FOOD
Although the Germans as a nation are large eaters, they begin their
day with the usual light continental breakfast of coffee and rolls. In
households where economy is practised it is still customary to do
without butter, or at any rate to provide it only for the master of
the house and for visitors. In addition to rolls and butter, you may,
if you are a man or a guest, have two small boiled eggs; but eggs in a
German town are apt to remind you of the Viennese waiter who assured a
complaining customer that their eggs were all stamped with the day,
month, and year. Home-made plum jam made with very little sugar is
often eaten instead of butter by the women of the family; and the
servants, where white rolls are regarded as a luxury, have rye bread.
No one need pity them on this account, however, as German rye bread is
as good as bread can be. Ordinary London household bread is poor stuff
in comparison with it. The white rolls and butter are always excellent
too, and I would even say a good word for the coffee. To be sure, Mark
Twain makes fun of German coffee in the _Tramp Abroad_: says something
about one chicory berry being used to a barrel of water; but the
poorest German coffee is better than the tepid muddy mixture you get
at all English railway stations, and at most English hotels and
private houses. Milk is nearly always poor in Germany, but whipped
cream is often added to either coffee or chocolate.
The precision that is so striking in the arrangement of German rooms
is generally lacking altogether in the serving of meals. The family
does not assemble in the morning at a table laid as in England with
the same care for breakfast as it will be at night for dinner. It
dribbles in as it pleases, arrayed as it pleases, drinks a cup of
coffee, eats a roll and departs about its business. Formerly the women
of the family always spent the morning in a loose gown, and wore a cap
over their undressed hair. This fashion, Germans inform you, is
falling into desuetude; but it falls slowly. Take an elderly German
lady by surprise in the morning, and you will still find her in what
fashion journals call a _negligé_, and what plain folk call a wrapper.
When it is of shepherd's plaid or snuff-coloured wool it is not an
attractive garment, and it is always what the last generation but one,
with their blunt tongues, called "slummocking." Most German women are
busy in the house all the morning, and when they are not going to
market they like to get through their work in this form of dress and
make themselves trim for the day later. The advantage claimed for the
plan is one of economy. The tidy costume worn later in the day is
saved considerable wear and tear. The obvious disadvantage is the
encouragement it offers to the sloven. In England whatever you are by
nature you must in an ordinary household be down to breakfast at a
fixed hour, presentably dressed; at any rate, with your hair done for
the day, and, it is to be supposed, with your bath accomplished.
Directly you depart from this you open the door to anything in the
dressing-gown and slipper way, to lying abed like a sluggard, and to
a waste of your own and the servants' time that undermines the whole
welfare of a home. At least, this is how the question presents itself
to English eyes. Meanwhile the continent continues to drink its coffee
attired in dressing-gowns, and to survive quite comfortably. In every
trousseau you still see some of these confections, and on the stage
the young wife who has to cajole her husband in the coming scene
usually appears in a coquettish one. But then it will not be made of
shepherd's plaid or snuff-coloured wool.
The dinner hour varies so much in Germany that it is impossible to fix
an hour for it. In country places you will find everyone sitting down
at midday, in towns one o'clock is usual, in Hamburg five is the
popular hour, in Berlin you may be invited anywhen. But unless people
dine at twelve they have some kind of second breakfast, and this meal
may correspond with the French déjeûner, or it may be even more
informal than the morning coffee. It consists in many places of a roll
or slice of bread with or without a shaving of meat or sausage.
Servants have it, children take it to school, charitable institutions
supply the bread without the meat to their inmates. In South Germany
all the men and many women drink beer or wine with this light meal,
but in Prussia most people are content with a _belegtes Butterbrot_, a
roll cut in two, buttered, and spread with meat or sausage or smoked
fish. This carries people on till one or two o'clock, when the chief
meal of the day is served.
All over Germany dinner begins with soup, and in most parts the soup
is followed by the _Ochsenfleisch_ that made it. At least
_Ochsenfleisch_ should make it by rights.
