Home Life In Germany Part 8

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 quant.i.ties of fruit and of farm produce. Your second breakfast there is like a French dejeuner, 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 _Hornchen_ 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 b.u.t.ter they have horrid little chokey biscuits flavoured with vanilla. Old-fas.h.i.+oned 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_, _Sc.h.i.n.kenwurst_, _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 cuc.u.mbers 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-fas.h.i.+oned German menage, 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 b.u.t.ter. 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 coa.r.s.e 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 b.u.t.ter; 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 b.u.t.ter 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 b.u.t.ter.

"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 b.u.t.ter 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 h.o.a.rd 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 _pate 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 a.s.sures you, should be a creamy white, and as smooth as a well made puree. If he is of the South he would like a _Mehlspeise_ after his meat, _Spetzerle_ if he comes from Wurtemberg; 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 Grutze_. 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 Grutze_ 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 _Grune Grutze_ 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 pa.s.ses quite unnoticed too. No one seems to mind thick soups that are too thick and gravies that are tasteless, and melted b.u.t.ter 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- oz. of green corn, wash it well in hot water, and let it simmer for a few minutes with a little stock and 1- oz. b.u.t.ter. 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, b.u.t.ter, milk and egg, and then dropped into the soup and cooked in it for ten minutes.

CHAPTER XVI

SHOPS AND MARKETS

Berlin people compare their Wertheim with the Bon Marche at Paris, or with Whiteley's in London; only always adding that Wertheim is superior to any emporium in France or England. So it really is in one way. A great artist designed it, and the outside of the building is plain and stately, a most refres.h.i.+ng contrast to most Berlin architecture. On the ground floor there is a high s.p.a.cious hall that is splendid when it is lighted up at night, and a staircase leads up and down from here to the various departments, all decorated soberly and pleasantly, mostly with wood. You can buy almost anything you want at Wertheim's, from the furniture of your house to a threepenny pair of cotton mittens with a thumb and no fingers. You can see tons of the most hideous rubbish there, and you can find a corner reserved for original work, done by two or three artists whose names are well known in Germany. For instance, Wertheim exhibits the very clever curious "applications" done by Frau Katy Munchhausen, groups of monkeys, storks, c.o.c.ks and hens, and other animals, drawn with immense spirit and life on cloth, cut out and then _machined_ on a background of another colour. The machining has a bad sound, I admit, but for all that the "applications" are enchanting. Wertheim, too, shows some good furniture; he sells theatre tickets, books, fruit, groceries, Liberty cus.h.i.+ons, embroideries, soaps, perfumes, toys, ironmongery, china, gla.s.s, as well as everything that can be called drapery. He has a tea-room as well as a large general refreshment-room, where you can get ices, iced coffee, beer, all kinds of sandwiches, and the various _Torten_ Germans make so very much better than other people. In this room no money is wasted on waiters or waitresses, and no one expects to be tipped. You fetch what you want from a long bar running along two sides of the room, and divided into short stretches, each selling its own stuff; you pay at the counter, and you carry your ice or your cake to any little marble-topped table you choose. The advantage of the plan is that you do not have to wait till you catch the eye of a waitress determined not to look your way: the disadvantage is that you have to perform the difficult feat of carrying a full cup or a full gla.s.s through a crowd. Whatever you buy at the counter is sure to be good, but if all you could get was a Mugby Junction bun you would have to eat it after the exhausting process of buying a yard of ribbon or a few picture postcards at Wertheim's.

To begin with, there are no chairs. You cannot sit down. On a hot summer morning, when you have perhaps been to the market already, you go to the Leipziger Stra.s.se for theatre tickets, a pair of gloves, and two or three small odds and ends. On the ground floor you see gloves, innumerable boxes of them besieged by a pus.h.i.+ng, determined crowd of women. The shop ladies in any coloured blouses look hot and weary, but try to serve six customers at once. When you have chosen what you want, and know exactly how sharp the elbows to left and right of you are, you see your lady walk off with your most pushful neighbour and the pair of three-penny gloves she has after much argument agreed to buy; for at Wertheim's you cannot depart with so much as a halfpenny postcard till it has pa.s.sed through three pairs of hands besides your own. First the shop lady must deposit it with a bill at the cas.h.i.+er's desk. Then, when the cas.h.i.+er can attend to you, you pay for it. Then you may wait any time until the third person concerned will do it up in paper and string. This last proceeding is often so interminably delayed that if you were not in Germany you would s.n.a.t.c.h at what you have paid for and make off. But the _Polizei_ alone knows what would happen if you ran your head against the established pedantry of things in the city of the Spree. You would probably find yourself in prison for _Beamtenbeleidigung_ or _lese majeste_. "The Emperor is a fool,"

said some disloyal subject in a public place. "To prison with him,"

screamed every horror-struck official. "Off with his head!" "But I meant the Emperor of China," protested the sinner. "That's impossible," said the officials in chorus. "Anyone who says the Emperor is a fool means our Emperor." And an official spirit seems to encroach on the business one, and drill its very customers while it anxiously serves them. For instance, the arrangements for sending what you buy are most tiresome and difficult to understand at Wertheim's.

His carts patrol the streets, and your German friends a.s.sure you that he sends anything. You find that if you shop with a country card the things entered on it will arrive; but if you buy a bulky toy or some heavy books and pay for them in their departments, you meet with fuss and refusal when you ask as a matter of course to have them sent. It can be done if your goods have cost enough, but not if you have only spent two or three s.h.i.+llings. It is the fas.h.i.+on in England just now for every man who writes about Germans to say that they are immensely ahead of us in business matters. I cannot judge of them in their factories and warehouses, but I am sure they are behind us in their shops. A woman cannot live three hundred miles from Berlin and get everything she wants from Wertheim delivered by return and carriage free. Nor will he supply her with an immense ill.u.s.trated catalogue and a book of order forms addressed to his firm, so that the trouble of shopping from a distance is reduced to a minimum. In England you can do your London shopping as easily, promptly, and cheaply from a Scotch or a Cornish village as you can from a Surrey suburb.

In most German towns you still find the shops cla.s.sified on the old lines. You go to one for drapery, and to another for linen, and to another for small wares, and to yet another for ribbons. There are sausage shops and chocolate shops, and in Berlin there are shops for the celebrated Berlin _Baumkuchen_. There are a great many cellar shops all over Germany, and these are mostly restaurants, laundries, and greengrocers. The drinking scene in _Faust_ when Mephisto made wine flow from the table takes place in Auerbach's Keller, a cellar restaurant still in existence in Leipzig. The lower cla.s.s of cellar takes the place in Germany of our slums, and the worst of them are regular thieves' kitchens known to the police. There is an admirable description of life in a cellar shop in Klara Viebig's _Das Tagliche Brot_. The woman who keeps it has a greengrocery business and a registry office for servants, and as such people go is respectable; but I recommend the book to my countrymen who go to Berlin as officials or journalists for ten days, are taken over various highly polished public inst.i.tutions, and come back to tell us that the Germans are every man jack of them clean, prosperous, well mannered, and healthy. It is true that German munic.i.p.al government is striving rather splendidly to bring this state of things about, but they have plenty of work before them still. These cellar shops, for instance, are more fit for mushroom growing than for human nurseries, and yet the picture in the novel of the family struggling with darkness and disease there can still be verified in most of the old streets of Germany.