Green Corn Soup.—For six people take 7 oz. of green corn: wash it well in hot water, and cook it until it is quite soft in stock or salt water. Put it through a sieve, add boiling stock, and serve with fried slice of bread or with small semolina dumplings.
Green Corn Soup.—Another way. For six people take 5½ oz. of green corn, wash it well in hot water, and let it simmer for a few minutes with a little stock and 1½ oz. butter. Then add strong stock, and let it simmer slowly with the lid on till the corn is soft. Then stir a tablespoonful of fine flour with half a cupful of milk, and add it to the soup, stirring all the time. This must then cook an hour longer. When ready to serve, mix the yolks of two eggs with a little sour cream, and add the soup carefully so that it is not curdled. The soup is not strained through a sieve when it is served without dumplings.
The little dumplings are first cooked as a panada of semolina, butter, milk and egg, and then dropped into the soup and cooked in it for ten minutes.
CHAPTER XVI[ToC]
SHOPS AND MARKETS
Berlin people compare their Wertheim with the Bon Marché at Paris, or with Whiteley's in London; only always adding that Wertheim is superior to any emporium in France or England. So it really is in one way. A great artist designed it, and the outside of the building is plain and stately, a most refreshing contrast to most Berlin architecture. On the ground floor there is a high spacious hall that is splendid when it is lighted up at night, and a staircase leads up and down from here to the various departments, all decorated soberly and pleasantly, mostly with wood. You can buy almost anything you want at Wertheim's, from the furniture of your house to a threepenny pair of cotton mittens with a thumb and no fingers. You can see tons of the most hideous rubbish there, and you can find a corner reserved for original work, done by two or three artists whose names are well known in Germany. For instance, Wertheim exhibits the very clever curious "applications" done by Frau Katy Münchhausen, groups of monkeys, storks, cocks and hens, and other animals, drawn with immense spirit and life on cloth, cut out and then machined on a background of another colour. The machining has a bad sound, I admit, but for all that the "applications" are enchanting. Wertheim, too, shows some good furniture; he sells theatre tickets, books, fruit, groceries, Liberty cushions, embroideries, soaps, perfumes, toys, ironmongery, china, glass, as well as everything that can be called drapery. He has a tea-room as well as a large general refreshment-room, where you can get ices, iced coffee, beer, all kinds of sandwiches, and the various Torten Germans make so very much better than other people. In this room no money is wasted on waiters or waitresses, and no one expects to be tipped. You fetch what you want from a long bar running along two sides of the room, and divided into short stretches, each selling its own stuff; you pay at the counter, and you carry your ice or your cake to any little marble-topped table you choose. The advantage of the plan is that you do not have to wait till you catch the eye of a waitress determined not to look your way: the disadvantage is that you have to perform the difficult feat of carrying a full cup or a full glass through a crowd. Whatever you buy at the counter is sure to be good, but if all you could get was a Mugby Junction bun you would have to eat it after the exhausting process of buying a yard of ribbon or a few picture postcards at Wertheim's.
To begin with, there are no chairs. You cannot sit down. On a hot summer morning, when you have perhaps been to the market already, you go to the Leipziger Strasse for theatre tickets, a pair of gloves, and two or three small odds and ends. On the ground floor you see gloves, innumerable boxes of them besieged by a pushing, determined crowd of women. The shop ladies in any coloured blouses look hot and weary, but try to serve six customers at once. When you have chosen what you want, and know exactly how sharp the elbows to left and right of you are, you see your lady walk off with your most pushful neighbour and the pair of three-penny gloves she has after much argument agreed to buy; for at Wertheim's you cannot depart with so much as a halfpenny postcard till it has passed through three pairs of hands besides your own. First the shop lady must deposit it with a bill at the cashier's desk. Then, when the cashier can attend to you, you pay for it. Then you may wait any time until the third person concerned will do it up in paper and string. This last proceeding is often so interminably delayed that if you were not in Germany you would snatch at what you have paid for and make off. But the Polizei alone knows what would happen if you ran your head against the established pedantry of things in the city of the Spree. You would probably find yourself in prison for Beamtenbeleidigung or lèse majesté. "The Emperor is a fool," said some disloyal subject in a public place. "To prison with him," screamed every horror-struck official. "Off with his head!" "But I meant the Emperor of China," protested the sinner. "That's impossible," said the officials in chorus. "Anyone who says the Emperor is a fool means our Emperor." And an official spirit seems to encroach on the business one, and drill its very customers while it anxiously serves them. For instance, the arrangements for sending what you buy are most tiresome and difficult to understand at Wertheim's. His carts patrol the streets, and your German friends assure you that he sends anything. You find that if you shop with a country card the things entered on it will arrive; but if you buy a bulky toy or some heavy books and pay for them in their departments, you meet with fuss and refusal when you ask as a matter of course to have them sent. It can be done if your goods have cost enough, but not if you have only spent two or three shillings. It is the fashion in England just now for every man who writes about Germans to say that they are immensely ahead of us in business matters. I cannot judge of them in their factories and warehouses, but I am sure they are behind us in their shops. A woman cannot live three hundred miles from Berlin and get everything she wants from Wertheim delivered by return and carriage free. Nor will he supply her with an immense illustrated catalogue and a book of order forms addressed to his firm, so that the trouble of shopping from a distance is reduced to a minimum. In England you can do your London shopping as easily, promptly, and cheaply from a Scotch or a Cornish village as you can from a Surrey suburb.