"I know what this is," said an old German friend, prodding at a tough
slice from a dish we all found uneatable. "This is not _Ochsenfleisch_
at all. This is _cow_."
Good gravy or horseradish sauce is served with it, whether it is ox or
cow, and for a time you take a slice day after day without
complaining. It is the persistence of the thing that wears you out in
the end. You must be born to _Ochsenfleisch_ to eat it year in and
year out as if it was bread or potatoes. It does not appear as
regularly in North as in South Germany; and in Hamburg you may once in
a way have dinner without soup. People who know Germany find this
almost beyond belief, but Hamburg has many little ways of its own, and
is a city with a strong individual character. It is extremely proud of
its cooking and its food, and it has every right to be. I once
travelled with two Germans who in a heated way discussed the
comparative merits of various German cities. They could not agree, and
they could not let the matter drop. At last one man got the best of
it. "I tell you that Hamburg is the finest city in Germany," he said.
"In a Hamburg hotel I once ate the best steak I ever ate in my life."
The other man had nothing to say to that. Hamburg has a splendid fish
supply, and Holstein brings her quantities of fruit and of farm
produce. Your second breakfast there is like a French déjeûner, a meal
served and prepared according to your means, but a regular meal and
not a mere snack. You drink coffee after it, and so sustain life till
five o'clock, when you dine. Then you drink coffee again, and as your
dinner has probably been an uncommonly good one you only need a light
supper at nine o'clock, when a tray will arrive with little sandwiches
and slender bottles of beer. In North Germany, where wine is scarce
and dear, it is hardly ever seen in many households, so that a young
Englishman wanting to describe his German friends, divided them for
convenience into wine people and beer people. The wine people were
plutocrats, and had red or white Rhine wine every day for dinner. I
probably need not tell my well-informed country people that Germans
never speak of hock.
In households where the chief meal of the day is at one or two o'clock
there is afternoon tea or coffee. It used invariably to be coffee,
good hot coffee and fresh rusks and dainty little _Hörnchen_ and
_Radankuchen_, an excellent light cake baked in a twisty tin. German
cakes want a whole chapter to themselves to do them justice, and they
should have it if it were not for a dialogue that frequently takes
place in a family well known to me. The wife is of German origin, but
as she has an English husband and English servants she keeps house in
the English way. Therefore mutton cold or hashed is her frequent
portion.
"How I hate hashed mutton," she sometimes says.
"Why do you have it, then?" says the husband, who has a genius for
asking apparently innocent but really provoking questions.
"What else can I have?" says the wife.
"Eel in jelly," says the husband. He once tasted it in Berlin, and it
must have given him a mental shock; for whenever his wife approaches
him with a domestic difficulty, asks him, for instance, what he would
like for breakfast, he suggests this inaccessible and uninviting dish.
"There is never anything to eat in England except mutton and
apple-tart," says the wife. "Your plain cooks can't cook anything
else. They can't cook those really. Think of a German apple-tart--"
"Why should I? I don't want one."
"That's the hopeless part of it. You are all content with what Daudet
called your _abominable cuisine_. I thank him for the phrase. It is
descriptive."
"Oh, well," says the husband, "we're not a greedy nation."
