Stomachs on legs are proud to present

Over the last month or two I have taken time out from my afterwork curriculum to practice being a little bit more German. It's difficult to say what prompted this. For a long time I felt that I ended up in this country by accident rather than choice. For a few years, I felt comfortable as a citizen of no-place. But something seems to have shifted. I don't feel like I'll ever want to become German per se, but I finally feel at home enough that I allow myself a certain adopted pride for some of those quaint, old-fashioned customs... like making baked apples stuffed with rosehips, marzipan and hazelnuts, or autumn flower arrangements that include tiny crab apples.

After four years of living in Cologne, I've finally committed to my bicycle as a means of daily transport - using a 2nd hand foldable '50s klapprad to traverse the terrifyingly fast bicycle lanes and negotiate traffic (preferably with Erik alongside me as bikecoach).

In order to make my work-permit stick like glue, I recently participated in a nine-day state-subsidised integration course. I was hoping to be schooled in sausage varieties, but instead bonded with Phillipino, Jamaican, Dominican Republican and Kurdish classmates over parliamentary processes and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

At the start of the first day of our integration course, the tutor, a nice Turkish man named Herr Kaygisiz, asked us what we thought was typically German. Naturally, the first things that sprang to my mind were beer & cake.

Although I never drank beer before moving to Germany, I now enjoy a daily schwarzbier or pils. Unfortunately I don't like the local brew Kölsch so much.

Cake is a bit more difficult. Although my friends might deny it, cake still plays an integral or even iconic role in the lives of young Germans. Our pals love to spend an occasional Sunday eating cake, drinking coffee and gossiping the afternoon away. Below is a picture of Carmen's birthday tea-break - a symphony of cake.



For my own part, I would usually rather eat a sandwich. Although I admire many German cakes - rustic, not too sweet, using yeasted bases and seasonal fruit like zwetschgen plums, or copious poppyseeds or light quark cheesecake formulas - I am not a committed cake fan. Manufactum has one apple, walnut & poppyseed cake that I especially love (in photo below, with a crust of poppyseeds like purple volcanic sand). But I have never felt the need to bake a German cake.



I bake very rarely, and when I do it tends to be things like strawberry-lavender muffins, sweet potato pie, or blueberry-molasses cake, from Canadian or American books and websites. This is my habit generally when cooking - to make food I can't buy around the corner from my house. Variety is the spice of life, as they say, but of course going against the local culinary grain is also a way of satisfying nostalgia and creating a bubble in which to feel at home when you live abroad.

So for my birthday in early August, we made a nostalgic yum cha homage lunch: steamed buns, scallop shiu-mai, chinese broccoli and black sesame dumplings all made from scratch (to my chagrin it turned out Erik is much more talented at dumpling construction than me). It was a perfect lazy Sunday. And the German birthday cake that Ina brought along turned out to be the perfect dessert to follow this meal. A coconut-date cake, it was very light, fluffy and moist - so moist it was almost juicy in texture, rather than crumbly and cakey, and exactly as I like it: not too sweet.

Although I am quite keen to experiment with poppyseed-streaked muffins, if there is any cake that might start me on a path of German baking, I think it will be this delightful coconut-buttermilk-date cake.

INA'S COCOS-BUTTERMILK-DATE CAKE

Ingredients:
3 eggs
1 & 1/4 cups raw sugar (or more, to taste)
2 cups buttermilk
4 cups flour
22 g, 5.25 tsp or 1 & 1/2 packets of German baking powder (supposedly American/UK baking powder is 'double-acting', so you might use less than this recipe calls for - perhaps 4 teaspoons)
2 cups dessicated coconut
1/2 cup sugar (or more, to taste)
1/2 cup chopped dried dates
400 ml cream (or two 'becher' pottles)

Mix the first five ingredients together and pour into a greased pan. Mix the coconut, sugar and dates together and spread over the top. Bake for around 30 minutes at 140 degrees.
As soon as you remove it from the oven, pour 400 ml cream over top and let cool.

