Lebkuchen

During my First Baking Job in the 1970's, we made traditional German Lebkuchen (“life cakes”) at Christmas. All the bakery breads were worked up on the top of an old wooden pétrin—a sturdy affair on wheels, with a heavy wooden lid that one could slide off. Beneath the lid was a trough, where now-anonymous bakers had formerly mixed their doughs by hand, before the advent of mechanical mixers. Sometime in September, we mixed together good honey and white rye flour and left it in