Soups are nearly always good in Germany, and some of the best are not known in England. The dried green corn so much used for soup in South Germany can, however, be bought in London from the German provision merchants, so at the end of this greedy chapter I will give a recipe for making it. Nudelsuppe of strong chicken stock and home-made Nudeln used to be what the Berliner called his roast goose—"eine jute Jabe Jottes," but the degenerate Germans of to-day buy tasteless manufactured Nudeln instead of rolling out their own. Nudeln are the German form of macaroni, but when properly made they are better than any macaroni can be. If you have been brought up in an old-fashioned German ménage, and, as a child likes to do, peeped into the kitchen sometimes, you will remember seeing large sheets of something as thin and yellow as chamois leather hung on a clothes horse to dry. Then you knew that there would be Nudeln for your dinner, either narrow ones in soup, or wider ones boiled in water and sprinkled with others cut as fine as vermicelli and fried brown in butter. The paste is troublesome to make. It begins with a deceptive simplicity. Take four whole eggs and four tablespoonsful of milk if you want enough for ten people, says the cookery book, and make a light dough of it with a knife in a basin. Anyone can do that, you find. But then you must put your dough on the pastry board, and work in more flour as you knead it with your hands. "The longer you knead and the stiffer the dough is the better your Nudeln will be," continues the cookery book. But the next operation is to cut the dough into four, and roll out each portion as thin as paper, and no one who has not seen German Nudeln before they are cooked can believe that this is actually done. It is no use to give the rest of the recipe for drying them, rolling each piece loosely and cutting it into strips and boiling them with salt in water. If you told your English cook to make you Nudeln she would despise it for a foreign mess, and bring you something as thick as a pancake. If you want them you had better get them in a box from a provision merchant, as the Hausfrau herself does nowadays.
English people often say that there is no good meat to be had in Germany. I would say that there is no good mutton, and a great deal of poor coarse beef. But the Filetbraten that you can get from the best butchers is excellent. It is a long roll of undercut of beef, so long that it seems to be sold by the yard. If you cook it in the English way, says my German cookery book, you rub it well with salt and pepper and baste it with butter; while the gravy is made with flour, mushrooms, cream, and extract of beef. I should like to see the expression of the English plain cook if she was told to baste her beef with butter and make her gravy for it with mushrooms. I once came back from Germany with a new idea for gravy, and tried it on a cook who seemed to think that gravy was made by upsetting a kettle over a joint and then adding lumps of flour.
"My sister's cook always puts an onion in the tin with a joint," I said tentatively, for I was not very hopeful. I know that there is always some insuperable objection to anything not consecrated by tradition.
"It gives the gravy a flavour," I went on,—"not a strong flavour"—
I stopped. I waited for the objection.
"We couldn't do that HERE," said the cook.
"Why not?—We have tins and we have onions."
"It would spoil the dripping. What could I do with dripping as tasted of onion?"
I had never thought of that, and so I had never asked my sister what was done in her household with dripping as tasted with onion.
"I should think," I said slowly, "that it could be used to baste the next joint."