Not to get too far off the path here, but there is a nice tradition of light German soft drinks, chief among them the delectable Club Mate, a South American-inspired beverage which falls somewhere between soda and carbonated tea. There’s also the fairly wide family of fassbrauses, which I sadly did not sample, and Spezi, which combines a half and half concoction of cola and orange soda. An expat friend reported an incident of ordering the latter at a cafe and being served orange soda mixed with Coke, tableside, with a retort of “this is what you wanted, isn’t it?”
All in all, German drink culture seems to lean away from the cloying, artificial sameness of America’s, in keeping with the famously fastidious nation’s focus on process and quality. This of course extends to beer gardens, rightly more known for their wheaten alcoholic brews than fruity ones. The Prater Garten, ensconced in the city’s Prenzlauer Berg district since 1837, does their own, in light and dark varieties, all you’ll need for a long evening’s repast under the chestnut trees. They also offer rhubarb sodas, at least during rhubarb season, an updated take on classic German schorle, originally a wine and mineral water spritzer.
To me these tasted close to shrubs (aka drinking vinegars), only minus the vinegar. In terms of other seasonal spring specialties, we missed the signature combination of woodruff (known locally by the superior name Waldmeister) and beer, its emerald essence sparkling inside glasses all around us, although this wouldn’t be the last chance to try that herb in liquid form. Also favored as a radler additive is raspberry, although this one didn’t seem to be as commonly imbibed, at least not at Prater; both are traditionally mixed with Pilsner to make a Berliner Weisse, or served separately in small glasses for personal application, as seen in the garden. The other big seasonal item, white asparagus (aka spargel) had to wait a few days, as we settled for a classic pretzel and sausage combo. Foregoing the Krakauer, the Prussian spin on a Polish sausage, seen commonly at snack bars, I went for the slightly-classier Thuringian variant, which looked especially mighty in its tiny little bun.
Meatballs can basically be found anywhere on earth, if you squint hard enough, but they seem especially predominant in these parts, appearing under several different monikers (buletten, frikadellen (more on those later), klopse, kuechle, pflanzerl). Just as commonly seen, considering the city’s profusion of Turkish food, is kofta. We ate these at Osmans Töchter, a trendy spot where the menu is expansive and the food spectacular, the meal rounded out with fish kofta (a less recognized, but still reputable, branch of the meatball family tree), boregi, braised octopus, grilled chicken and a warm potato salad.
I also had kofta at Sahara Imbiss, which provided few surface pleasures (the space was cramped, countermen admirably surly and dismissive) but good flavors and some unexpected novelty. Here I was excited to discover that, despite weeks of thorough research, I’d missed that Berlin features a variant of East African cuisine we don’t have at all in New York: Sudanese. Owing to Sahara’s East African origin, the kofta here are...still kofta, actually, demonstrating the term’s cross-contintental viability, while the falafel are actually tamiya. Both get tossed onto pita sandwiches heaped with veggies and a clutch spicy peanut sauce, most likely the chili legume dip known as dakwa. All told, it was preferable to the usual doner kebab sandwich mess, and also led me to learn some bonus Jewish history.
In a close second are these amazing Easter eggs, made from actual fresh eggshells, the contents of which are blown out through a tiny hole. We arrived a few days after Easter and found the trees still littered with orbs, although usually of a more durable, probably plastic variety. Since foodstuffs transformed into crafts are the polar opposite of what this blog is about, it’s important to note that the Spreewald also has some endemic culinary specialties. The local river fish (several menus mentioned perch-pike, or pike-perch, which appears to be the fish more commonly known as zander) gets fried in cornmeal, accompanied by pickled squash, or mulched into a fish soup (labelled"fischsuppe", although in this case the closest analogue I can find is this, known only as “eel soup”).
Our meal here also included the blood sausage hash grützwurst, which tasted a bit like German chili, rich and speckled with pepper and allspice. Grützwurst is alternatively known as Tote Oma (“Dead Grandma”), among other morbid names, although I haven’t been able to determine specifically why it’s the grandmother being sacrificed. The name does take on a certain Red Riding Hood quality in these fairy-tale environs of the Spreewald, which seems fitting.
So while in some sense you could assert that the food is different here - owing either to the Sorb culture itself or that group’s self-preserving preservation of antique traditions and dishes - in a larger sense it’s just a tad more old-fashioned, less marked by outside cultural influence. The bill of fare therefore meshes neatly with the classical Prussian-era table, which incorporates a lot of flavors and techniques normally associated with Polish cuisine, while remaining classically “German” in conception. A typical breakfast here might include bread (often dinkelbrot) spread with liverwurst, or sulze (a pickled, highly astringent version of head cheese sometimes known in English as souse), or herring, or all three if your tastes run to grotesque maximalism. A wide assortment of pickles, many of them cubed, colorless, and impossible to identify with any specific vegetable, also make an appearance at the breakfast bar. A lunch by the river in Lübbenau finds multiple places hawking the coastal specialty Fischbrötchen, a taste of what was to come for us in Hamburg, with Backfisch (really a fried fish fillet, despite the “baked fish” name) and Seelachs (“sea salmon,” actually smoked pollock) making up that day’s selections.
Of this mid-century poverty kitchen, it’s really only currywurst that’s not just survived but thrived, a fact that I don’t fully understand but won’t begrudge. It’s mixing of ketchup with curry powder doesn’t seem to add much to the existing sausage, but the effect may be harder to imagine with richer, plumper modern versions, as opposed to the drab runts of the Cold War-era. It also seems more appetizing than ketwurst, at least. Other deprivation staples from this era include breaded and fried jagdwurst, blutwurst (of the solid variety), hackepeter and senfeier, none of which I managed to track down. The GDR museum at one time had a cafe that served many of these dishes, but it appears to have closed for good, proving that even an establishment centered entirely around Ostalgie can’t make them adequately palatable to a modern clientele.
Speaking of old-time obscurities, at some point in Berlin I spotted hoppel-poppel, a Midwestern classic that I suspected had German roots, but never assumed would directly connect back to the motherland. Here it’s a similar hash of leftover odds-and-ends, but isn’t necessarily served with eggs, or for breakfast for that matter. I eventually had a nice woodruff soda, but never got a chance to sample the pickle one being sold in the Spreewald, sadly. It’s always good to leave a reason to return. Maybe when I do, I'll be able to track down that udder schnitzel.