At the Table: Food and Family around the World - Ken Albala (2016)

Germany

Ursula Heinzelmann

Pictured below is the Schmid family at their kitchen table, enjoying lunch on a weekday. They live in a small rural town in the southwest of Germany and have been farming for generations. Today wine is their signature product, but the mixed farming of old prevails with asparagus, potatoes, and, to a smaller extent, other garden fruit and vegetables. Adelheid and Peter, both in their late 30s, have been in charge of the family estate for a decade, with up to four generations living under one roof.

Generally speaking (and in contrast to more urban settings in Germany), the women are in charge of the kitchen and cooking, whereas the men tend vineyards and fields. Also in contrast to city households, where the main meal has mostly moved to the evening, here lunch is the most important meal that brings everybody together around the big kitchen table. Besides Peter’s parents, “everybody” includes his centenarian grandmother; Adelheid and Peter’s two children, Karl, age 13, and Anna, age 11; Peter’s sister and her husband (who live a few houses down the street) and some of their children; and whoever of the Schmids’ employees is present that day. Everybody has been up since the early morning, and lunch is served at noon. Hands are scrubbed and dirty shoes left at the door, but otherwise it is pretty much a working lunch, during which the conversation turns to everybody’s daily tasks, how things are going out in the fields and vineyards and at the cellar door, and what’s up next.

The Schmids start their meal with a clear soup made from boiling beef on the bone, to “fill the stomachs.” The broth comes with some leftover pancakes cut into thin strips (flädle), finely diced root vegetables, and chopped fresh parsley. It is served in special cups to be eaten with spoons (whereas for the typical Saturday stew a large tureen is used, from which Adelheid serves everybody into deep round plates). The children love to slurp it from the cup but are usually told off for doing so. The main course consists of a pork roast made from the shoulder. Rubbed with mustard, coated in breadcrumbs and herbs, it basically makes itself, comments Adelheid. She is in charge of all administrative matters as well as communications at the estate, and as important as food cooking and eating is, it is not a task that she can devote much time to. She usually makes a rough plan on Monday for the week ahead, devotes the first couple of hours of every workday in the morning to the office, and then spends another couple of hours in the kitchen. Sometimes one of the other women drops in to help or offers to bring along some dish.

A German family living in a rural setting gathers four generations around a big kitchen table for lunch. In contrast to city households, where the main meal is served in the evening, rural families still treat lunch as the most important meal of the day. (Courtesy of Andreas Durst)

Today there are steamed cauliflower and oven-roasted potatoes to go with the meat. It is all served on large dishes and on platters and passed around the table for everybody to serve themselves, including the children. As a general rule, the young ones are expected to eat up whatever they choose to take and to taste everything at least once. But they all love to eat and enjoy getting a few “best bites” slipped onto their plates by their doting great-granny.

The large wooden table with benches running along two sides of it is part of the open-space kitchen. The same wood has been used by some former Schmid for the paneling, and the whole setting radiates coziness without any overly decorous kitsch. There is a radio, but it is only switched on during the rare moments when Adelheid is working here on her own, and the TV in a corner on principle is switched off during meals. On weekdays the wooden table is kept bare, just as everybody is in their working clothes. Rather inexpensive regular china and cutlery are used: a knife and fork for the main course and a small spoon or fork for dessert. In contrast to that, on Sundays when field work is kept to a minimum, the treasured old china from former generations is brought out, together with engraved silver cutlery, a white tablecloth, and napkins.

However, the wineglasses are always the same, modern and functional instead of the colored cut glass of old. This is symbolic: the Schmids belong to the new generation of German wine growers. In the past 25 years German wine has seen a fundamental revival, with many young wine growers leaving the cooperatives their parents belonged to in order to strive for the best possible quality. Adelheid and Peter frequently travel to wine shows and tastings as far away as the U.S. West Coast and Australia, and if school holidays permit, they take the children with them. Anna and Karl are proud to get a tasting sip of each wine served at family meals. On weekdays it tends to be a more regular refreshing dry white such as Gutedel/Chasselas, the local speciality, whereas on Sunday Peter usually brings out one of his excellent Spätburgunder/Pinot Noir or Syrah wines. Effervescent bottled mineral water is always at hand and served in simple tumblers.

Cutlery

We might imagine the use of a knife and fork is a simple operation with straightforward rules. Nothing could be further from the truth. In Europe the fork is held in the left hand with tines facing downward, and the knife is held in the right for cutting. Food is conveyed to the mouth on the tip of the fork held by the left hand. In the United States food might be cut up this way, but the fork is then switched to the right hand and used as a shovel to scoop up food. This is a remnant of the early use of the fork in the 17th century—that is, the original way they were used when first introduced. European cutlery use evolved in a different direction.

