Another German ambition is to have the largest and most comfortable floating hotels. The newest Hamburg and Bremen steamers are indeed unsurpassed in any respect, and their cuisine is particularly good. The trans-Atlantic steamers have the great advantage of being able to buy in New York the best things American markets offer, and in the German ports not only the European delicatessen, but those which the sister boats bring from Oriental countries. I once gained eight pounds in as many days crossing the Big Pond on a German steamer; and can you wonder, in view of the abundance of the choicest viands offered as antidotes to the hunger-breeding sea air?
There are now on the largest steamers Ritz-Carlton restaurants for wealthy epicures; but you need not go to these for good food, as the sample menus for first-cabin breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, herewith reproduced, indicate. He must be hard to please, indeed, who cannot find something on such menus to tempt his appetite—unless he is sea-sick.
GERMAN, SWISS, AND DUTCH CHEESES.
German steamers and German restaurants nearly always offer a variety of French, Dutch, Italian, English, and Swiss cheeses in addition to those of their own country, among the best known of which are the Handkäse, the Liptauer, the Harz, the Kräuter and the Limburger, which, though it originated in Belgium, has come to be looked upon as a specifically German variety.
Germany is not, like Switzerland, Holland, and parts of France, a land of pastures green and studded with grazing cows. Pasturage throughout the Empire is usually so scarce—the land being needed for grain and other crops—that the cows, poor things, are kept in stables all the year round. It is therefore, not surprising that Germany is not among the great exporters of cheeses, most of the many domestic varieties, some of which are excellent, being consumed at home.
Very different is the situation in Switzerland, where cheese-making is one of the principal industries, the value of the exports exceeding $12,000,000 a year, nearly one quarter of which, in 1911, was sent to the United States. So good is the Flavor of Schweizerkäse that even France, in that year, took $2,688,539 worth of it, while Germany took $1,888,257 worth.
Nearly all the cheese which Switzerland exports is of the hard Emmenthaler type, put up in the huge cakes familiar to us all. It is practically the same as the French Gruyère. Not all Emmenthaler comes from the Emmenthal, the valley where the pasturage is particularly abundant and juicy.
The best flavored Swiss cheese is that which is made in summer, when the cows roam the mountain sides, going up higher and higher as the season advances and the snow melts, till they reach the slopes where even at the end of August the soil is still moist and the herbage two or three feet tall. This succulent food, consisting largely of lovely Alpine flowers, they industriously condense into fragrant cream, butter, and cheese.
When we speak of the Alps we mean snow mountains, particularly those of Switzerland. The Swiss themselves, however, when they refer to the Alps, mean the green pastures on the mountain sides on which the cows gather sustenance and wealth for them.
On one of these Alps, above Mürren, I once accosted a peasant who gave me information which confirmed my belief that the much-liked Flavor of Swiss cheese is due not alone to the succulent Alpine forage, but also, in great part, to the way the best of it is made—with all the cream left in the milk.