Donaueschingen, Germany Trip by Ruth Paget
I first read about the German Black Forest town of Donaueschingen, the source of the Danube River, in Marina Polvay’s cookbook All Along the Danube: Recipes from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria (Hippocrene Press – 357 pages).
When I moved to Stuttgart, Germany with my husband Laurent for five years, we lived close to the Black Forest and made Donaueschingen one of our first trips. We drove through the Black Forest with its gingerbread architecture towns and shops selling cuckoo clocks and beer steins and ended up with those items before returning to the United States.
On our walk to the source of the Danube River once in Donaueschingen, we passed churches and apartment buildings painted in pastel colors like Venice that would shine in the snowy winters here and constantly remind inhabitants of their connection to water.
The two streams that come together as the source of the Danube River are the Brege and Brigach. They are encircled in a fountain with an Art Nouveau metal railing. People toss Euro coins in the fountain. I wondered if they ended up downriver in Budapest, Hungary or it the German civic authorities gathered them up for fountain maintenance.
There are many pack terrace cafés in town that no doubt serve dishes made with mushrooms from the Black Forest like trout in mushroom-butter sauce.
I treated our time in Germany as one long cooking course, so we returned home where I had a salad waiting that I made from Marina Polvay’s All Along the Danube. The rough outline for the salad I made follows. (I noted the page with the exact recipe.)
Mushroom-Potato Salad (p.16)
-slice mushrooms and marinate in vinegar and oil dressing
-toss mushrooms with slices of boiled potatoes
-garnish with slices of green pepper and capers
This salad served at room temperature is especially good with a chilled Pilsner beer on a cool Fall day.
By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