To finish the meal, Adelheid serves something sweet: fresh homegrown fruit in the summer or a tub of ice cream if time is particularly short during harvest time. Semolina and rice pudding are big favorites with everybody, as is quark mixed with fruit (like they are going to have today). Finally, the children are expected to clear the table, while one of the men rises to fetch the coffee from the filter machine Adelheid has prepared as well as mugs and some cream and sugar. This is a last moment of relaxing quiet before everybody gets back to work. The women then all join together in cleaning the kitchen, loading the dishwasher, quickly rinsing the pots and pans, and carefully storing away the leftovers in the large fridge, to be incorporated in a later meal. In general, at 1:30 p.m. everybody is back at their work.

A lot of the produce used in the Schmids’ kitchen is seasonal and homegrown. The vegetable garden and fruit orchards are right behind the house, next to the sunny patio where the family sits out, weather permitting. The harvest is supplemented by the local purveyors. Similar to the Schmids, the butcher and baker have been around for generations and are surviving because of the strong support of the local population. However, Peter’s mother has always baked her own bread every Friday, and Adelheid does a weekly run to the next supermarket to shop for basics, just as she has no qualms about incorporating convenience food such as canned tomatoes into her cooking.

The same is true for the dishes she serves. Whereas the pictured meal is very traditional, the next day might feature pizza, pasta, or a Thai curry. While traveling, all the Schmids are happy to enjoy and taste the local cuisine—although they draw a line at breakfast, which they prefer to be as much as possible what they’re used to: filter coffee, a little milk, some kind of bread, butter, and jam or honey. The children like their muesli and hot chocolate, and all of them struggle when faced with a big American-style cook-up or an Asian savory soup at an early hour.

Just as her cooking, Adelheid’s kitchen combines traditional elements with very modern technology. One part of the oven range is fired with wood, of which there are ample provisions. The fire makes for a cozy kitchen in the winter, and some dishes such as fried potatoes and baked apples are particularly delicious when prepared that way. On the other hand, Adelheid is glad to be able to switch on the gas burner as well. She uses a pressure cooker to speed up some procedures, while she is happy to let a roast cook very slowly in an old earthen crock she inherited from her mother. There is a microwave that is mostly used to reheat small portions or leftovers. Like a lot of farming households, Adelheid owns a Thermomix, a highly sophisticated machine that combines a food processor’s functions with that of a cooker operated on a touchscreen and with an integrated scale. It can be preset to mix a mayonnaise or heat the mixture for a sauce hollandaise to go with the asparagus in late spring but also to make a cream dessert, and Adelheid finds it most convenient and well worth the significant investment.

By and large, the techniques used to prepare food in Germany are the same as in other Western cultures. Pasta, potatoes, and dumplings in all variations are boiled in large amounts of water, as are some kinds of vegetables such as cauliflower and larger cuts of meat (called Siedfleisch). More tender ingredients such as fish are kept just under the boiling point. The energy and time-saving Schnellkochtopf (pressure cooker) uses steam, but Adelheid also owns a woven bamboo steamer basket bought at an Asian store. The pork roast uses a combination of dry and wet heat to tenderize and yield some sauce. In the winter ragouts, gulash and large meat cuts are braised: the meat is browned, and vegetables such as carrots, celeriac, and onions are added and lightly sautéed as well before a little liquid is added. A lid then goes on the pan, and the meat is slowly finished, often in the oven, where it yields the sauce deemed essential for a traditional real meal. Somewhat paradoxically, the finished dish is still called roast (Braten), although strictly speaking roasting would involve only dry heat, with a little fat but no liquid, either on the stove or in the oven. That is how Schnitzel are made, often but not always covered in breadcrumbs. Although the Schmids’ kids love fries as much as everybody else, Adelheid has no deep fryer; in general, deep-frying is not very common in private households in Germany. Her pans are mostly of stainless steel; the aluminum widely used after World War II today is deemed a health risk, but there is the odd cast-iron or copper pan. An array of cake tins and baking sheets completes the kitchen equipment, some enameled white or black, some in glass, some earthen and in all kinds of traditional and modern shapes.

Undoubtedly food preparation, which entails chopping, pounding, and the like, used to be a more physically demanding task for former generations and has been made much easier today with the aid of electricity. Adelheid’s drawers contain a handheld blender and an electric whisk, whereas the standing blender and the food processor with all kinds of functions have been made obsolete by the Thermomix. Besides that, there are herb and garlic cutters, egg cookers, can openers, knives, knife sharpeners, lemon squeezers, bread slicers, and cheese graters, and someone even gave them an electrically powered pepper mill. As recipes are in (kilo)grams and (milli)liters, there is a liter measure as well as an electronic scale. Adelheid uses a large wooden cutting board but also has smaller ones made of plastic. A whole battery of knives live on a magnetic holder fixed to the wall, whereas other tools such as wooden spoons, slotted spoons, sieves, and a rolling pin are kept in a big earthen jar next to the stove. A Swabian relative has given her a Spätzlebrett, a handheld wooden board on which an almost liquid egg noodle dough is spread with a palette knife to be scraped in thin strips into boiling water to make spätzle, a kind of egg pasta. However, Adelheid is much more likely to opt for (quicker) mashed potatoes.

