Friday Shuffle - The Edible (and Inedible) Edition

The other day Rachel commented on one of my posts that she would have a hard time living in Germany because she's not a fan of German food. And you know what? I had the same thought when I moved here. I never thought I could adapt to German foods but after 10 1/2 years of eating it, I've learned to manage. Even learned to love some of it.

The first thing I ever ate in Germany was potato salad and Wienerwürstchen, which is like a long, thin hot dog. I despise hot dogs - they're disgustingly mushy - but I loved Wienerwürstchen...mostly because it's not mushy at all. And over the ensuing weeks I tried other German dishes - some hits, and some horrifying misses.

What's Good
~ Bratwurst. I will eat a variety of bratwursts but the best is the Thüringer style. Particularly fabulous if it's grilled and the skin has gotten a bit black and wrinkly. Unfortunately to the chagrin of my husband, I eat my bratwurst with ketchup.

~ Currywurst. While it can be bought all over Germany, it's a speciality of Berlin. It's a bratwurst that has a ketchup based sauce over it that's been spiced by curry powder. Particuarly wonderful with fries that you can dip into the curry-ketchup sauce.

~ French Fries. I know they originated in Belgium, but fries in Germany are wonderful too. I'm guessing they're also great in Holland. It's just because potatoes in Europe have a better flavor than the bland, flavorless Russett potatoes you find in America. I've seldom had crappy fries in Germany. My sister, who normally isn't a French fry eater, dreams of them and orders them at every opportunity when she visits me.

~ Wienerschnitzel. Technically not German either - it originated in Vienna, Austria (which is why it's Wienerschnitzel...Wien is the German name for Vienna) and I don't eat genuine Wienerschnitzel either since the genuine type is made with veal and I opt for pork schnitzel. Either way, it's lovely. When the meat is really thin and tender and the breading is crispy and flavorful it's heavenly. Know what? Goes great with fries.

~ Döner Kebap. Again, not originally German - it comes from Turkey - but it was adapted to suit German tastes. The döner you find in Turkey is different, unless you're in an area that caters to German tourists. My favorite way to eat it isn't in the more common flat bread but instead on a plate with the meat, salad, sauces and - yes! - French fries all piled together. Get a bit of each thing on your fork, pop it in your mouth and proceed to have your eyes roll back into your head.

~Grillhänchen. This is a rotisserie grilled chicken spiced with a rub made of salt, pepper and paprika. These are sold at stands everywhere and regardless of where you buy it, they all taste the same - fantastic.

What's Bad
~ Harzer Käse. This is a cheese made in the region of the Harz mountains. It also looks and smells like what you'd get if you had a pedicure, took the scrapings from the callouses on the bottom of your feet and compressed them together into a log shape.

~ Teewurst. One of the many sorts of spreadable wursts you can buy. I'm especially grossed out by the "grob" style, which means the bits of meat are not finely ground and so you can really see and taste the chunks of fat in it.

~ Weisswurst. This is a sausage that's boiled. It's rather soft and you eat it by dipping it in a sweetish mustard (that right there makes it a big no for me), putting the end into your mouth and then squishing a bit of the wurst out of the casing into your mouth.

~ Sauerbraten. We're not even going to get into how genuine Sauerbraten is made with horse meat. Most people, however, usually make it from pork or beef. It's soaked in a marinade and I swear, by the time it's ready to be cooked, it's gray.

And the nastiest of all?

~ Losewurst. This is ground pork mixed with a lot of spices and then is cooked in pig's blood and is usually served over boiled potatoes. Pig's blood. Who in the hell dreamed that up?. The pig's blood still has to be warm when you begin to cook it. It doesn't smell bad - actually it smells nice and peppery when it's cooking - but it looks like an autopsy. When B was a chef he had to cook this dish fairly often which disgusted him no end. My MIL, however, loves it and every time I see her eat it I become nauseated. Which I supposed is only fair since she is completely disgusted by all poultry and B and I eat a lot of chicken. To each his own.

Y'all need to get that nasty, nasty image out of your heads, right? Just think of the cakes in Germany. They make delicous, delicious cakes in German. And maybe a shuffle will help.

Hit it.

1. Follow That Sound - Sharon Little
2. Feelin' Alright? - Traffic (So kind of Bixente the iPod to be concerned over your wellbeing)
3. How She Could Sing The Wildwood Flower - Emmylou Harris
4. Stand And Deliver - Adam Ant
5. The Way That He Sings - My Morning Jacket
6. 25 Or 6 To 4 - Chicago
7. Still The Night - BoDeans
8. Meeting Place - The Last Shadow Puppets
9. Chasing Pavements - Adele
10. Communication Breakdown - Led Zeppelin
    

All I Could Want

I once saw an article about what families around the world spend on food. In the article was shown photos of families from the places where they took their survey and showed the families with the food they would normally buy for one month and I was not surprised in the least that the German family that was shown had in their photo a whole lot of dairy products.

