Aeppelkeschd

Talking to Joe last night reminded me on the fruit trees in my home area - he was telling me about small apple trees that friends of his are planning to put into their backyard. The trees are basically hybrids, i.e. set on top of a different tree that does not get very large. This way, one can have a full-fledged apple orchard in a relatively confined space. Yield is similar to full-size trees, but with the hybridization come also fortitudes of the tree partner into play - the new tree might be small, but also more hardy in different climates, more robust against different diseases etc.
Germany has a very long tradition of hybridization of trees. Saarland, specifically, also named the "apple box of Germany" (in the local dialect: "Aeppel kischt"), has hills full with apple, but also pear, and plum trees, most of them hybrids.

Every local family used to have a little piece of land somewhere on the hills surrounding the respective village, with a couple of nice, old trees on them (Streuobstwiesen). Comes fall, one can go and harvest, collecting the fruit on the tree, but also those that have already fallen to the ground. It was normal for us as kids to go for a walk with the parents on these hills in fall, collect fruit, pick some berries, eat some apples and plums on the way, and mostly we would not stick to our own families piece of land, but picked fruit, pretty much only for direct consumption, from any tree that had something nice to offer.

Lots of the apple varieties there are not commercially available in a normal grocery store. Some are very small and sour ("Viezaepfel") and used exclusively for Viez-production. Some have a very strong skin, tough texture, and a not very sweet, but really great flavor, like "Boskop"; those are used a lot in apple pies, or apple sauce, where they are mostly mixed with other varieties as well, or as Bratapfel.
One can harvest all the apples on one's own land, bring them to Merziger, the fruit juice company, stand in line with all the other locals with their boxes and barrels and baskets full of fruit, get the harvest weighed, and according to yield, trade it in against fresh apple juice and Viez. The company receives the harvest of the year for nothing, all locally grown, fresh, and basically organic, and we, the apple tree owners, don't have to deal with fruit press and bottling and, if having only the sour and tart Viezaepfel, receive sweet apple juice we'd never get out of these fruit.
A perfect deal.

The last peppers of the season

This is just a little thankyou to the provider of these beautiful little peppers -
I filled them with sort of Biryani rice (cooked with raisin, cardamom, safran, & coconut flakes), and chicken and tomato that were seared in a indian ginger-cumin-garam masala-garlic spice mix, together with some locally grown fresh okra that I placed on top of the pepper-filling. They were baked for about 15 minutes at 470deg F, still crispy & crunchy. I'm eating them right now with sprinkles of fresh cilantro, lime, and red onion.

The peppers are outstanding, even with all that stuff in them..! :)

Boudin

“Essen un Trinken haelt Leiw un Seel beisammen.”, Eating and drinking keeps body and soul together this is one of the most important sayings in Saarland, and now it reminds me on how I seemed to slowly loose control over my body contours with every day of indulgence back there.. but the soul, oh man, the soul..

On my last day to celebrate life Saarland-style it was all lunch: Boudin, with fried onion and spring onion, grilled whole potatoes, mixed salad with zucchini juliennes. Best to drink with that is a cool fresh Pilsener beer, Karlsberg Urpils works beautifully. I opt for Viez, the dry type of Saarland's applewine, which is very refreshing but sports a rather acquired taste. To have something more sweet and juicy alongside the Viez, I also drink Federweisser, which now is bubbling a little more than a couple of days ago and is less sweet, more delicious, and much more dangerous. My rumbling intestines will remind me all day that I had the two most “active” beverages of the region and season together, raw and slightly fermented fruit is quite something..

I was surprised years ago to be, in Nashville, offered Boudin from Louisiana, that was of light color and looked like liver sausage, it had rice in it, and was spicy. What I did not know then: there are two kinds. French moving to New Orleans and neighborhood had Boudin blanc in their luggage, and recreated it with the new ingredients and spices they found in place. Saarland got excited about Boudin noir, apparently an about 2000 years old and very local and traditional dish.

Boudin noir is a blood sausage containing white cabbage, raw thrown into a frying pan and busting open and falling apart at high heat, surrounded by onions, til part of the sausage is black and crispy, slightly salty and savory, the inside creamy and moist and sweet from cabbage and cooked blood. Lots of onions are fried with it til they are very sweet and golden crispy; in my home area it is primarly eaten with pan-fried potatoes, again, crispy outside, and sweet inside, sometimes apples are added to that and fried as well.

Thinking about this multitude of savory & salty, and crispy & creamy contrasts, each part of this dish is actually really accentuating another, bringing this whole thing to a new level.. certainly something I am craving for every fall.

Boudin has a very short shelf life, and can not be shipped easily. That means, it is very specific to the region it has been made in, and very specific to the time of slaughter. This year I was lucky to be in Saarland just at the right time of the year to taste this unique dish again.