You could try it with beer I guess, but we enjoyed it with a 2008 Rheinhesser Grauer Burgunder (a dry Pinot Grigio). The cake-baker is pictured with her family below.

My workmate Niklas is in a band called Locas in Love and they're playing a show tonight at Altes Pfandhaus in the Südstadt (an old pawn shop turned into a small seated concert venue).

(The photo above is of his other band, Karpatenhund, eating cake at one of Cologne's nicest small konditorein, Café Walden)

Below is a new Locas in Love video where they are singing about the pleasures of winter connected to frozen lakes and staying indoors to make cookies. Niklas is the blonde one on the left chucking the cookie dough around blithely.

In the second video, Niklas is grilling something next to the river Rhein. It appears to be chestnuts. He is serving them with tea (or coffee?), what looks like 'lebkuchen' (spicy christmas cookies), and a little bit of pathos.


Locas In Love - Wintersachen from Locas In Love on Vimeo.


Locas In Love - Roder from Locas In Love on Vimeo.

Today, since I had got myself in a teensy bit of trouble with the immigration department, me & Erik went over to the Auslanderamt. Speaking of the 1950s, this building is typical of Cologne's post-war architecture - at first glance nondescript and beige, but then you start to notice some pretty cool details like big portholes and original lighting fixtures. For some reason, both the entrance by the elevator and the 1st floor immigration department hallway were paved with orange juice and milk cartons. So I was glad I wasn't on acid.







After submitting some papers and promising to bring more, we thought we would have lunch at a big Brauhaus by the Dom cathedral, Früh. That's the Cologne coat of arms above the door. Who that friendly gentleman is in stone relief, I am not sure. He probably worked at the immigration department.





The sausage & cheese salad above was served with a side-dish of yummy bratkartoffeln pan-fried potatoes. The salad, too, looks like something from the 1950s - from one of those cookbooks that has pictures of stuff preserved in aspic, and weird joints of meat with frilly paper sockettes on them, and trifle.

Anyway, it was much yummier than it looks: thin strips of some nameless yellow cheese, really good pickled gherkin, and fleischwurst, which is sort of a cross between luncheon sausage and paté and kids eat it a lot here. I'm not usually a big fan of dill but it added a lot to this salad. Dill, I'm giving you another chance.

I ordered a liver dumpling which came in the usual nice clear broth, sprinkled with a tiny bit of fresh parsley, with a crisp on the outside soft on the inside rye roll.

It was good but the one I had at the Viktuellienmarkt in Munich was better. The Früh version was just a fraction more liver-tasting.

I wonder if I'll have to identify different types of dumpling as part of my integration course.

The server was a joker as is usual at the Brauhaus, and when a businessman next to us asked for an assortment of vegetarian things like plain noodles, the server looked at him with a mixture of disbelief and amusement. He gestured at a few vege dishes on the menu and gently chided, "is that really going to fill you up?"

After lunch we emerged into the warm light of a fading summer, on the small square in front of Früh where a guillotine once stood.

I wish one of us had had a proper camera that night at Brauhaus Putz. I love how my colleague Wulf looks like a weather-beaten politico who just spent 23 hours in the war room, and is now enjoying a well deserved fag with some raw mince.

Maybe some Republicans think Germany is full of people like this: who wear Obama t-shirts and smoke Players P&S while eating raw mince & onion on crisp white buns.

On the subject of smoking & eating, I was just reading an article from February last year about the latent smoking ban in Germany. It quotes Claudia Picht, whose organic café Metzgerei Schmitz was an extreme anomaly last year with its self-imposed smoking ban. She was quoted as saying "I don't see the non-smoking principle of my café as a prohibition, but as a special offer to those people who want some fresh air." Aw.
"They keep telling the barkeepers that a smoking ban would decrease their rates. I think people have to be very courageous to say: 'I will do it anyway! I will turn my bar into a non-smoking place.' And then they find out that drinking coffee can also be wonderful without a cigarette!'"

