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Why Aren't Germans Fat?

Perhaps the fundamental truth of German cuisine, weighty, comforting and rather unadventurous as that truth may be, can be found in the country's crazed enthusiasm for white asparagus (Spargel). But what about sausages, I hear you cry, surely the stalwart of the German table? And pickled cabbage – they're always snacking on a jar of Sauerkraut, right? You are not wrong, both the beloved Wurst and that tart, ham-speckled salad of pickled white cabbage are dietary staples for many. Indeed, the humble sausage and its thousands of incarnations could be considered something of a deity. But neither sausages nor the infamous sauerkraut have the seasonal cache asparagus does and let it be known, whether strawberries or Spargel, the Germans love a good seasonal item. Each year, Spring brings with it not only the sense that life may once again resume, but also bundles of thick spears of white asparagus, artfully arranged in supermarkets displays with little boxes of Hollandaise sauce. Spargel recipes fill the cooking magazines, Spargel dishes are scrawled all over menu special boards from Freiburg to Flensburg. German families gather round the table for dinners consisting purely of Spargel; white, boiled Spargel, bland but bizarrely bitter at the same time, smothered in creamy, eggy Hollandaise sauce - the lone bright spot of the entire débâcle – served with potatoes and platters of ham. I am of the opinion that of all the vegetables in the world, Spargel has to be the least remarkable yet it has to be the most celebrated in all of Germany and therein lies the truth of German cuisine; simple, filling, comforting, a little stodgy and not particularly adventurous.

We could, rather easily, leave our examination of German food there. The fundamentals of the German palate have been shown; boiled vegetables, a thick, creamy, accompanying sauce and pig. We've been acquainted with the colour spectrum of the German palette; yellows, creams and the burnt pink of pig meat.

But let's not. Let's delve a little deeper, see what we can't unearth. There are more treats in German kitchens than meet the uninitiated eye and one would do well to forget about Sauerkraut and boiled asparagus, consign them to the back of the mind to make space for tastier things. However, do not forget about the colour spectrum. The colour spectrum remains, just add brown for chocolate and beer.

Wurst

To Germans, Wurst is not just processed meat and a bit of stray trotter all mashed up and packaged conveniently in stomach lining. To Germans, Wurst is art. It is cultural identity (a friend of mine once famously assumed the German drinking toast was ‘Wurst’ not ‘Prost’ and so yelled it, confidently, whilst chinking his glass). It is life. There is nothing the Germans can’t make into Wurst, there is nothing they won’t make into Wurst. There is no form of Wurst they won’t eat – big rolls of lunch meat, sausages in jars, in bread, on the grill, boiled in water, smothered in curry powder, in paste form, able to be squeezed out and spread onto Brötchen.

I asked SG how many types of Wurst he thought there were in Germany and he said, ‘oh, I couldn’t say. There are so many, the possibilities are endless. You can have a Wurst that is one kind and then add one or two different ingredients and you have a completely different Wurst.’ He went on to discuss a few different examples (‘and this is just breakfast Wurst!’) and closed with this audacious assessment; ‘there are possibly millions of types of Wurst.’

Brot

German bread is absolutely wonderful. Never has there been such variety, such quality in the bread roll (Brötchen) field. This is a country that eschews simple sliced bread (known, rather disdainfully, as ‘Toastbrot’) consigning it to quick breakfasts or emergencies only. And even then, sliced bread is dark and sense and sold in modest sized loaves. Sliced bread doesn’t do bread justice. Toast doesn’t do breakfast justice. A loaf of sliced Wonder White? There’s the door. Get out. And wash your mouth out with soap as you leave.

Bread isn’t a dirty word in Germany. It is a celebrated, beloved dietary staple. Bakeries are Germany's chippies, milk-bars, local take away. They are on every corner of every street. They are even open on Sundays so no breakfast will go without fresh bread. Bakeries are where you go to ‘grab’ meals. They are cornucopias of crusty, grainy, soft, dense, seed-filled, crunchy, short, round, long, stout loaves and rolls, looming on their shelves above trays of cakes and pastries and biscuits, smothered in chocolate and sugar and custard and cream, filled with apple or poppyseeds or jam.

Bakeries, in Germany, are life.

Käse

It helps when you share a border with Holland and France, two deities in the cheese world, and Germany produces some rather delicious cheese itself. But wherever it comes from, cheese is plentiful, tasty, varied and cheap. It is also on every Brötchen in every bakery (often baked onto the brötchen, resulting in the imaginatively named Käsebrötchen) every breakfast table and woven into as many dishes on as many menus as possible.

A note on cheese, and I shall use the example of goat’s cheese, because it is one I am most experienced with. If you order a pizza or salad with goat’s cheese, in many countries, you can expect a stingy crumble atop your meal. Certainly one must fossick through their dish in many Australian restaurants, to find the delicious stuff. In Germany, expect a huge disc of it, perhaps two, perched on your veggie burger, or sitting on your Ruccola salad. Be prepared for as much goat’s cheese on your pizza, as basic mozzarella. There is no skimping on cheese in this country. Small talk, yes, cheese, never.

