Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 June 1895 — Bologna by the Mile. [ARTICLE]

Bologna by the Mile.

The revival of trade after the long stagnation which followed in the wake of the Crusades was responsible for many fantastic procession freaks in the larger towns of western Europe. For an instance, we are told that in the Councilor’s processions, which took place at Nuremberg in 1487, the bakers of the town exhibited a loaf of bread weighing 1,14 l pounds, and that in the same procession a cheesemaker exhibited a star-shaped cheese which put three horses on their metal to pull it through the streets mounted on a goodly dray. The old account further says that this bread and cheese, which was distributed free of charge among the merrymakers, “was dinner sufficient for upward of 3,000 persons.” In the New Year's procession of Konigsberg in 1558 a bologna sausage exhibited by the “butchermen” was G 22 feot in length and was carried on the shoulders of sixty-seven men and boys. The one exhibited in the same city in the year 1583 was over 1,600 feet in length and weighed 431 pounds. But the giant of all sausages, and perhaps the largest thing of the kind ever made, was exhibited by the Konigsberg butchers on New Year’s day in 1601, when they paraded the streets with a bologna 3,750 feet in length and weighing nearly 2,000 pounds. It was carried on the shoulders of 187 men, the first and last in the column each having it wound around their necks.