Meanwhile the old guard of non-organic sausage-loving Germans is represented by Meinolf Saure, the owner of the monolithic Brauhaus Früh. He is quoted as saying "I cannot support a general ban, for a bar without smoke would be nothing." But he admits that he is also happy about the non-smoking areas. "We have established them on every level of our bar and they are a huge success."

The jury is still out on whether eating a raw mince mettwurst brötchen without a cigarette can also be wonderful.

Ironically, my workmate Wulf took up smoking again when he was in North America. The smoking ban in Toronto meant that people would go outside for a chat and a fag, and since he is so tall he found this an easier way to converse than trying to shout down at people in the noisy club.

As New Years approached last year, I was less excited about clinking glasses of 'sekt' bubbly than I was about the promised moratorium on smoking, about to be introduced in clubs. Most eating and drinking venues in Germany are not air-conditioned. The ban felt long overdue - other European countries with a strong penchant for smoking had banned it in public spaces, what felt like ages ago (Italy, Ireland, England, even France). Not without protest. A Parisian cafe-owner, Olivier Colombe, was quoted in the Independant last December as saying "Long dinners with several bottles of wine and lots of discussion are going to be difficult".
It sounds like he needs to sit down for a delicious cup of coffee with the über-upbeat Claudia Picht.

Just before New Years, the governors of North Rhein Westphalia decided that they would push the start of the ban back so that the fine Kölle folk could smoke it up during the traditional carnival season. Then, when I thought the ban would finally trudge into effect on July 1st, a loop-hole was discovered to allow smaller venues who don't have room for a 'non-smoking' area to become members' smoking clubs.

The Federal Constitutional Court ruled on July 30th in favour of plaintiffs who said the constitutional rights to property and to exercise one’s profession were at stake, easing smoking bans for at least 60,000 one-room establishments. It's a convenient loop hole that has been jumped on enthusiastically by all the local discotheques (which are, by the way, not necessarily all that small).

The Economist wrote on the 24th of July that "The German Hotel and Restaurant Association says smoking bans have cost small bars and restaurants 30% of their revenues. That shakes a pillar of social life: the Stammtisch, a regulars’ table at the corner bar where fellowship is forged. If people cannot smoke at Köpi, says its bartender, “we would lose our regulars”.

Anti-smoking campaigners have long found Germany a hard case. Last year the Swiss Cancer League ranked the tobacco-fighting zeal of 30 European countries, and placed Germany 27th. The new smoking bans might improve its ranking, but they are riddled with 130 exemptions, complains Martina Pötschke-Langer, of the German Cancer Research Centre."

130 exemptions is quite an achievement in my opinion. That's something worth bragging about. I'm amazed at the number of loopholes that the normally fastidious Germans have allowed to permeate this veritable legislative sieve. And 'strict' is clearly a matter of interpretation.

Five days ago, bloomberg.com published the following confusing news item. The court begins by upholding the law with no members' club exceptions in straight-laced Bavaria, but then sidles around it by claiming that smoking in beer tents (which also serve a number of Bavarian food delicacies) can be allowed until the end of the year because it is of a temporary nature.

"The Bavarian law is in line with a July 30 ruling that permits smoking bans as long as they don't allow for exceptions, the Karlsruhe-based Constitutional Court said today. Allowing smoking in beer tents until the end of this year doesn't breach rules because the exemption is of a temporary nature, it said. The Bavarian state law, one of the strictest in Germany, doesn't apply to clubs with a restricted membership because they aren't open to the public."

Say whut? Isn't saying something is allowed simply because it's temporary, the very definition of an exception?

Bavaria, sorry mate, I don't think you are as strict as you are cracked up to be.

