Coffee is served at 4 p.m. with Kaffee Küchen, its attendant cake, and at supper (Abendessen) one hot dish, generally veal, is given with a choice of cold viands or sausages in thin slices—leber Würst, Göttinger Würst, hot Frankfurter Würst, and black pudding.
If the above gruesome list does not warn the over-zealous inquirer, his indigestion be on his own head.
In the south the cookery, though still indifferent, approximates more nearly to the French bourgeois cookery.
A dinner-party at a private house of well-to-do German people is always a very long feast, lasting at least two hours, and the cookery, though good, is heavy and rich, and too many sauces accompany the meats. Many of the dishes are not served à la Russe, but are brought round in order that one may help one's self. Just as one is struggling into conversation in defective German, a pike's head obtrudes itself over the left shoulder, and it is necessary to twist in one's seat and go through a gymnastic performance to take a helping.
Except in large cities the Germans are not given to feeding at restaurants.
A golden rule, which may be held to apply all over Germany, is that it is safe to take ladies wherever officers go in uniform.
The Rathskeller
In most German towns where there is a Rathhaus (a town hall) one finds the Rathskeller, where beers or wine, according to the part of the country, are the principal attraction, single dishes, cutlets, steaks, cold meats, oysters, caviar being served more as an adjunct to the drink than as an orthodox meal. The most noted of these Rathskeller are at Bremen, Lübeck, and Hamburg, and that at Bremen is first in importance. It is a mediæval Gothic hall, built 1405-1410, and it holds the finest stock of Rhine and Moselle wine in the world. The wine is kept in very old casks. One of the cellars is of particular interest as being the "Rose" one, where the magistrates used to sit in secret conclave, sub rosa, beneath the great rose carved upon the ceiling. The German Emperor generally pays a visit to the Rathskeller when he visits Bremen.
In the Lübeck Rathskeller is the "admiral's table," said to be made from a plank of the ship of the last Admiral of Lübeck, who flourished in 1570; and even more interesting than the Rathskeller is the Schiffergesellschaft, with its strange motto and its even stranger sign.