Schweinefleisch

Germans are carnivorous people. They can pick a pig carcass cleaner than any other country. Indeed, my time spent has led me to ride the rollercoaster of pig eating, beginning at the endless schnitzel consumption, gliding past the a new appreciation for the versatility of pig meat, and ending with giving it up entirely. No more pork for me, but the Germans, well they worship at the altar of the pig. To be a pig in Germany is to be loved and eaten with equal gusto. It is to be completely unsafe from bib-wearing Germans, licking their chops and getting ready to carve you up and eat every little part of you with a side of potato dumpling. They will roast you, fry you, crumb you, mince you, wurst-ify you, bake you, take your knuckles and your elbows, schnitzel you, roll you, smother you in cheese and bake you again, and spread you, raw and pink onto their breakfast Brötchen.

Not just tasty, versatile and plentiful, pigs are also considered lucky critters and the Glücksschweinchen (little lucky pig) appears in many forms (often marsipan, because, you know, why not) throughout the country, most often around Christmas and New Years Eve. As I said, loved and eaten with equal gusto.

Kartoffel

Fried, baked, boiled, moulded into dumplings, cut into pommes, layered into gratin, flattened into pancakes, smothered in bacon and cream moonlighting as a ‘salad’ in the north, mixed with oil and vinegar in the south. Like the pig, the potato has many uses and, like the pig, is a menu star. Unlike the pig, it isn’t lucky. Just starchy and filling.

Milchprodukte

Yoghurt, quark, cream, cream cheese, ice cream, drinking yoghurt, milk, buttermilk, cold chocolate milk, various fruit-flavoured milks not to be confused with drinking yoghurt, creamy meat and seafood ‘salads’ for the breakfast table, creamy salad dressings, creamy soups, Hollandaise sauce, the aforementioned cheese in about three million different forms – cubes, slices, discs, wedges, balls, spreads. The dairy section of the average German supermarket is three times the size of the fruit and vegetable section and almost overwhelming in its offerings. My personal theory, and it pertains to the Dutch and Danish, is the general height and breadth of these people is a result of the extreme calcium their bones must absorb.

Kuchen

As often as possible, perhaps because it's Sunday, or Christian from the neighbouring village has a birthday, or the sun reflects off the window in a certain way, the Germans partake in the national sport of Kaffee und Kuchen. The tray is set with all necessary implements and ingredients to fashion a cup of coffee. The coffee is brewed, or tea, if you're Frisian. A vast selection of biscuits or a freshly baked/bought cake is laid out. Participants gather around the coffee table in the family room. Depending on which part of Germany you come from, this could have the potential to be a rather quiet affair given the German's dislike of small talk. A couple of coffees and slices in, things heat up, conversation flows a little, punctuated by repeated cries of 'lecker! Lecker! Gaaaaanz lecker!' (tasty, tasty, reeeaaallly tasty). After Kaffee und Kuchen, there is a nice, solid break before the evening meal is rolled out and the carbo-loading can continue.

Beer

Let's leave it at that.

After many months of bread paired with great hunks of cheese, of carefree purchasing in bakeries crammed full of biscuits, cakes and sugared balls of fried dough, of fried fish, moorish soups, fries smothered with mayonnaise, blocks of the milkiest, creamiest chocolate and schnitzel upon schnitzel upon schnitzel, my clothes stopped fitting, the button on my jeans popped off and I started hitting my bottom on things I never used to hit my bottom on because it had hitherto never encompassed the circumference it does now. I affected horror, even alarm, vowed to stop eating bread. But there are few things more comforting, when it's cold and rainy and you have fifteen minutes to kill before your bus comes, than popping into a warm, cheery, bustling bakery with its baskets of fresh bread, trays of jammy, sugary, chocolatey treats and displays of fat bread rolls stuffed with egg and cheese and cheese and meat and cheese. And all the Germans in the bakery are long of leg and relatively lithe. There's no guilt as you order something freshly baked and stuffed that morning, alongside perfectly fit, healthy looking people who are eating far more than you. Besides, with the button having popped off my jeans, I was wearing nothing but leggings, a far more forgiving pant. So I kept eating. Quarkbälle (donut balls, piping hot and rolled in sugar)? Give me 5 for 1.50€! A vast wedge of Brie for 2€, absolutely, and give me a few sunflower-seed rolls to smear it on, they're only 25c a piece. Because here's the other thing about German food. It's delightfully inexpensive. An egg and salad roll is around 2€, a block of chocolate hovers somewhere around the 90c mark. Yoghurt tubs can be 20c each. Grabbing a big, mustard smothered bratwurst, wrestled into a neat, round roll is spare change.

It was after an Easter trip to Kiel where I was presented with 5kg of fine, fine chocolate and got myself acquainted with the German fish and chips (also battered, deep fried and served with a side of chips, the only difference being the sheer generosity when it comes to the creamy, tangy sauce portion) that I returned to Bavaria, land of the pig knuckle and dumpling, and desperately asked the ethers, 'why aren’t Germans fat?' How can they eat what they eat with the appetite they eat it with and not be completely enormous? Remain, in fact, quite the opposite. Is their metabolism, developed over thousands of years of eating particularly heavy foodstuffs and perfecting the humble bread roll, simply better than ours? Is it their height? Does their general efficiency extend to their ability to process food?

I continue to ponder this, deeply and lengthily, over Kaffee und Kuchen, the occasional pommes and mayo and far more chocolate than I ever actually thought I’d be able to eat.