As with anything, it is possible to make it at home. I referred to this cookbook: "Das Kochbuch aus dem Saarland", previously in my Schwenker post. So far, all recipes I tried from this book taste to me like home. So, here is that book's Boudin-recipe that sounds very realistic as well-

2.5kg lean, cooked pork meat
1l warmed blood
750g cooked pork skin
1 boiled white cabbage
5 boiled leeks
4 raw onions
pepper, nutmeg, salt, savory, majoram, coriander, maggi (a spice sauce you will find in most savory dishes in Saarland)

Mix all but the blood together and pass it through the meat grinder to get a really fine paste that then can be mixed with the blood. Add the spices to taste, fill into casings, and let them cook in boiling water for 30 minutes. Cool with cold water after that and hang up for drying. When the links are cold, they can be fried in the pan, as I described above.

Now, Boudin has a taste that, for me, stands out among other central european dishes - like there might something like cumin and cinnamon in it, making the spice mix almost arabic. From all recipes I read there is no evidence for that sort of ingredient though - my tastebuds and nose are so overwhelmed by this food they seem to get overexcited..

Dornfelder - the german Red

German wines are commonly thought to be white, maybe along the lines of Riesling, sometimes very dry, some very sweet and fruity, dependent on which region they come from, with an almost metallic smell that speaks to the slate the vines thrive on.
Rarely one talks about german reds, and, in my opinion, which is tainted by a strong bias towards liking heavy-body wines like Rioja, Ochoa, Cabernet etc., there are good reasons for being not too excited about red grapes from central-north europe. Typically, red vines are less hardy in the german climate, also the traditional viticulture in Germany does not appeal to those plants, and the grapes that are grown are more light red, almost rose in color, and taste rather like that as well. All good for someone who really likes Trollinger and Lemberger, but I was never cut out for those wines.

But, I have to revise my opinion.

Recently, I drank two different german red wines, both from the Dornfelder grape, and was really stunned - one of them was aged in a barrique by the Weintor winemaker cooperative, and could have almost been a Rioja, in terms of oakiness, while being really soft and round, or Cabernet, in terms of complexity of flavours, a very rich nose with lots of berries jumping at you, blackberries and maybe cherry, a very deep red color - the kind of wine I want to take home with me.
Apparently, this grape is really doing well in the german climate (and has been crossed from the Helfensteiner and Heroldrebe vines for this purpose and other features, by August Herold in 1956), that can be a little tough on other reds, and being grown as well in England, and in colder areas of the United States.

I'll be looking out for this one.

Apple, 'shrooms & game

It's fall! I've been craving all the good things that come this time of the year

...like my favorite mushrooms, “Steinpilze”, that I've never seen in the US other than dried, but, alas, they don't grow yet in Germany either right now; although I may have encountered a few first pieces in my Risotto funghi di bosco that I had in Saarlouis..

...the apple wine called “Viez” (the Viez wiki is only in german so far), important product of this region with all its fruit trees in meadow orchards, and so good because the local apple scene is unimpressed by the mass-product culture that knows only four apple types or five - Vice Vinum, the substitute wine, as the romans probably named it, is largely made from Viez-apples, sometimes special pears are added as well; it can be very sour but refreshing, but there are also sweet types, dependent on how far along the fermentation has progressed. There is nothing better on a winter or cold fall evening to drink sweet Viez that has been warmed up with a cinnamon stick...

...the very young wine, “Federweisser”, still white and milky looking, and, very early, heavy and sweet as pear juice, but with light foaming and fine bubbles and definitely having some alcohol even if you can't taste it - be aware!...

...and eating dinner in the “Scheune”, in Perl-Nennig, right at the french-german border, I discover the perfect cliché german food on the daily special menu:

fried sausage (like a 'Bratwurst') from wild boar!
with a side of red cabbage, fried potatoes, battered and crispy fried onions, and a pear with Preiselbeeren, the european sibling to cranberries. The mustard appears to be mellowed by an addition of apple sauce to give the fruits in the dish a last chance to provide an enjoyable transition between the seasons...

Asterix & Obelix would have been delighted.

Schwenker Schwenken

Taking the train through Germany is a beautiful thing to do – watching the landscape change with the faces of people entering the train, and the dialects mutate along with the city names. You can even smell some transitions between states: Saarland is one of these that you can identify blindly – in summer, the border is marked by a smell of grilled meat. Sorry, SCHWENKED SCHWENKER. It's not simply a grill. And it's not simply meat. And it is not just a simple smell you're encountering either.

