Lecker schmecker

Germany is unfortunate in a culinary sense: it seems to have been eclipsed by nearby France and Italy - even Switzerland has claimed the cheese fondue! - and has been relegated as the Land of Cake, Beer and Wurst (feel free to make as many bad puns out of the last one as you like). And while they are all tasty in their own right, until I got here I was wondering how I was going to avoid getting chubby (my jeans were tight by the end of my 9 day visit in March) and why there doesn't seem to be more fat Germans - the answer to both, I've decided, seems to be cycling. I've even managed to develop muscles: I'm impressed.

While I've been here, I've discovered that to reduce the entirety of German cuisine is a complete understatement. In actual fact, it's four: I forgot cheese. And I suppose if you count Fleisch, which technically means 'meat' but seems to count as it's own food-group (as opposed to "non-meat") that takes it up to a whopping five. However, I've concluded that not only in food in Germany generally yummier for working with what I would consider less, as a whole it's generally healthier. I say this for two reasons: firstly, there's less pre-processed food. Supermarkets will sell pasta sauces and frozen pizzas, but that will be it - the rest of the stuff on offer will be fresh produce or the product. Like risotto, for example. My mum was a big fan of Ainsley Harriot's risotto mixes. She doesn't need to rely on them - she's a fantastic cook in her own right. But my point is that such things don't seem to exist here. You'd get risotto, and then be directed to the herb section. The emphasis is not on the quick-fix, but on the ingredients (and remember that I'm in the middle of farmland - the vegetables in the supermarket here look like something out of a Women's Weekly cookbook).

The second is that the main meal of the day here seems to be lunch: most days, we go to the Mensa where the standard fare is soup, salad and a big hot meal that I'm generally struggling to finish. Breakfast is apparently also pretty substantial - while I was in Berlin, standard morning tucker was smoked herring, salami (or wurst), cream cheese with alpine herbs, at least two different types of cheese, yoghurt, bread, muesli, as well as the juices and teas and/or coffees. And in the hotel that Mum and her partner Steve were staying in, it was an impressive buffet - much more exciting than the standard British or regular Continental breakfasts. And not a waffle in sight.

In comparison, dinner or the evening meal is apparently something enough to bide you over until the morning - still yummy, but light enough. The benefit in this approach is one that's well known to dietitians and the like: namely, eat big meals while you can still exercise afterwards. And although a big lunch often sends me into a food coma, I can usually rectify that with a bit of movement and a coffee mid-afternoon. Whereas a heavy dinner and I'll just sit there and watch TV while I'm busy digesting.

Having said all this, I wouldn't yet say that my stomach has become German. My meals are becoming more Germanly distributed (hmm, new word) but I'm still eating a lot of pasta, the odd Morrocan dish and have just discovered an Asian supermarket (bring on the Thai! It's been lacking from my regular round of meals) but apart from the odd barbeque that we have here, I haven't mastered the hunk-of-meat cuisine yet. And even more upsettingly, I haven't found the himbeer dumpling things that Jo served up while I was visiting her in March in Berlin - but like so many things in Europe, if it's a regional specialty, then you're going to have a hard time finding it even in the same country. And I still haven't had my first piece of BlackForrest cake while I've been here - shame!

But I'm working on it all :)



PS: "Lecker" = 'yummy', while "schmecken" = 'to taste'. The phrase itself doesn't actually mean anything properly - it's just something I coined one day when asking people whether they were going to lunch. They all knew what I meant though ;)