CHAPTER XV[ToC]
FOOD
Although the Germans as a nation are large eaters, they begin their day with the usual light continental breakfast of coffee and rolls. In households where economy is practised it is still customary to do without butter, or at any rate to provide it only for the master of the house and for visitors. In addition to rolls and butter, you may, if you are a man or a guest, have two small boiled eggs; but eggs in a German town are apt to remind you of the Viennese waiter who assured a complaining customer that their eggs were all stamped with the day, month, and year. Home-made plum jam made with very little sugar is often eaten instead of butter by the women of the family; and the servants, where white rolls are regarded as a luxury, have rye bread. No one need pity them on this account, however, as German rye bread is as good as bread can be. Ordinary London household bread is poor stuff in comparison with it. The white rolls and butter are always excellent too, and I would even say a good word for the coffee. To be sure, Mark Twain makes fun of German coffee in the Tramp Abroad: says something about one chicory berry being used to a barrel of water; but the poorest German coffee is better than the tepid muddy mixture you get at all English railway stations, and at most English hotels and private houses. Milk is nearly always poor in Germany, but whipped cream is often added to either coffee or chocolate.
The precision that is so striking in the arrangement of German rooms is generally lacking altogether in the serving of meals. The family does not assemble in the morning at a table laid as in England with the same care for breakfast as it will be at night for dinner. It dribbles in as it pleases, arrayed as it pleases, drinks a cup of coffee, eats a roll and departs about its business. Formerly the women of the family always spent the morning in a loose gown, and wore a cap over their undressed hair. This fashion, Germans inform you, is falling into desuetude; but it falls slowly. Take an elderly German lady by surprise in the morning, and you will still find her in what fashion journals call a negligé, and what plain folk call a wrapper. When it is of shepherd's plaid or snuff-coloured wool it is not an attractive garment, and it is always what the last generation but one, with their blunt tongues, called "slummocking." Most German women are busy in the house all the morning, and when they are not going to market they like to get through their work in this form of dress and make themselves trim for the day later. The advantage claimed for the plan is one of economy. The tidy costume worn later in the day is saved considerable wear and tear. The obvious disadvantage is the encouragement it offers to the sloven. In England whatever you are by nature you must in an ordinary household be down to breakfast at a fixed hour, presentably dressed; at any rate, with your hair done for the day, and, it is to be supposed, with your bath accomplished. Directly you depart from this you open the door to anything in the dressing-gown and slipper way, to lying abed like a sluggard, and to a waste of your own and the servants' time that undermines the whole welfare of a home. At least, this is how the question presents itself to English eyes. Meanwhile the continent continues to drink its coffee attired in dressing-gowns, and to survive quite comfortably. In every trousseau you still see some of these confections, and on the stage the young wife who has to cajole her husband in the coming scene usually appears in a coquettish one. But then it will not be made of shepherd's plaid or snuff-coloured wool.
The dinner hour varies so much in Germany that it is impossible to fix an hour for it. In country places you will find everyone sitting down at midday, in towns one o'clock is usual, in Hamburg five is the popular hour, in Berlin you may be invited anywhen. But unless people dine at twelve they have some kind of second breakfast, and this meal may correspond with the French déjeûner, or it may be even more informal than the morning coffee. It consists in many places of a roll or slice of bread with or without a shaving of meat or sausage. Servants have it, children take it to school, charitable institutions supply the bread without the meat to their inmates. In South Germany all the men and many women drink beer or wine with this light meal, but in Prussia most people are content with a belegtes Butterbrot, a roll cut in two, buttered, and spread with meat or sausage or smoked fish. This carries people on till one or two o'clock, when the chief meal of the day is served.
All over Germany dinner begins with soup, and in most parts the soup is followed by the Ochsenfleisch that made it. At least Ochsenfleisch should make it by rights.
"I know what this is," said an old German friend, prodding at a tough slice from a dish we all found uneatable. "This is not Ochsenfleisch at all. This is cow."
Good gravy or horseradish sauce is served with it, whether it is ox or cow, and for a time you take a slice day after day without complaining. It is the persistence of the thing that wears you out in the end. You must be born to Ochsenfleisch to eat it year in and year out as if it was bread or potatoes. It does not appear as regularly in North as in South Germany; and in Hamburg you may once in a way have dinner without soup. People who know Germany find this almost beyond belief, but Hamburg has many little ways of its own, and is a city with a strong individual character. It is extremely proud of its cooking and its food, and it has every right to be. I once travelled with two Germans who in a heated way discussed the comparative merits of various German cities. They could not agree, and they could not let the matter drop. At last one man got the best of it. "I tell you that Hamburg is the finest city in Germany," he said. "In a Hamburg hotel I once ate the best steak I ever ate in my life." The other man had nothing to say to that. Hamburg has a splendid fish supply, and Holstein brings her quantities of fruit and of farm produce. Your second breakfast there is like a French déjeûner, a meal served and prepared according to your means, but a regular meal and not a mere snack. You drink coffee after it, and so sustain life till five o'clock, when you dine. Then you drink coffee again, and as your dinner has probably been an uncommonly good one you only need a light supper at nine o'clock, when a tray will arrive with little sandwiches and slender bottles of beer. In North Germany, where wine is scarce and dear, it is hardly ever seen in many households, so that a young Englishman wanting to describe his German friends, divided them for convenience into wine people and beer people. The wine people were plutocrats, and had red or white Rhine wine every day for dinner. I probably need not tell my well-informed country people that Germans never speak of hock.