I have no scientific proof of this but based upon what I personally know of the eating habits of Germans and judging by what sorts of things are on sale in their supermarkets, Germans are some dairy product eating fools. When I lived in the US I used to shop in a pretty big chain supermarket and the dairy section of the supermarket I shop with in Germany puts their US brothers to shame. You know how in the US there are dozens of different types and brands of breakfast cereals? Think of the same happening in Germany except replace "breakfast cereal" with "dairy products". It goes beyond just milk, cream, cheese (of which there are dozens of varieties and brands) and butter. There's Germany love affair with pudding. My supermarket sells at least five different brands of ready-to-eat pudding that I know of and then each brand has a wide variety of styles and flavors. Then there's quark - both flavored and unflavored. Milk rice. Mousse. Flavored milks. Flavored whey drinks. Sour cream. Smetana. Crème fraîche.

And then there's yogurt. I love yogurt and have eaten it daily since I was a teenager. During the first week I moved to Germany I asked my now MIL to buy me some yogurt. Since I wasn't specific with what I wanted (I was just thinking she's bring home a couple cups of peach or strawberry fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt), she came in with a sack full. Once I went to the supermarket myself I could see why she came home with so much. The supermarket where I shop has two aisles about twelve feet long each devoted to yogurt only. There's plain, fruit-on-the-bottom, fruit puree on the top, lowfat, regular fat, Rahmjoghurt (literally "cream yogurt") that has 10% fat, Greek style (fabulously creamy!), yogurt with fruit, candy or cereal on the side to stir in, and yogurts that are dessert style that have bits of cake in them. There's strawberry, honey, vanilla, chocolate chip, pear, apricot, peach, kiwi, raspberry, banana, blueberry, lemon, hazelnut, rhubarb, orange, blackberry, plum, and lime flavors - and likely more that I can't even think of. There's yogurt that will help you out if you're constipated and some of it has grain in it so that if the bacteria doesn't help move you, the fiber will.

It's a good thing I married a German so I could live where a food I love is so popular. I'd be sorta screwed if I fell in love with a Frenchman or an Italian. I don't do cheese and wine very well.

Good Timing on My Part

The fall of the Berlin Wall is what enabled me to meet and marry my husband. And the fall of the Berlin Wall is what enabled me to survive living in Germany because had there been a way for me to meet and marry my husband before the demise of East Germany, there's no way I could have coped. The whole food thing in East Germany would be just too much for me to handle.

My husband, who was born and raised and lived the first thirty years of his life in the former East Germany will be the first to say that he did not starve while growing up. He and his family - a regular working class East Germany family...maybe a bit better off because my FIL always worked an enormous amount of overtime to enable the family to have a bit more - always had enough to eat, even if what they had to eat wasn't gourmet fare. Here's a bit of how food was back in East Germany.

Shopping
This would have perhaps been my biggest nightmare. Grocery stores were open until 6pm and one store in town was open until about 8:30pm. As for weekend shopping, grocery stores were open every other Saturday until about noon. I assume this meant that you either got out of work and rushed to the shops before closing time or you did like my MIL did and shop on your lunch hour (most women in East Germany had jobs outside the home). Which store you shopped at was generally a matter of convenience and perhaps a bit of who-you-know. Prices were the same in every store, country-wide. It's a good thing that people were spared from scouting for the best price because you were going to need that time to stand in line. Not just lines to check out but even long lines to buy hard-to-find products. There's an old joke that if East Germans saw a line somewhere, they'd automatically go stand in it without even knowing why people were lining up. That may be an exaggeration but it's not much of one.

Networking
The real key to living well and getting what you needed in East Germany was the network of people one would spend years carefully building. My MIL was (and still is) a master at this. A bone of contention in the family is the hard feelings created between my MIL and her SIL over the SIL taking advantage of and embarrassing my MIL with the network of merchants my MIL had. A network of merchants would not get you better prices - God forbid the government be cheated out of one Pfennig - but it could get you products that were notorously hard to find. Say you needed to get things for Christmas or a birthday celebration. You're going to need things like liquor, better cuts of meat, snack foods and perhaps fruits. If you'd made friends with the butcher and the grocer and had started preparations well in advance, you could have those things set aside for you by the merchants so you could buy them instead of having them available to the general public. In turn you could perhaps help them get things they needed or maybe you'd just do something nice for them like bring them cake or flowers (cut flowers were not always readily available back then so they were a much appreciated gift). Treat your network of merchants well and you'd be sure to be able to pull off a special event with the things you really needed.

Meat
In Germany - east or west - pork is the most popular meat. One could generally find most cuts of pork available in East Germany but cuts like fillet were rare. If you'd arranged it with the butcher in your network of merchants, you could get it set aside for you...but it was crazy expensive. Beef was less popular and not as available. Grilled chicken was (and still is) popular and was easily bought at sale stands everywhere. Wursts and Aufschnitt (cold cuts) were also easy to buy. Not every sort of meat was available all the time but there was always some sort of meat to eat.

Dairy
Virtually all dairy products - milk, cheese, yogurt, butter, quark and condensed milk - were readily available. The one exception was whipping cream. Spray whipped cream didn't exist and sometimes cream to whip up yourself wasn't available. If you didn't have cream to whip then cooks would use milk and butter and whip the hell out of them together until it turned into whipped cream.

