German Appetizers and Soups by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Exploring German Culture through Appetizers and Soups by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

When I went to live in Stuttgart (Germany) for five years, I was worried about what I would eat.  I knew about brats and Christmas cookies, but knew I could not subsist on those food items alone.

I read and bought German cookbooks before I left, so I could order German foods in restaurants and know what they were and buy ingredients for cooking at home.

I bought The New German Cookbook by Jean Anderson and Hedy Würz before going to Germany, because they had dishes from the Baden-Würtemberg state where Stuttgart is located.

The dishes from this region are sold in deli departments of supermarkets and in independent delis called “feinkosts.”  I learned how to ask for food items in both places in Germany in hochdeutsch, university – level German - not dialect.

Many appetizers and soups are sold in German bars and made from a mix of fresh food and bottled items traded by the ancient Hanseatic cities such as Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bremen. 

German bread is excellent and goes well with spreads like Liptauer cheese.  The Germans brag that they have a bread for each day of the year like the French have a cheese for every day of the year.

The New German Cookbook has 230 recipes, including many for appetizers and soup.  Knowing about the following recipes made it easier for me to live in a country that I did not know much about when I first went to live there. 

The cookbook provides the details, but I will provide the enticements to look up the recipes that Anderson and Würz developed, tested, and verified before publication:

Appetizers

-smoked salmon tartare with black caviar

-tiny potato pancakes with black caviar

-herring salad with apples, dill, pickles, and horseradish

-herring salad with potatoes, apples, hard-boiled eggs, onions, dill, peppers, mayonnaise, and yogurt

-rollmops – brined herring salad – hangover cure after Carnival

-herring in sour cream, onions, apples, cream, vinegar, mustard, and red pepper

-shrimp salad – shrimp with hard-boiled egg, green peas, and a dressing made with Dijon mustard, heavy cream, and lemon juice

-Liptauer cheese made with yellow onion, butter, cream cheese, Camembert, sour cream, plain yogurt, and Hungarian paprika

For a group of 6 people, 4 or 5 of the above appetizers with an individual bowl of a soup listed below with bread would be a nice meal for a brew pub where a house beer is brewed on the premises.

The New German Cookbook has detailed recipes for these delicious soups.  I tried many of them when I lived in Stuttgart, Germany for five years:

-beef broth with dumplings

-pancake soup – uses leftover pancake strips in the soup

-Maultaschen Suppe with Swabian spinach-and-meat stuffed ravioli

-Goulash – Hungarian beef stew flavored with sweet Hungarian paprika

-Pheasant with lentil soup

-Asparagus with rice soup

-Fennel with bacon soup

-Kale soup

There are more soups listed in The New German Cookbook.  I like this cookbook, because it uses many ingredients that you can easily find in American supermarkets with the exception of herrings. 

Those sour fish bites are good once in awhile, though.  Maybe we could make them easier to obtain in colder parts of the US.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Ruth Paget Selfie

Well-Seasoned Greetings: Christmas Feasts from Poland, Mexico, and France by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Well-Seasoned Greetings:  Christmas Feasts from Poland, Mexico, and France by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

This column about Christmas that I wrote for the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) shows that having many ways to celebrate Christmas makes the holiday merrier.  This article contains information about holiday celebrations from Poland, Mexico, and France that I have celebrated throughout my life:

Well-Seasoned Greetings:  Christmas Feasts Feed Both the Body and Soul by Ruth Paget (Monterey County Weekly – Circulation: 200,000)

Eating messy krushchiki and listening to mystic kolendy, Polish carols, in the home of my mother’s best friend whose ancestors were Polish always made me feel the magic of Christmas as a child.

Polish “angel wings” – a twisted, deep-fried cookie liberally sprinkled with powdered sugar along with the Polish carols were the heart of the festivities.

Sometimes before we ate, our hostess would break an oplatek into pieces and share the flour wafer with everyone as a sign of peace.

We ate spiral-cut ham for dinner with gourmet additions like veal pâté flavored with cognace.  This early glimpse into Slavic culture set me on the path to becoming a global gourmet.

Later in high school, my best friend and I would debate whether or not to actually bake the pecan dough for Russian (also Mexican) teacakes that we made.

My high school buddy and I also purposely added too many chocolate chips to cookies, so they would bake into ovals of delicious, warm goop.

I also exchanged cookies with a Mexican high school friend, whose mother made empanadas, pumpkin turnovers flavored with anise.   I liked the way she folded dough to make a beautiful, scalloped edge for this Christmas Eve treat.

The French, like the Mexicans, traditionally celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve, as I discovered when I married into a French family.  On my first Christmas in France, we attended midnight mass and got ready for an “all nighter” at the dinner table.

Hors d’oeuvres appeared on after the other:

-smoked salmon

-rillettes (pork cooked and preserved in its own fat, resulting in a salty, creamy spread

-foie gras

Next, we had an entrée of monkfish tail in a dish called lotte à l’américain.  This recipe is of Basque origin, but is dubbed American, because sweet, red peppers and tomatoes are used to make it.