So if this is the English point of view the less said about cakes the
better. And anyhow, it is in this country that afternoon tea is an
engaging meal. Berlin offers you tea nowadays, but it is never good,
and instead of freshly cut bread and butter they have horrid little
chokey biscuits flavoured with vanilla. Old-fashioned Germans used to
put a bit of vanilla in the tea-pot when they had guests they delighted
to honour, but they all know better than that nowadays. The milk is
often boiled milk, but even that scarcely explains why tea is so seldom
fit to drink in Germany. Supper is a light meal in most houses. The
English mutton bone is never seen, for when cold meat is eaten it is
cut in neat slices and put on a long narrow dish. But there is nearly
always something from the nearest _Delikatessen_ shop with it,--slices
of ham or tongue, or slices of one or two of the various sausages of
Germany: _Blutwurst_, _Mettwurst_, _Schinkenwurst_, _Leberwurst_, all
different and all good. When a hot dish is served it is usually a light
one, often an omelette or some other preparation of eggs; and in spring
eggs and bits of asparagus are a great deal cooked together in various
ways: not asparagus heads so often as short lengths of the stalk sold
separately in the market, and quite tender when cooked. There is nearly
always a salad with the cold meat or a dish of the salted cucumbers
that make such a good pickle. The big loaves of light brown rye bread
appear at this meal instead of the little white rolls eaten at
breakfast. Beer or wine is drunk, and very often of late years tea as
well. Sweets are not usually served at supper, unless guests are
present. They are eaten at the midday dinner, and each part of Germany
has its own favourite dishes.
Soups are nearly always good in Germany, and some of the best are not
known in England. The dried green corn so much used for soup in South
Germany can, however, be bought in London from the German provision
merchants, so at the end of this greedy chapter I will give a recipe
for making it. _Nudelsuppe_ of strong chicken stock and home-made
_Nudeln_ used to be what the Berliner called his roast goose--"_eine
jute Jabe Jottes_," but the degenerate Germans of to-day buy tasteless
manufactured _Nudeln_ instead of rolling out their own. _Nudeln_ are
the German form of macaroni, but when properly made they are better
than any macaroni can be. If you have been brought up in an
old-fashioned German ménage, and, as a child likes to do, peeped into
the kitchen sometimes, you will remember seeing large sheets of
something as thin and yellow as chamois leather hung on a clothes
horse to dry. Then you knew that there would be _Nudeln_ for your
dinner, either narrow ones in soup, or wider ones boiled in water and
sprinkled with others cut as fine as vermicelli and fried brown in
butter. The paste is troublesome to make. It begins with a deceptive
simplicity. Take four whole eggs and four tablespoonsful of milk if
you want enough for ten people, says the cookery book, and make a
light dough of it with a knife in a basin. Anyone can do that, you
find. But then you must put your dough on the pastry board, and work
in more flour as you knead it with your hands. "The longer you knead
and the stiffer the dough is the better your _Nudeln_ will be,"
continues the cookery book. But the next operation is to cut the dough
into four, and roll out each portion _as thin as paper_, and no one
who has not seen German _Nudeln_ before they are cooked can believe
that this is actually done. It is no use to give the rest of the
recipe for drying them, rolling each piece loosely and cutting it into
strips and boiling them with salt in water. If you told your English
cook to make you _Nudeln_ she would despise it for a foreign mess, and
bring you something as thick as a pancake. If you want them you had
better get them in a box from a provision merchant, as the _Hausfrau_
herself does nowadays.
English people often say that there is no good meat to be had in
Germany. I would say that there is no good mutton, and a great deal of
poor coarse beef. But the _Filetbraten_ that you can get from the best
butchers is excellent. It is a long roll of undercut of beef, so long
that it seems to be sold by the yard. If you cook it in the English
way, says my German cookery book, you rub it well with salt and pepper
and baste it with butter; while the gravy is made with flour,
mushrooms, cream, and extract of beef. I should like to see the
expression of the English plain cook if she was told to baste her beef
with butter and make her gravy for it with mushrooms. I once came back
from Germany with a new idea for gravy, and tried it on a cook who
seemed to think that gravy was made by upsetting a kettle over a joint
and then adding lumps of flour.
"My sister's cook always puts an onion in the tin with a joint," I
said tentatively, for I was not very hopeful. I know that there is
always some insuperable objection to anything not consecrated by
tradition.
"It gives the gravy a flavour," I went on,--"not a strong flavour"--
I stopped. I waited for the objection.
"We couldn't do that HERE," said the cook.
"Why not?--We have tins and we have onions."
"It would spoil the dripping. What could I do with dripping as tasted
of onion?"
