Melantrichova: Prague Ham and the Trdelník Question

Why is it significant?

Squeeze up the narrow lane and follow your nose: on one side a giant ham turning slowly over glowing wood, on the other a coil of dough spinning on a metal spit, being rolled in sugar and nuts. Melantrichova is Prague's street-food runway, and two very different stories are cooking on it.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Squeeze up the narrow lane and follow your nose: on one side a giant ham turning slowly over glowing wood, on the other a coil of dough spinning on a metal spit, being rolled in sugar and nuts. Melantrichova is Prague's street-food runway, and two very different stories are cooking on it.

First, the name. Jiří Melantrich of Aventino was a sixteenth-century printer whose workshop produced some of the finest books in the Czech language, including a famous Czech Bible. So the lane is named after a man of letters... and now smells of bacon. He might forgive it.

The ham is the genuine article. Prague ham, Pražská šunka, is a pork leg cured in brine, gently smoked over beechwood and cooked on the bone. In the nineteenth century Prague butchers turned it into a famous speciality, exported across the Habsburg empire and beyond. At home, the classic way is thin slices with mustard, horseradish and fresh bread. One honest tip: the stands price it by weight, so ask how much you are getting before the knife comes down.

And now the trdelník, the cylinder of dough you see on every corner. Plenty of visitors are told it is an ancient Czech tradition. It is not. Spit cakes like it belong to the old kitchens of Hungary, Transylvania and Slovakia, and the town of Skalica in Slovakia even holds European protection for its own trdelník. In Prague it appeared in force only in the last couple of decades, mostly for tourists, and Czechs joke about it with a mixture of pride and embarrassment.

Does that mean you should not eat one? Of course not. Just know that you are tasting a very successful immigrant, not a grandmother's recipe. Now cut across Malé náměstí, the little square with the painted facade of an old ironmonger's shop, into Karlova, and turn left into Husova. There, a pub waits that is famous for not wanting you.