The recipe enclosed is one of the best recipes of my grandma, which she usually bakes for Christmas. It was passed onto her by her mother, the original recipe being written down before 1950. In this repository, there are two versions enclosed:

1. the original Czech text, as I wrote it down when I came to visit and bake it with her in the year 2019 (with added formatting and typos corrected) - in this archive in the file called hamburg_slices_recipe_czech.md
2. an English translation made specifically in the hope that people will be able to read it 1000 years later - in this archive in the file called hamburg_slices_recipe_english.md

The rest of this README.md file contains some background about where this recipe is from, some definitions and a list of descriptions of concepts that I think might be necessary to understand this recipe in the distant future.

Why it is called Hamburg slices, after the city of Hamburg in Germany, I do not know.

The finished slices should look something like this:

They are delicious

My grandma, who lives in a small town in the south-east region of the Czech Republic, a country which itself lies in the centre of a continent called Europe, is a well renowned cook. She has never made cooking her work (that she would do for a living), but her skills of how to prepare food set her apart from most people that I know.

During Christmas, a Christian celebration at the end of the year, at the end of December, mid winter in the Czech Republic, she would bake various kinds of small sweets, we could say various kinds of "traditional biscuits". This is common for the people in my country to do.

In the year 2019, I decided that I'm going to record (write down and photograph) all the recipes that she makes, so that generations to come can keep enjoying them. The one described here is my favourite, and it just so felt right that this one should be archived in Svalbard, with the hopes that some very distant generation will be able to recreate it.

There are a few words and things in the recipe that are key to understanding how to make it, for which I include copied articles from Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a book written by many people all across the world. It is written (and usually read) using computers and phones. The following articles are included in the supporting_articles folder in this repository:

The files included in this recipe are all formatted as markdown, a type of text file same as this one. The encoding is Unicode UTF-8. If you are reading this very text, then you already know how to decode them. There are also some images. They are included as jpg, a lossy compression format which allows to save space. To display these, software from this very archive can be used. There are many - you should search for jpg decoder or jpeg decoder in this very archive.

While my grandfather was never a great cook, he used to work as an excellent machinist, designing and fabricating various parts of machines. That was back in the time when design used to be done by drawing with a pencil on paper and then moving the various metal or plastic milling machines, e.g. the lave, by hand. No computer aided design, no programming a CNC machine. A good eye, some handy maths and a great deal of talent and imagination were needed.

Apart from being a brilliant machinist, he used to play (and win!) card games at competitions. One game that he sometimes plays with me sticks out in my mind the most. The rules of this one are written down in the file card_game.md.