Most people I've asked still don't think the tobacco lobby is especially strong here: they think all this poking loop-holes in the fabric of the law is down to the strength of the German Hotel and Restaurant Association (DEHOGA). The DEHOGA insists that as long as the consumption of tobacco is not generally forbidden it should remain a personal decision whether or not to smoke in a bar.

But some, like Claudia Picht, are pretty sure the tobacco lobby is meeting up with the DEHOGA in some war rooms of their own.

The Economist commented that it is hard to prove, although cigarette ladies are a fixture at political parties’ conventions. "Germany has conducted no large-scale campaign on the dangers of passive smoking, says Dr Pötschke-Langer. Despite boosting taxes recently, cigarettes are still cheaper than in Britain and Ireland. The share of the adult population that smokes has dropped from more than half in 1950 to around a third, but smoking rates remain among the highest in Europe."

Cologne's yearly c/o Pop festival began this week, and I celebrated the opening day by eating a c/o Pop ice cream cone from the organic ice cream truck which sometimes appears on Brüsselerplatz. Some would have you believe the cute two-tone van is there every fine afternoon, but I think it depends which dimension you're currently inhabiting.

The cone cost one euro (about 30 cents more expensive than your average non-organic ice cream cone): Demi and Erik told me when they were kids a cone went for 50 pfennig (about 20 cents). The range of flavours this guy offers is pretty dope: the mango-mint was good and I'm looking forward to trying the Hollunder-blossom and yoghurt flavour, and the cassis flavour. The milk & spelt-cookies one could be good too.
And I'm not even such a big fan of ice cream. This is actually the first time in living memory that I have bought one. Kein scheiss.



I remember some years ago buying a Cologne techno compilation, that featured a red & white tiled modernist drinks cart on the cover. Supposedly some guy would set it up in random places and sell alcoholic beverages. At that time I thought it was a pretty cool idea, but since I moved here I have never seen the cart and none of my work mates has ever heard of it.

Supposedly coffee carts are against the law here, and Demi & Erik were also laughing at the idea of someone trying to put an uncovered food vendor stall under a tree or lamp post or anywhere a bird might shed unhygienic effluence.

And yet apparently it is possible to get around the current smoking 'ban' in corner bars and clubs simply by having someone sitting outside the door with a 'smoking club' list which everyone who wants to go inside has to sign and become a temporary 'member' of.

The hygiene and health laws in Germany can be very strict, but apparently the rights of 'kneipe' owners are still more important than the lung-health of hospitality workers.

Bear that in mind if somebody approaches you with a clipboard outside one of the c/o Pop venues.

Introducing Metzgerei Schmitz, once a butcher belonging (presumably) to a gentleman named Schmitz, it's now an organic cafe and the best place to spy hipsters, quiche and steak-frites in Cologne.

In summer its prime west-facing position means its kerb-side tables are at a premium all afternoon.

I was never a huge fan of quiche, but I must say the quiche offerings of Metzgerei Schmitz have come to occupy a special place in my heart, because they are hardly eggy at all, and the buttery crusts are packed with big colourful chunks of veges and things. I especially love the one with beetroot topped with a few thin strips of roasted camembert and sprigs of freshly snipped thyme - and the one pictured below, which has gorgonzola, leeks and small round grapes. Yummy.



It's asparagus time once again, and the best I've had so far this season was for breakfast at Schmitz: a delightful omelette, asparagus 'gratineed' with a sprinkling of parmesan, and crostini piled with balsamicky tomato and basil.



Generally I hold cake & hipsters in the same regard (can be pretty to look at, but have to be in the mood for them). The cakes at Schmitz are a little on the sweet side for me but they are very beguiling to look at. The one below has a nutty crust and the berries are johannisbeeren, which are tart jewel-like red currants.



Their Italian sandwiches are also quite decent too, I like the softness of the argentinian roast beef focaccia, and you can get them with Merguez sausage, or goats cheese and honey.



