Читать книгу Strudel, Noodles and Dumplings: The New Taste of German Cooking - Anja Dunk - Страница 23

As a girl, I hated the thought of going into the cellar – it was so dark down there, and I dreaded being asked to fetch something, which happened quite often. But there was a thrill to it that I can’t deny.

The open wooden steps were suspended on a steel frame. Heart pounding, I would skip down them fast, for fear of either falling through or being grabbed on the back of my foot by an imaginary hand. The walls in the hallway at the bottom were lined with liquor – shelf upon shelf of strange and exquisite alcohol in dusty bottles. Banana liqueur in a grass skirt, tequila with a sombrero lid, a cactus-shaped bottle – the luminous contents of which looked toxic – and, the most scary of all things down in the cellar, a large bulbous bottle with a whole lizard preserved in white spirit, like a Damien Hirst formaldehyde artwork, its beady white eyes peering out through a glass cage.

The larder, a small square room with no windows, was at the end of the hallway. The door was kept shut and a steel key hung in its lock at all times. The smell inside this room was so distinctive that it has lingered in my memory all this time, a mixture of concrete and thick orange rubber bands. A rope of dried figs hung on a nail at the entrance, to be pulled off when passing by. Now, whenever I eat a fig, the sugar-frosted skin melting into the sweet, fudgey flesh and crunch of seeds, it takes me right back to this spot, just inside the larder door of Omi’s Bavarian house.

The larder felt like a museum, a beautifully curated collection of preserved foods arranged on the shelves as they were bottled, by season. On the cold concrete floor sat blue and grey salt-glazed pots filled with pickled cucumbers and Rumtopf. Alongside these were brown stoneware jars of Preiselbeeren (mountain cranberries), sealed with a layer of rum – these would be spooned out to go alongside roast venison or to top semolina pudding.

The shelves in the larder positively groaned with fruit, vegetables, fish and meat, all potted up using various methods from jamming to pickling, fermenting to bottling, salting to smoking. A fine layer of dust covered everything down here. It felt almost eerie standing among the jars in the stillness, surrounded by all this fruit suspended in time.

Despite my memories of this house being distant, this place – the larder – is a vivid space in my mind. A room in a permanent state of flux, with jars coming and going. The shelves, a medley of colour and flavour, fascinated me, and it was my dream as a child to one day have rows of glass vessels filled with goodness like this in my life.

Well, reality means I don’t have a cellar of my own, or a larder for that matter, but a cupboard two tiers high that is home to all our preserves. I’m still dreaming.