Produce
Fruits and vegetables that were most common were things that were grown in East Germany. Potatoes were most popular and were always available but when it got to be late winter and the new potatoes hadn't yet been harvested you may be pulling your potatoes out of a slimy pile. Kohlrabi, asparagus, carrots, cabbage, beets, green beans and peas, tomatoes, bell peppers, leeks - all were available but only in season...out of season canned vegetable were eaten - frozen veggies weren't all that common. Fruits like apples, pears, peaches, apricots, cherries and strawberries were available in season and citrus fruits like oranges and tangerines were available around the Christmas holiday season - and one should be prepared to stand in a long line to get them. My husband recalls bananas being available fairly often but many times they were pretty sorry bananas. He said the times the best bananas were available were at Christmas and when West Germany markets bought too many bananas and to get rid of them quickly they'd sell them to the East German government.

Sweets and Snacks
Chocolate was available but it wasn't a great quality. B reports that it tasted gritty. A finer grade of chocolate was available but it was also five times more expensive than the regular stuff. Potato chips and popcorn weren't available. A common snack item would be pretzels and they were not always available so plan ahead if you're throwing a party! Soft drinks were easy to get but there was no Coke or Pepsi. The East German brands were Vita-Cola or Club Cola. Vita-Cola is still sold and I've drank it a couple times. I'll stick with Coke, thanks.

Hard or Impossible to Buy Things
The things that I would take for granted - sauce mixes and pre-packed frozen meals - really didn't exist. Virtually all cooking was done from scratch. There were some exceptions. There was a pasta sauce called Carnito - one variety with ground meat and one with meat balls. It is still sold and to me tastes like the vile sauce in Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee canned pasta. And there's a sauce made of strips of red bell peppers with tomato sauce called Letscho that is also still sold - very tasty! Other sauces and gravies - Hollandaise, brown sauce, fish sauces, cream sauces, mushroom gravies - all were made from scratch.

Coffee was easy to buy but extremely expensive - so expensive that it would be considered wasteful to throw out any undrunk coffee. There was a time when it was hard to get and a story my MIL always tell is how she and B's dad scrimped and saved to buy a little packet of coffee for Christmas - enough for one pot only because that's all they could get. Two of B's uncles, who were drunk, dropped in on them, walked into the kitchen, found the coffee, brewed it and drank it up themselves and left my in-laws with no coffee for Christmas.

Mustard and mayonnaise were easy to buy but ketchup was a luxury. If there was any for sale, count on standing in a long line to get it. Twice a year in Leipzig there was a convention of merchants from around the world and regular East Germans could go there and buy many items that were nearly impossible to get otherwise. B remembers going there with his parents and one of his assigned duties was to stand in line for hours to buy a couple bottles of ketchup.

Tomorrow I'll go grocery shopping and with driving there, buying what I need, loading it in the car, driving home and getting inside I'll use about an hour - and to me that's an big chunk of my time. An hour and I'll have virtually everything I want and have food that comes from all around the world. All that hour would get me on an East German shopping trip is maybe halfway though the line to get a kilo of oranges. Good thing that Berlin Wall is down. I don't have any extra time to spare.

What You'll Do When You Really Want It

Know how I whine about how much I have to shell out to buy a teensy squeeze bottle of Hellmann's mayonnaise? I do it even if I don't particularly like to because when you really want something you've been used to eating for your whole life, you will fulfill any outrageous request and make any outrageous payment to get it.

It never occurred to me that people living in the United States or in Canada - people who are from Germany or have lived in Germany and just really love German products - would do the same in reverse.

Over the weekend I found, by accident, this website. It was sort of amusing to poke around and see the things they have for sale, mostly because I wanted to see just what sorts of things people living in the US and Canada want to have. And then I looked at the prices and got the shock of my life.

Those of you who shop in Germany will be the ones whose mouths really drop open when you see how much they charge for stuff. Knorr Fix for $4.49 - for one envelope! You need two envelopes if you want to cook for more than two or three people. Two Milka advent calendars for $39.99! A double pack of Götterspeise for $3.49. Hell's bells, it ain't like they don't sell 700 different kids of Jello in America. I found a box of chocolate muesli for $12.99. The cereal aisle in your average American grocery store is long enough to be a runway for a jumbo jet and that's not enough for some poor soul who's just got to have some muesli from Germany?

I know there's a lot of overhead in a food import business like this. Dealing with customs alone has got to be a pain in the neck. Somehow it just seems crazier to pay this sort of price for stuff that I can't imagine German people in America can really be missing all that much anyway but then again someone in America is thinking I'm out of my mind to pay nearly 2€ for a little bitty package of strawberry Twizzlers.

I suppose the moaning I do about the 4.99€ I pay for a jar of pickle relish is being repeated somewhere in the wilds of the Dakotas or in a Manhattan highrise or a ranch in Texas when they order a $12.99 jar of wurst.