It is impossible in translation to give Heine's intense ridicule and scorn. He was a Frenchman out of place in Germany. He revolted at things German, but endeared himself to his people by his wit, universality of talent, and sincerity. The world has thanked him for his "Reisebilder." Heine gives us new ideas of the horrors of German cookery when he talks of Göttingen sausages, Hamburg smoked beef, Pomeranian goose-breasts, ox-tongues, calf's brains in pastry, gudgeon cakes, and "a wretched pig's-head in a wretcheder sauce, which has neither a Grecian nor a Persian flavour, but which tasted like tea and soft soap."
He cannot leave Göttingen without this description: "The town of Göttingen, celebrated for its sausages and its university, belongs to the King of Hanover, and contains nine hundred and ninety-nine dwellings, divers chambers, an observatory, a prison, a library, and a council chamber where the beer is excellent."
German sausages are very good. Even the great Goethe, in dying, remembered to send a sausage to his æsthetic love of a lifetime, the Frau Von Stein.
Thackeray, who was keenly alive to the horrors of German cookery, says that whatever is not sour is greasy, and whatever is not greasy is sour. The curious bill of fare of a middle-class German table is something like this: They begin with a pudding. They serve sweet preserved fruit with the meat, generally stewed cherries. They go on with dreadful dishes of cabbage and preparations of milk, curdled, soured, and cheesed.
Dr. Lieber, the learned philologist, was eloquent on the subject of the coarseness of the German appetite. He had early corrected his by a visit to Italy, and he remarked, with his usual profundity, that it was "the more incomprehensible as nature had given Germany the finest wines with which to wash down the worst cookery."
A favourite dish is potato pancakes. The raw potatoes are scraped fine, mixed with milk, and then treated like flour cakes, served with apple or plum sauce.
Sauer-kraut is ridiculed, but it is only cabbage cut fine and pickled. There are two delicious dishes in which it plays an important part: one is roast pheasant cut fine and cooked with sauer-kraut and champagne; the other is sauer-kraut cooked in the croûte of a Strasbourg pâté de foie gras.
Favourite Austro-Hungarian dishes are bachhendl, baked spring-chicken,—the chicken rolled into a paste of egg flour and then baked. It is rather dry to eat, but just the thing with a bottle of Hungarian wine. Also a beefsteak with plenty of paprika, or Hungarian red pepper, Brinsa cheese, pot cheese, made in the Carpathian mountains and baked in a hot oven.
Brook trout is never fried, but boiled in water, and then served surrounded by parsley in melted butter.
In eastern Russia grows a pea, the gray pea, which is boiled and eaten like peanuts by peeling off the hard skin, or boiled with some sort of sour-sweet sauce, which softens the skin. This pea is such a favourite with the Lithuanians that it is made the subject of poetry.