I had never thought of that, and so I had never asked my sister what
was done in her household with dripping as tasted with onion.
"I should think," I said slowly, "that it could be used to baste the
next joint."
"Then that would taste of onion," said the cook, "and I should have no
dripping when I wanted it."
I have always thought dripping a dull subject, and I know that it is
an explosive one, so I said nothing more. I went on instead to
describe a piece of beef stewed in its own juices on a bed of chopped
vegetables. We actually tried that, and when it was cold it tasted
agreeably of the vegetables, and was as tender to carve as butter.
"How did you like the German beef?" I said to an Englishwoman who had
been with me a great many years.
"I didn't like it at all, M'm."
"But it was so tender."
"Yes, M'm, it made me creep," she said.
So this chapter is really of no use from one point of view. You may
hear what queer things benighted people like the Germans eat and
drink, but you will never persuade your British household to
condescend to them.
Except in the coast towns, sea fish is scarce and dear all over
Germany. Salt fish and fresh-water fish are what you get, and except
the trout it is not interesting. A great deal of carp is eaten, cooked
with vinegar to turn it blue, and served with horseradish or wine
sauce. At a dinner party I have seen tench given, and they were
extremely pretty, like fish in old Italian pictures, but they were not
worth eating. At least a pound of fresh butter was put on each dish of
them, handed round, and you took some of it as well as a sort of
mustard sauce. Perch, pike, and eel are all eaten where nothing better
is to be had; but the standing fish-course of inland Germany is trout.
Most hotels have a tank where they keep it alive till it is wanted,
and in the Black Forest the peasants catch it and peddle it, walking
miles to make good sales. We went into the garden of our hotel in the
Wiesenthal one day, and found the basin of the fountain there crammed
with live trout. It was so full that you could take one in your hand
for a moment and look at its speckles, as lovely as the speckles on a
thrush's breast. The man who was carrying them on his back in a wooden
water-tight satchel was having a drink, and he had put out his fish
for a drink while he rested. I have never been within reach of fresh
herrings in Germany, and have never seen them there, but smoked ones
are eaten everywhere, often with salad, or together with smoked ham
and potatoes in their jackets. Neither the ham nor the herrings are
ever cooked when they have been smoked, and the ham is very tough in
consequence. The breast of a goose, too, is eaten smoked but not
cooked, and is considered a great delicacy. Poultry varies in quality
a good deal. Everyone knows the little chickens that come round at
hotel dinners, all legs and bones. A German family will sit down
contentedly to an old hen that the most economical of us would only
use for soup, and they will serve it roasted though it is as tough as
leather. I think it must be said that you get better fowls both in
France and England than in Germany. The German national bird is the
goose. In England, if you buy a goose your cook roasts it and sends it
up, and that is all you ever know of it. In Germany a goose is a
carnival, rather as a newly killed pig is in an English farmhouse.
You begin with a stew of the giblets, you perhaps continue with the
bird itself roasted and stuffed with chestnuts, you may have a dozen
different dishes made of its remains, while the fat that has basted it
you hoard and use sparingly for weeks. For instance, you cook a
cabbage with a little of it instead of with water. In South Germany,
goose livers are prepared with it, and are just as much liked as _pâté
de foie gras_.
Hares are eaten and most carefully prepared in Germany. They are
skinned in a way that an English poulterer has been known to learn
from his German customers and pronounce very troublesome, and the back
is usually served separately, larded and basted with sour cream.