Metzgerei Schmitz is at 28 Aachenerstrasse, it has a bigger brother next door called Salon Schmitz but the bigger spot lacks the 'gemütlichkeit' of the original.

At last...at long last. The German fine hand-crafted goods emporium Manufaktum, and its signature Bread & Butter bakery/cafe, has come to Cologne. It's in the Disch-haus, a beautiful curved building built in '28, seen as an early 'manifesto of modernism'. We went along on their second day of business.

I first ate Manufaktum's signature sour 'sauerteig' bread at their branch in Munich - Erik and me ate a whole half loaf drowned in pumpkin-cinnamon jam. I then discovered that they do a very good short black espresso at their branch in Duesseldorf (served on a small silver tray with a glass of water), so I've been looking forward to the Cologne branch opening, a lot.

I'm looking forward to trying out the nicely curated offerings of delicatessan goods over the coming months. And it's always fun to browse the kitchenware like raclette machines, utilitarian yet impracticle modernist toaster models from the 50s, Haussler wood-burning ovens for 3000 euros, Kenyo Warikomi knives, hand-made copper & porcelain bain-maries from France, and very serious looking small metal gadgets for removing plum or cherry stones.
And the gardening section is fun too.

Bread tapas, anyone? !



Manfaktum's cafe Bread & Butter is mostly for 'brotzeit' - not as in dinner but as in a snack of something on bread. They have a selection of thick cut sour rye bread with a thick layer of hand-made butter and then cheese, salami or a gouache of quark, taramasalata, sun dried tomatoes or other spread.

The bread with a blue-shot creamy cheese or italian salami both came daubed with barbieri aprikosen-senf - a sharp, tangy apricot 'Mostarda' jam from Lombardia Italy.



The poppy seed cake was the yummiest thing actually. I recommend to order that and take a loaf of bread home. These bread snacks are overpriced at 4 euros each. Whereas half a loaf will cost you 2 euros.

The poppyseed 'mohnkuchen' is nutty tasting and minimally sweet.





Latte art is mocked (mocca-ed?) by some, but in Europe it's a crucial indication that the barista has paid due care to a velvety texture milk and a well-extracted oily espresso. If you are ever in Cologne, come here and order an espresso macchiato: you'll be served a nice small-sized flat white as in the photo above (no, not as strong as in NZ, but thank god, not a milky milkshake - unless you order a latte macchiato, which was my first folly). A capuccino here means something similar to the espresso macchiato pictured, but in a slightly larger size.

Bread & Butter use Mokaflor beans from Florence, (70 & arabica, 30% robusta) available from the store in a gold shrink-wrapped packet.

Or you can have this delicious fizzy French grapefruit drink instead:



And across the road is the rather attractive new Kolumba museum which, when seen from the inside, has really quite amazing natural light effects, star bursts and jagged rows of pin pricks, from the holes in the facade.



Felt a bit sick after this maiden voyage to Manufaktum Koeln though. Probably too much bread and butter.

Weckmanner like this fellow are made for St Martin's Day, and are stocked in German bakeries until almost christmas. St Martin's Day is a nice festival where kids join a candle light parade with lanterns, and people roast geese. The day honours a military man who gave half his jacket to a beggar and became a saint. Apparently it was a very nice jacket.

Naturlich, this Weckman eventually met his fate and was eaten, starting with the head. He was a bit dry & salty. Erik thinks a wholewheat weckman is like cruelty to children. But the white ones are usually much more misshapen, even if they taste better.

This Tim Burton-esque 'weckman' (whole wheat, from the Biomarkt) is the nicest & most handsome one I've seen: but for some reason, he looks like he needs to go to the toilet.



The cool thing about Weckmanner, which are apparently based on a priest, is that their little pipes do work. Saintly fun for all the family.

I was reading Coco's post and waxing nostalgic about those little mini doughnuts they made at kiwi school fairs and pretty much any public gathering.

