When I was in Dresden in May, 1917, I ate elephant meat. An elephant got hurt in the Zoo and had to be killed. A beer restaurant bought his meat for 7000 marks, and it was served with sauerkraut to the public without a card at 1.30 marks. It tasted like the finest kind of chopped meat, and the restaurant was packed as long as the elephant lasted.
The food question is not the same all over Germany, and in Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg and Leipsic they have less than in other places. Bavaria, the Rhine Country and East Prussia are far better off, and in some of the small villages they do not even have a bread card.
One of the hardest things to get is candy. In Berlin one can buy chocolate for sixteen marks a pound, but in Dresden it is very cheap because it is bought on the card. The candy is bought on the grocery card and one gets a half pound every two weeks. Candy lines are the only kind of lines that one sees now in Germany.
One card I forgot to mention is the coal card that will be issued for the coming winter. There is no scarcity of coal, but there are no people or cars for delivering. The people will be given three-fourths as much coal as they formerly consumed.
In times of peace eating in a German restaurant was notoriously cheap, and one could get a menu of soup, meat, potatoes and dessert for 90 pfennigs, and in Munich for 80 pfennigs. Now these same restaurants charge 1.75 marks, that is, twice as much; but even then food is cheaper than in America. Before the war some of the restaurants charged extra if you did not order anything to drink, but this is now done away with.
Anything can be bought without a card if you know how to do it. The government tries in every way to stop this selling, and although the fine is very heavy for selling ohne Karte, it goes on just the same. We always managed to get things without a card. Our janitress got coffee for us at 9.25 marks a pound, our vegetable woman gave us extra potatoes, and we could always get eggs. On the card an egg cost 30 pfennigs and without a card we paid anywhere from 50 pfennigs to 1 mark. The hardest thing to get without a card was sugar, for the food commission has an iron hand on the sugar, but we got it for 2.50 marks a pound. On the card it was 30 pfennigs a pound. It is said that butter could be bought for nine marks a pound without the card, but we never tried to get it.
The police sees that every one gets his share of food. If a woman holds a servant girl's rations from her, the girl can report it to the police and the woman is fined. In a boarding-house when the potatoes are passed around the landlady tells you whether you can take two or three potatoes, or one big potato and one small potato. The food conditions are not always comfortable, but the food commission has the things divided off so they will last for years.
WHAT WE ATE IN GERMANY.
Reading over the food restrictions, one does not get a very clear idea of what we really ate in Germany, so I have made out a menu that was possible in the month of April, 1917. April is, of course, one of the hardest months of the year because it is just before the green vegetables come in and the winter supplies are gone. In this month, however, we could buy canned goods which were forbidden during the winter months, and each person was allowed two and one-half pounds of canned goods a week.
The menu as I have written it includes only things which are bought on a card or without a card, but no restricted food that has been bought underhand without a card as everybody does. It does not include any of the expensive articles like chicken, goose, or fresh vegetables which the better middle class have, and it does not include the canned vegetables, fruit and meat which all German families have in their supply cupboard.