Schwenken is more than a pastime, it is a tradition, a culture and way to show hospitality. The correct ways of marinating, or where to buy Schwenker (the meat), how to construct the Schwenker (the grill), which wood to use (beech), and who is the better Schwenker (the grill master) are all serious topics that are often discussed at family gatherings and flow best with some Karlsberg Urpils, the local Pilsen style beer, sharp and hoppy and very tasty.

Here's my parents Schwenker, with a fire pit built from a washing machine's drum, and the classical tripod construction with ball-joint to have the roast rotating above the fire. The ball-joing is held on a chain that is used to lower the grill grid, for you need to start the grilling closer to the fire, and end a little higher to finish.

A recipe for Schwenker I find very nice is partially from the book "Das Kochbuch aus dem Saarland", Wofgang Hoelker Verlag, which has many great recipes, including one for Boudin/Budeng, which is really tempting for an Saarland-expatriate...

Schwenker recipe
The ingredients are these:
- 10 pork cutlets,
- 1kg onions
- salt,
- pepper
- 1 tablespoons thyme
- 1 tablespoons oregano
- 1 table spoon clove powder
- 1 tablespoon allspice powder
- 4 garlic cloves
- 2 crushed bay leaves
- 15 juniper berries

The meat should be neck pieces without bones and mostly lean. Rub it with the salt, and then layer it in a bowl with the spices: first a layer of onion rings, then a layer of a mix of salt, pepper, thyme, oregano, garlic, bay leaves, cloves, juniper berries, and allspice. Then a layer of meat, and repeating the onion-spice-meat sequence, finishing with onions. This should stay cool for a night, optimally, for next day's dinner.
I personally like adding a little bit olive oil to the spice mix, and sometimes I add a little Paprika powder.


Eat it with Dandelion salad if it's early in the year (no idea where to get that in Nashville though..), have a nice little beer with it (in my dad's case as shown above, a Bitburger) and enjoy.

Of course, you can do this on whichever grill you have; I have even pan-fried the marinated meat, after scraping most of the spice mix off, on the stove.. It will taste great, even though beech wood fire and the Schwenker-technology definitely add more than just atmosphere to the experience :-)

Ironworks

Driving from Saarbruecken, the capital of Saarland, the smallest area-state (as opposed to city-state) of Germany, towards Trier is picturesk – at night you can see only the outline of forests encompanying the autobahn on the left, the Saar flowing quietly alongside on the right, lights of the villages and cities along the way shining dimly.

Greysilver monuments, towers, futuristic constructs, steaming chimneys climbing up high, are glowing in the heat of molten ore, or brightly lit to present themselves as reminders of what this area once was and still is – proud producer of steel.

The Voelklinger Huette is a UNESCO-sponsored world heritage site, representing industrialism and beauty so eery as nowadays only attributed to Fritz Lang and his Metropolis, yet it is here, standing, still alive, this one now supporting, in his postmodern halls of pastmodern constructions, the culture of today, the art exhibitions and Jazz and Rock concerts, while its siblings are still active, blowing sulphurous clouds into the sky, red signals marking chimney tops, blue flames shooting out high.

Currywurst my day

The couple next to me started discussing their meal - theirs was much better, they agreed before getting into the details. The lady here had put way too little sauce on the sausage. And their own buns were much better. And the sausage cutter, the machine you drop in the sausage to have it slice up in evenly sized pieces, at this little stand was not working right, they complained. The pieces were "zerfleddert", ripped apart.

Me, still enjoying this amazing little fastfood feast that has a long tradition in Berlin and is famous way beyond german borders, still think the ketchup-curry-spice mix was pretty well balanced, sweet, fruity, probably from some addition of apple sauce to the ketchup, acidic from something akin to a soysauce-vinegar mix, and curryish, well, from curry. The sausage was decent or, for someone as deprived as me, who had not eaten something like this in a couple of years, even really great, and the buns were good because warmed up on the grill, nice light crust, and warm and soft inside. Of course you can get this better. But then you would not stand right next to the Gedaechtniskirche.

Pigeons and a few oddly grey-black patchy crows were hopping around, waiting for bread to fall. I befriended a crow, after staring at it for a while and being worried it might recognize me, with a piece of bread.



Currywurst stand at the Gedaechtniskirche, Berlin

Authorities

A kid riding his bike on the walkway, encompanied by two young men, is being stopped by a policeman – you can't ride the bike on the sidewalk, you're supposed to walk the bike there. The kid is a little nervous, and the police guy tries, friendly but intensely, to make the boy understand the situation and the gravity of potential consequences of this misbehavior. One more child lost to fear of the authoritarian system, and one more to eternally obey any given rule.

It makes me think of an old TV-show “The hidden camera”, in which situations were manipulated to confuse people while they were, unknowingly, filmed. In one show a traffic light was installed in the middle of a 2-mile long straight street in the middle of far-stretching fields – you could see miles of flat land. You were able to tell a car was approaching long before hearing it. Worse, this street had not seen more than 20 cars a day since years. Yet, now it had traffic light. And the light was set to red.

