tirggel recipe consists of honey, sugar, flour, rose water and spices. Because the latter particularly were expensive historically, the cookies, which are also called Züri Tirggel or Dirgelly, were a luxury item. Families used to have them made with their crests emblazoned on them, and, beside the Guilds, the government also used them to display crests or other motifs. Essentially, they were a form of communication, of image making, of passing promotional and other messages.
In everyday life, the cookies could be supports for biblical and other scenes, holiday motifs, and even declarations of love. Only city bakers were allowed to produce Tirggel until 1840, when the possibility opened to bakers canton-wide and thus to a wider public. This unleashed a rush of competitive creativity, as producers sought new subjects and found them in landmark buildings, new-fangled means of transportation like the first steamer on the Lake of Zurich, and so on, in what amounted to producing postcards or greeting cards in baked form.
More About Tirggel
Tirggel history is sketched out on the Culinary Heritage of Switzerland website, and the cookies themselves (and/or the highly attractive wooden molds used to create their relief motifs) are the subject of at least eight books – however, like the links with this article, none of the material is in English.
Visitors to the Swiss National Museum, located in Zurich, can view some molds used in the past, and web travelers can check out the firm of Suter, a semi-industrial bakery on Tirggel Way, in Schönenberg (ZH), which supplies some of the country's largest distributors. The Suter site features photographs of the cookie-making process and a range of different Tirggel products.
Interestingly, if offers a corporate service that is an exact match for one of the major ways Tirggel were originally used: promotion and public relations. Companies can order Tirggel adorned with their logos. Suter also offers ‘’year round Tirggel’’ some shaped like hearts, others with motifs like clowns, signs of the zodiac and other themes. Suter produces ready-made decorative Tirggel for Christmas trees, but many Zurchers just buy a pack of cookies in the supermarket, bore a small hole in each one (if there isn't one already - as the illustration shows, some come with the small hole already in), and insert pretty ribbon before tying them on the Christmas tree. The thin, hard cookies are certainly keepers – many families use the same decorations for decades and they show no signs of disintegration.
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