In Germany, you can get cold donuts from bakeries (glazed or cinnamon donuts), but top consumption goes to the Berliner
(known as jelly donut in the States, though I'm having a serious memory block over what we call them in NZ. I think they are known as another animal to the ring-shaped and dusted variety, right?)
In Germany when it comes to bakeries the Berliner rules the roost. Witness the huge glass walled stacks of them at Merzenich chain bakeries for ambling shoppers and children of shoppers. Rather gothically, their jelly filling is injected with a large syringe post cooking.



But when cruising Christmas markets and malls or supermarkets, for your hot fried and/or doughy treat, you will have much more luck finding either waffles or (mostly at Christmas time) the delicious 'reibekuchen'.

A typical scene at the entrance of Kaiser's supermarkets:



The waffles are of course very good, especially when accompanied with a thick cherry compote like the ones at local theme park Fantasialand. (The waffles are pretty much the highlight of Fantasialand by the way, though supposedly Michael Jackson is a big fan of their roller coasters. But the Chinese acrobats in the Chinatown section performing to high speed euro pop in faded neon leotards? How hokey)

Getting back to the important stuff (i.e. fried treats), Reibekuchen - grated potato pancakes served scalding hot with apple mousse - are damn good.

Basically,
this:



leads to this:




and it all ends in this:




Super on a freezing night with a cup of Glühwein.

Here is a recipe for banana-lemon waffles from a woman living in Berlin

The 'you're not in Hataitai' series will be about the as-faithful-as-possible reconstruction of new zealand favourites...

Because there are some things you just can't get in Germany (parsnips, feijoas, watercress, creamed corn for starters) sometimes we flown-the-kupu kiwis have to improvise...

Tinned spaghetti is clearly not an institution in German kindergartens. Erik hadn't ever heard of it until I pointed out a few lonely tins at the supermarket. When I told him & Demian about the NZ tradition of tinned-spaghetti-toasties they had a good laugh and told me about their friend, a drum n bass producer in Essex, who likes putting baked beans on pizza. Somehow I couldn't come up with a clear argument of why spaghetti toasted sandwiches are much more elegant and sensible than baked beans on a pizza, but I still knew I needed to eat such a toastie sometime in the near future.

I chose some nice-looking Peter & Paul rye sour dough bread. Note: amazing bread is a sort of birthright of all Germans, even the supermarket bread kicks ass. White Tip Top
bread like I used to squash salt & vinegar chips and vegemite between is seen as tantamount to child abuse by Germans who encounter it abroad... However there is a strange crust-less refined wheat flour bread variety known as TOAST (other than small crustless toasted sandwiches and paninis and other foreign inventions, bread is normally never toasted). Why anyone would choose that stuff over delicious German bread is beyond me.

The final toasted spaghetti sandwich was quite good - mostly due to the bread toasted with a smear of olive oil. This tinned spaghetti is cut into short lengths so doesn't have that familiar worms-in-a-can comfort. If I'm going to impress the virtues of a spaghetti sandwich upon Erik I'll need to put something a bit sharper or tastier inside... some chopped Mettwurst, parmesan or anchovy-rosemary sauce, though that would seem to be departing from the whole "in praise of blandness" aspect.

The Arbeitslosigkeit (unemployment) may be shrinking, but suddenly all those jeans don't fit right anymore. To address this discrepancy in girth, Merzenich
puts their best gelatinized berries forward on a spring day. These fruit-gelee slices (in the background) always entice.. glittering in the sunlight. But ever since I heard the story of how Erik's sister used to live by a Haribo factory (Germany's big time confectioner, founded not too far away in Bonn in 1920), I really have trouble eating products with lots of gelatine involved. Big trucks used to pull up every week and unload pig's heads, you see...an image that made me resolve to only eat artisan, hand made gelatine if such a thing exists. But since I learned to love pork in Japan I'm happy that Deutschland is a pork-proud nation: and I'm likewise glad that no snout is left to waste.