Both peppers and tomatoes originated in the Americas.  Other ingredients in the sauce included olive oil, garlic, onions, white wine, and Armagnac.  I thought this dish tasted wonderful.

I was ready to crawl under the table and go to sleep after this dish, but, then Uncle Jacques entered the dining room carrying a yard-long platter holding slices of salmon terrine with a spinach topping he had prepared.

He decorated this sliced, terrine dish with lemon slice sails and pastry shells made of puff pastry.  The whole presentation looked like a Mediterranean galley.

After the terrine, we ate slices of chèvre goat cheese on toasted baguette.

Dessert was a chocolate cake called a büche de Noël followed by espresso.

The dinner party broke up at 6 am, but we were expected back at noon for another meal.

We began our “light” meal with raw oysters, another salmon terrine, roast turkey with chestnuts, and homemade chocolates.

Between courses during both meals, we sang carols and listened to my brother-in-law play the piano and papie (French grandpa) play the violin.  We made toasts going around the table, askng for “nouvelles” – news to report.

My pleas for water garnered me a round of Gallic scoffing.

“Water if for fish and flowers,” I was told.

“I don’t want to spread tipsy tales,” I responded and coffee quickly appeared.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Ruth Paget Selfie

Community Christmas Memories by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Community Christmas Memories by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Before I became a restaurant reviewer for the Monterey County (CA) Weekly (Circulation:  200,000), I wrote a column entitled “Side Dish” with anecdotes related to food. 

The book Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl was popular at the time, and my column gave memoirs of Paris (France), Osaka (Japan), China (1979 Study Tour as a teen), and ethnic restaurants in Detroit, Chicago, and Monterey County to encourage local writers to do the same as Reichl in our multicultural community.

I still wish people in our community would get a spiral notebook and a package of pens and write about how they celebrated holidays at various stages of their life: child, teen, 20 – 30 year old, married couple or not, and retiree.  This kind of memoir does serve a community greatly in helping make sure that people obtain items to celebrate in the way that they feel is magical and successful.

The following article, Well Seasoned Greetings, is one I wrote about Christmas, because I still love Christmas carols, hot chocolate, and churros that go by any ethnic name.

To be continued – cleaning house for Christmas and drinking some coffee.

Happy Holidays – will post tomorrow.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Ruth Paget Selfie

German Wine Labels by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Exploring German Culture through Wine Labels by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I lived in Stuttgart, Germany for five years in the mid-2010s.  I did not know much about Germany when I arrived, so I began researching the country with books. 

I like cooking and doing wine industry tourism and began my research with The New German Cookbook written by Jean Anderson and Hedy Würz (1993, Harper Collins Publishers). 

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, so the recipes in this book are mostly from what was “West Germany.”  I knew that Stuttgart was part of “West Germany” and thought I could get some tips for grocery shopping and recipes with this book.

The first section I went through was the wine section.  The Germans have a very methodical classification system for their wines that is different from the French one. 

The German system confounds everyone in France, because Germans mostly produce Riesling white wine.  The German classification system is based on sugar content in the wines.

The French and Germans do agree on the following points according to Anderson and Würz:

-“A delicate dish calls for a light and subtle wine.”

A delicate dish could be items such as fish with non-spicy sauces, vegetable terrines with tomato coulis sauces, sautéed scallops, garlic shrimp (light on the garlic), and hors d’oeuvres.

-“Robust recipes call for more vigorous wines.”

Main dishes go well with Rieslings and Franconian reds.  Veal and pork terrines go well with Rieslings I think.

This is a brief explanation of the classification of German wines that is based on the amount of sugar in the wine according to Anderson and Würz.

Geman AOC wines are called Qualitätsstufen, or quality wines, as the overarching broad category of excellent wines that are inspected for quality control and sold internationally.

Under this category are QbA wines (Qualitäts bestimmer Aubaugebiete wines).  QbA wines come from Gemany’s approved growing areas.  (Check a recent wine reference book as these regions do change.  They change slowly, but they do change.)

Under Qualitätswein and QbA wines come the following subgroups in ascending order (more sugar the higher you go) of sugar content:

-Qualitäts mit Prädikat (QmP) wines

-Kabinett

-Spätlese

-Auslese

-Beerenauslese

-Eiswein

-Trockenbeerenauslese (TBA)

TBA wines have the most sugar and are the rarest and most expensive of German wines. 

A combination of climate and northern growing regions make German wines sweeter than French ones.

Anderson and Würz list 4 marketing terms that are useful when purchasing German wine among several listed in The New German Cookbook:

1-Riesling on a German wine label means that 85% of that varietal must be used in the wine

2-Prädikat – indicates how ripe (sugary) the grapes were at harvest

3-trocken = driest taste

4-halbtrocken = dry taste, but not as dry as trocken.  Halb = half

Jane Anderson and Hedy Würz detail these items, especially with food pairings in The New German Cookbook with its 230 recipes.  I still like this cookbook after all these years.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Ruth Paget Selfie