Near the end of the 1200s, in a monastery in southern Germany, a monk opened a wooden chest and pulled out a flat brown cake he had baked roughly six months earlier.
It had never been refrigerated or sealed. It had sat in an unheated stone room through the back half of a medieval year. And it was still good. Still soft enough to eat. Still safe.
That cake was Lebkuchen, and the medieval world baked it by the thousands as insurance against the months when nothing else would keep.
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