Vegetables are cooked less simply than in England, and you will find
the two countries disagree heatedly about them. The Englishman does
not want his peas messed up with grease and vinegar, and though he
will be too polite to say so, he will silently agree with his plain
cook who says that peas served in the pod is a dish only fit for pigs
and what she has never been accustomed to; while the German will get
quite dejected over the everlasting plain boiled cabbage and potatoes
he is offered week after week in his English boarding-house. At home,
he says, he is used to mountains of fat asparagus all the spring, and
he thinks slightly of your skinny green ones or of the wooden stuff
you import and pay less for because it is "foreign." He likes potatoes
cooked in twenty various ways, and when mashed he is of opinion that
they should not be black or lumpy. He wants a dozen different
vegetables dished up round one joint of beef, and in summer salads of
various kinds on various occasions, and not your savage mixed salad
with a horrible sauce poured out of a bottle; furniture polish he
believes it to be from its colour. In the autumn he expects chestnuts
cooked with gravy and vegetables, or made into light puddings; and
apple sauce, he assures you, should be a creamy white, and as smooth
as a well made purée. If he is of the South he would like a
_Mehlspeise_ after his meat, _Spetzerle_ if he comes from Würtemberg;
one of a hundred different dishes if he is a Bavarian. He will not
allow that your national milk puddings take their place. If he is a
North German his _Leibgericht_ may be _Rote Grütze_. This is eaten
enormously all over Denmark and North Germany in summer, and is
nothing in the world but a ground rice or sago mould made with fruit
juice instead of milk. The old-fashioned way was to squeeze
raspberries and currants through a cloth till you had a quart of pure
juice, which you then boiled with 4 oz. ground rice and sugar to
taste, stirring carefully lest it should burn, and stirring patiently
so that the rice should be well cooked. But where fruit is dear you
can make excellent _Rote Grütze_ by stewing the fruit first with a
little water and straining off the juice. A quart of currants and a
pound of raspberries should give you a good quart mould. The Danes
make it of rhubarb and plum juice in the same way; and my German
cookery book gives a recipe for _Grüne Grütze_ made with green
gooseberries, but I tried that once and found it quite inferior to our
own gooseberry fool.
Food is so much a matter of taste and custom, that it seems absurd to
make dogmatic remarks about the superiority of one kitchen to another.
If you like cold mutton, boiled potatoes and rice pudding, most days
in the week, you like them and there is an end of it. The one thing
you can say for certain is that to cook for you requires neither skill
nor pains, while to cook for a German family, even if it lives plainly
and poorly, takes time and trouble. In trying to compare the methods
of two nations, one must naturally be careful to compare households on
the same social plane; and an English household that lives on cold
mutton and rice pudding is certainly a plain and probably a poor one.
In well-to-do English households you get the best food in the world as
far as raw material goes, but it must be said that you often get poor
cooking. It passes quite unnoticed too. No one seems to mind thick
soups that are too thick and gravies that are tasteless, and melted
butter like Stickphast paste, and savouries quite acrid with over much
vinegar and anchovy. I once saw a whole company of English people
contentedly eat a dish of hot scones that had gone wrong. They tasted
of strong yellow soap. But I once saw a company of Germans eat bad
fish and apparently like it. They were sea soles handed round in a
Swiss hotel, and they should by rights have been buried the day
before. I thought of Ottilie von Schlippenschlopp and the oysters. But
the soles were carefully cooked, and served with an elaborate sauce.
* * * * *
GREEN CORN SOUP.--For six people take 7 oz. of green corn: wash it
well in hot water, and cook it until it is quite soft in stock or salt
water. Put it through a sieve, add boiling stock, and serve with fried
slice of bread or with small semolina dumplings.
GREEN CORN SOUP.--Another way. For six people take 5-½ oz. of green
corn, wash it well in hot water, and let it simmer for a few minutes
with a little stock and 1-½ oz. butter. Then add strong stock, and let
it simmer slowly with the lid on till the corn is soft. Then stir a
tablespoonful of fine flour with half a cupful of milk, and add it to
the soup, stirring all the time. This must then cook an hour longer.
When ready to serve, mix the yolks of two eggs with a little sour
cream, and add the soup carefully so that it is not curdled. The soup
is not strained through a sieve when it is served without dumplings.
The little dumplings are first cooked as a panada of semolina, butter,
milk and egg, and then dropped into the soup and cooked in it for ten
minutes.