Himmel und Erde

My love of German food and cookbooks has less of a poetic story attached to its nascence than you might typically expect. I am as fond of what Diana Henry once referred to as 'Tuscan picnic writing' as the next person because who in their right mind doesn't want to be transported away from our current political hellscapes whenever possible. Still, not all my references are pretty ones. Berlin in the late seventies, where young girls worked as prostitutes to fund their heroin addiction (and by young I mean thirteen upwards), was as dark and gritty as it got and a place where good heroin was so inexpensive, that according to Mark Reeder, "it became a struggle to stay alive."

I was fourteen when I first read 'H: Autobiography of a child prostitute and heroin addict'; originally published as 'Christiane F: Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo' in Germany's Stern magazine and running true to type, what particularly struck me was a scene involving quarkfein and cheese where Christiane, her sister, and a younger friend called Babsi (who was also working as a BP, aka 'baby prostitute') were all displaying a similar level of obsession with preparing their strawberry quarkfein as they did their hits of heroin. I now know that the effects of opiates can trigger eating jags which are partly a reaction to the nausea and vomiting that heroin often causes, meaning the range of foods that can be tolerated becomes narrower and narrower. Eating them becomes inextricably linked with drug ingestion rituals, which dance between anticipation and gratification that addicts know all too well. It's heady stuff made more so because the book is narrated by Christiane, whose emotional development stalled when she first started using drugs, as is often the case.

I had never heard of quark outside of Hawkwind songs (physics was not my strong point, and initially I thought they were singing about cheese!) and the detailed description of Babsi stirring the strawberry quarkfein into the pot of soft cheese, curling her poor, needle-scarred arm around the bowl and forcing the whole lot down her throat because she was pissed off with Christiane and wanted to deprive her of the much-anticipated breakfast stayed with me for a long time. The scene begins with conviviality as they await their breakfast. As time passes, there develops an undercurrent of tension as they lose each other to the solipsistic and erratic existence of the freshly heroin-intoxicated.

Making quark myself didn't occur in the main because I wanted the whole plastic spoon, plastic pot experience. Home-made quark seemed too wholesome. I'd forgotten about all of this until I opened Anja Dunk's Strudel, Noodles & Dumplings and, oh joy, found pages and pages of recipes using quark which she calls one of the most hard-working ingredients in the German kitchen. There's shortcut quark; a hung quark spiced with nutmeg, cinnamon, and vanilla and served with walnuts and honey; nutmeg-spiced quark dumplings; fritters flavoured with honey and thyme, and batter-enrobed apple slices. My mother used to make apple fritters, and my husband makes even better ones now. It's one of those meals I have to have cooked for me. I have no desire to make them for myself because they would not taste the same.

This is a beautiful book with recipes suffused with Himmel und Erde, including a recipe for the actual dish. There's a savoury hazelnut omelette stuffed with goats cheese and spinach, which reminds me of the woods surrounding my brother's home in Glasshuetten; bottled greengages; a 'magic' vegetable bouillon; and some spectacular soups that go from ethereal (elderflower milk soup) to the practical (heartbreak potato soup). And prunes too! I love prunes, they're under-appreciated, and Dunk's use of them is so creative (that heartbreak potato soup contains prunes). Dunk also touches on the factors that have wrought changes in the way Germans cook and eat. The movement of workers (Gastarbeiter from Italy, Turkey, and Greece bought spices and new cooking techniques); the climate (cauliflower has two growth cycles per year, rye tolerates colder weather); geography (the prominence of freshwater fish in their diet because the German coastline is comparatively small); and politics (in the 50s fresswelle was a backlash against the dietary privations wrought by war which saw Germans embrace new-found freedoms through good eating, followed by the fall of the Berlin wall and reunification).

Also worth reading in its entirety, but especially for the chapter on German food in the USA, is Edward Lee's Buttermilk Graffiti. Lee travels to Wisconsin in search of German food (his wife is German) and asks interesting questions about why its undoubted influence on the food eaten all over the USA is not as celebrated as you might expect. Prejudices as a result of two World Wars; being seen by many as a heavy and old-fashioned cuisine; and a lack of contemporary immigration from Germany have all played a part but maybe, he asks, have German foodways become so well-assimilated into the national psyche that people see them as American, stripped of their backstory? Furthermore, he asks, can this be defined as a success or failure of Germans in their cuisine?

More reading:

This, from Phaidon (and I love the cover).

The brilliant Irina Dumitrescu on currywurst.

An early love: The Time-Life Cooking of Germany.

Here's an excerpt from Wie Geht's Y'all? German Influence in Southern Cooking by Fred R. Reenstjerna. The whole article can be found in Volume 4 of Cornbread Nation, the best of Southern food writing.

An interview with Ursula Heinzelman who makes this point: "I felt it very important -to also look at famines. That's part of the history of food just as much as eating or recipes. This struck me because I am writing a book about what happens when eating or appetite are interrupted for various reasons, whether situational, psychological or physical. What do people do to cope, and even triumph, when presented with a challenge or a change of circumstances?

This, on German-Jewish cooking, looks intriguing because it features food eaten by German Jews before WW2.