The average driver waited about 15-25 minutes for the light to change. Some got out of the car to shake and kick the traffic light.

After waiting for 20 minutes, one driver backed up, turned around, and took the longer route through a neighbor village.

That is *very* german.

- People watching at Cafe Reinhard, corner Ku'damm & Fasanenstrasse -

Coffee, cake & people-watching

This corner is perfect to sit down, and drink Cafe au lait, served here in two little pots, one with hot milk, and one with espresso, with a cup to mix the milk-coffee after your own liking.

People watching is what you're doing here – Berlin wears black, these days, but also flat, knee-high boots, very long sweaters, or very short sweater-like dresses, and sometimes tights that look like leggins. Strolling by are the young and the formerly youthful, the rich and the wanting, the beautiful and the character-faced, the winners, and yes, you see the other ones too, but not that many here in this part of town.

The poppyseed pie is phantastic, the ground up seeds have developed a flavor like marzipan, it has a good amount of very juicy raisins and chopped almonds, that only increase the illusion of tasting crunchy yet almost creamy amaretto-ish. Besides the coffee I have a 'Apfelschorle' with the pie: apple juice mixed with sparkling mineralwater. If you never had that, and are not too fond of sparkling water, try it here, where they add just a hint of water, giving the juice a refreshing lightness without too much of a zing.

- 'Cafe Reinhard', corner Ku'damm & Fasanenstrasse? Bleibtreu? -

Russian matronas

Two older ladies walk in and are stunning. Truly stunning. Stunningly out of place and just perfectly fitting in, an unusual feat they deserve a prize for. They also deserve the prize for the “best costume”.

The one is a classical russian matrona, very round, not very tall, wide dress and long wide pants underneath in the same very colorful very flowery pattern, with long silver hair, dark eyes full of ease and content and wit, and glowing-red cheeks that look like from the advertisements of the sixties. Her friend wears a cone-shaped hat, like those you see chinese wearing in reports about the life of fishermen along the Yangtze. The hat is black, her hair is silver-white and tied together in one long braid by a black and white striped band. Her black blouse has a simple, straight cut, while the skirt is sporting horizontal black and white stripes, corresponding to the hair band. I can't avert my eyes of these two (but do, well behaved), they combine aged gorgeousness with rule-ignoring individualism in a way I haven't seen before. Outstandingly crazy.

The ladies join the young beauties at the lunch buffet, and laughter and stories told in the beautiful language of Dostoiewsky and Tolstoi and Pushkin, all hanging on the walls and observing the scene, fill the room.

- 'Gruene Lampe', Uhlandstrasse, in Berlin Mitte/Charlottenburg -

Tschanachi - Lunch at "Gruene Lampe"

Russian beauties come to this place. They check, all model-sized, the contents of different platters and heating containers at the buffet, find a table to put down their purses, and then fill up a plate with little canapees for lunch. Then a bowl of Soljanka. A little bit of that beef stew. And, oh, yes, some blini for dessert of course. How do they keep these figures if they eat lunch like this? Clearly, the local russian community feels at home here.

I order from the menu – Herring in a furcoat is, unfortunately, out, I was looking forward to that pie-shaped dish from herring, potato, hard-boiled egg and red beets; I remember it as being almost sweet, with earthy and fresh fish flavors, a very unusual, yet incredibly delicious combination. But they have Tschanachi, a georgian stew which, served in a little clay pot, is simply wonderful: you open the lid, and the fragrant smell of fresh tomatoes and cilantro comes steaming at you. Underneath this summer sunshine layer you find the lamb stew with carrots, potatoes, eggplants, zucchini, just like your georgian uncle used the onset of harvest season to create the culinary incarnation of the last warm days of autumn.

Have some Kwas with it, an old russian fermented drink with very low alcohol content. And then go later to have some Fassbrause at some other, more berlinian place, and compare flavor notes and let me know if it's only me finding these two similar...

- 'Gruene Lampe', Uhlandstrasse, in Berlin Mitte/Charlottenburg -

Handreader at Ku'damm

She has the gift of creating an atmosphere of urgency. Fixating me intently with her green eyes she repeats again and again “ do you understand me, Barbara?”. If not for the information she reads from the lines of my left hand that she barely looks at and half covers with her own, she deserves the 15 euros I give her for this performance – but no, not more. I'm not interested in being helped, and not in knowing the details of my future. If what she sees will happen, so let it happen, let me be surprised.

She tells me the date that I will think of her. I write it down, so I won't forget to do that.

- Slovenian hand reader at Ku'damm, picking up random or not so random people walking by -