If all this sounds very traditional, it is obviously just one facet of the diversity that is German food culture. To capture all of Germany’s extremely complex, multilayered dinner culture in a single representative picture and meal is by definition impossible. So many differences and facets have been molded by geography, climate, and the infinite cultural influences from all sides in the course of history: Germany is a country right in the middle of the European continent, situated between the Slavs and the Romans, cold and heat, sea and mountains. Germany has no single national, overarching haute cuisine, not even a national dish. In addition to geographic and climatic reasons, this is mainly due to four factors. First, when populations moved they took some of their food preferences with them (in a similar manner, German emigrants took their foodways with them over the Atlantic to the Americas). Second, the disintegration of the (albeit not very tightly joined) nation into countless small political units following the decline of Charlemagne’s kingdom in the course of the ninth century was the basis for a variety of regional cuisines, each itself a complex system of socioeconomic and cultural layers. Third, the reformation movement instigated by Martin Luther and many like-minded innovators in the 16th century set an example for the wider populace that it was possible to be and act differently. Finally, the late but far-reaching and intense industrialization in the course of the 19th century turned a patchwork of agrarian states into one thoroughly urbanized industrial one. It also led to a surge of fears and longings in reaction, back then as much as today. Simply put, the result of that is the organic movement of today.

Having said all that, though, we can zoom out, so to speak, and look at the similarities this picture represents, after all. In a lot of homes, a table in the kitchen is one of if not the most important space: it is often described as used most, with the best atmosphere or feeling, and also used to receive visitors. On the table you’ll always find some kind of china, glasses, and cutlery, even if the pizza has been delivered. TV or music might be in the background, but conversation at the table in general is deemed more important. All over Germany it is still women who are mainly responsible for the kitchen and all related tasks (therefore often taking on a double role). As for the food itself, potatoes since the 18th century have played a major role in the German diet. Also, even in nonreligious households, the food tends to be influenced by Christian traditions, serving fish or a vegetable dish on Fridays (traditionally a lean day) and, for example, carp on New Year’s Eve and/or Good Friday. And finally, Germans’ meat of preference has been pork for a long time, although steak is now high on the list of favored dishes as well.

Further, it has to be said that in a new trend contrasting the old lure of the rural idyll once young adults started a family, recent statistics see Germans moving back into towns and cities. This changes the urban landscape and blurs the erstwhile clear contrasts between urban and rural communities. As the agricultural sector has been struggling to reinvent itself in an industrially driven environment, one of its most successful offshoots, capable of bridging the gulf between rural production and urban consumption, during the last two decades has been viticulture.

Finally, the southwest of Germany, the Schmids’ home region bordering on Switzerland and France and often called “Alemannic,” arguably boasts the country’s most sophisticated food culture (as well as a very strong accent very close to Swiss German and almost unintelligible to northern folks). In no small part this can be traced to the times of Roman invasion roughly 2,000 years ago, leaving a taste for the generosity of more southern foodways that has combined well with natural resources. The Schmids lead a comfortable life with good food, but they are aware that neither roast nor grapes just fall from the sky.

8 to 10 servings

5- to 6-pound roast (leg or shoulder)

garlic cloves, cut in half

2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

Salt and pepper

3 tablespoons butter, soft

Dried or fresh thyme, marjoram, parsley, and sage

½ cup fresh breadcrumbs

4 onions, sliced

2 carrots, sliced

½ cup water

½ cup dry white wine

1.Preheat oven to 350°.

2.Rub meat on all sides with cloves of garlic as well as the mustard and soft butter. Sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper.

3.Roughly chop or break down herbs, mix with breadcrumbs, and roll meat in this.

4.Arrange bed of onions and carrots on bottom of open roasting pan. Lay meat on vegetables.

5.Add water and wine to pan and roast in preheated oven for 2½ to 3 hours, adding more liquid to pan as needed.

6.Remove finished meat to a heated platter, roughly strain the pan juices to remove the (exhausted) vegetables, and serve with the meat.

8 dessert servings

2 cups white short grain rice

2 quarts whole milk

pinch of salt

Zest of 1 lemon

4 tablespoons butter

Granulated sugar and cinnamon to taste for sprinkling over finished pudding

1.Wash rice.

2.Bring to boil with milk and seasonings, stirring all the time.

3.Cover and cook in oven at very low heat for 45 minutes to 1 hour until rice is soft, stirring occasionally.

4.Stir in butter (more if you wish). Serve warm, sprinkled liberally with sugar and cinnamon. Stewed fruit or applesauce is very good with this.

Heinzelmann, Ursula. Beyond Bratwurst: A History of Food in Germany. London: Reaktion Books, 2014.

Heinzelmann, Ursula. Food Culture in Germany. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008.