Page:Czecho-Slovak Student Life, Volume 18.djvu/496

favor here, bibulous Americans of pre-Prohibition days did know what Kümmel was.

Buchta is a kind of coffee-cake, and a few American women have learned the word from their Bohemian neighbors, but it has not obtained much currency, probably because there is little difference between Bohemian and other coffee-cakes. In connection with buchta, I recall an amusing episode. A traveling salesman, stopping at a small hotel managed by a Bohemian woman, expressed a desire to have some sweetbreads for breakfast. “Sure,” said the landlady; and, next morning, she proudly served the astonished commercial gentleman an elaborate buchta. He had no complaint to make after eating the “sweet bread,” and I am sure that one man, at least, never forgot the meaning of the word buchta.

Descending from the kitchen to the cellar, a Bohemian word of more interest to the men folks may claim our attention for a moment. It has, for some time now, been verboten, and has doubtless been forgotten by Americans who used to know it. This is pivo, the Czech word for beer. No American in a Bohemian settlement, prior to the Eighteenth Amendment and the advent of Volsteadian ethics, could long have remained ignorant of the word, and certainly not of the thing it signifies. At the time that a large portion of our male population was filling out questionnaires with the pleasant prospect of being transported somewhere to help wreck the Kaiser, a young lawyer who was assisting me in unwinding the necessary red tape noticed that I had mentioned Bohemian as one of the languages I knew. He immediately addressed me in very good Czech, for a native American, and said that he had spent several years among the Bohemians of Wisconsin and Minnesota. During the course of the conversation he revealed that the first Bohemian word he learned was pivo. Pilsener, a type of beer, and Budweiser, are also among the memories of departed days. The words are German, but Bohemia is the country that started making both of them famous. Plzeň (Ger., Pilsen) and Budějovice (Budweis) are Bohemian cities of no small importance, apart from their character as meccas for the thirsty. Closely associated with them is the town of Žatec, the center of the Bohemian hop industry. The German name of this place, Saatz, used to appear as an adjective on the labels of some American brewers, who advertised their product as being made of “the finest Saatzer hops,” (or such, not having one of the labels at hand to refer to, is my recollection of the legend.) The adjective has since passed into oblivion among Americans,