The Healing Power of Classic German Cooking
“Germans are particularly nostalgic about the food of their grandmothers,” writes Luisa Weiss, furnishing a sturdy thesis for her handsome, welcoming new cookbook.
Weiss, whom you may — should — know, is a food writer. She was born, partly raised, and now lives full-time in Berlin. She blogged about food for more than a decade from New York as The Wednesday Chef, then moved to Germany. There she wrote her way deeper into the German culinary world: the food-driven memoir My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story with Recipes (2012) and Classic German Baking (2016). She now writes a Substack organized around food and books (Letter from Berlin) and in autumn 2024 published Classic German Cooking.
On nostalgia, food, and grandmothers
Her words about nostalgia, food, and grandmothers hit home. I grew up with an Oma who was Italian-born but German-speaking and (more importantly for these purposes) German-cooking. To me, it seemed she devoted her life to recreating the childhood foods of my German-to-the-core grandfather in their self-imposed exile in New York.
That doesn’t mean I appreciated the effort. As a child, my response to her crackling, fatty roasts and sturdy variations on a potato theme was to push the food around on my plate until someone mercifully took it away. But later, living in Germany as an adult, I came to love German food. So I greeted Classic German Cooking with trepidation and curiosity.
“My goal is to capture the national favorites eaten across the land,” Weiss writes, “as well as delicious regional discoveries that deserve a wider audience, and to canonize the recipes that every German will immediately recognize as a part of their culinary heritage. With this book, I also hope to illuminate German food culture, its rituals, rhythms, and traditions.” In this, she wholly, beautifully succeeds.
Many recipes are infused with tender memories. Weiss had an exceptionally fractured childhood. Food, as it so often does, helped hold life together. Thanks to the kitchen skills of family friends and the cooks in her Berlin high school cafeteria, classic German cooking forms the basis of particularly comforting memories.
She has been “ruthless” in selecting only recipes she loves or came to love in researching the book. Following these guidelines, she delivers the building blocks of a surprisingly varied, delicious day in German food: three squares, snacks, and desserts. (Classic German Baking covers the makings of Germany’s fourth mealtime, Kaffee und Kuchen).
Recipes for complex satisfactions within reach
No dish is too basic to escape Weiss’s appreciative eye. Zwei Eier im Glass mit Schnittlauchbrot is just a pair of soft-boiled eggs served with a slice of chive-sprinkled, buttered rye. But her attention to the quality of eggs and bread, the combination of delicate and robust flavors and textures, and artfully minimalist presentation make it irresistible. Most dishes are similarly straightforward, requiring little more than a knife, board, stove, pot, and spoon.
Not that Weiss lets us off easy every time. There is a recipe for Serviettenknödel mit Pilzgulasch (“festive and absolutely dinner party-worthy”) involving a litany of steps that may push you — briefly — out of your comfort zone as you contemplate soaking, mixing, shaping, towel-wrapping, poaching, unwrapping, slicing, and serving handsome bread dumplings smothered in a rich mushroom stew. But Weiss’s art is to make even these more complex satisfactions feel well within reach.
There’s a passing reference to the only German cookbook I read again and again, but never cook from: Nika Staden Hazelton’s glorious 1969 period piece Cooking in Germany. I adore it for its baroquely detailed photographs and crisply opinionated writing. It brims with insights into a certain time and class of German food culture: fussy, skewed to meats and blanched vegetables framed in aspic. Maybe German women were throwing together dishes like these on a nightly basis 50ish years ago. I’m not.
Give me Weiss’s approachable, step-by-step guide to making Maultaschen (meat and spinach-filled ravioli) or Scheiterhaufen (baked French toast with apples, but so much more fun to say) any day. Thanks to Classic German Cooking, I will definitely be leading the stateside revival of Errötendes Mädchen, a blushing dessert of raspberry buttermilk pudding. There’s also a wide array of puddings, cremes, and dumplings that can round out (or make) a satisfying German meal.
Of peasant food and vegetables
A big surprise of Classic German Cooking is the centrality of vegetables. Weiss reminds us that war, deprivation, and church dicta shaped a diet that was long all but meatless. A bleak kitchen economy prevailed: stale bread, durable cabbage and root vegetables, only occasionally enriched with dairy, eggs, and a sprinkling of herb or spice. If celery root cutlet with remoulade sounds all Eleven Madison Park to you, think again. This, Weiss reminds us, is the essence of Armeleutessen — peasant food — based on inexpensive, readily available ingredients. It’s something we easily forget if all we know is the stable prosperity of Germany today. The wealth that would make meat a mainstay is in fact shockingly recent.
Of course, the cucina povere of other cultures has long been celebrated in cookbooks for American audiences. Why not Germany’s? (Though I obviously don’t subscribe to the idea, it is possible that, as Anthony Lane recently suggested in the New Yorker, German itself “somehow murders the appetite before the first munch.”) I posit that classic German food has just been waiting for the right translator. Ideally, someone who lives and breathes these foodways, but also has a clear understanding of how the world sees them.
German food has found its translator in Weiss
We have that translator in Weiss. The book nods to a U.S. audience, helpfully noting where ingredient substitutions may be necessary. Nutmeg, caraway, marjoram, onion, cabbage, and bacon weave their way through the savory dishes. Cinnamon, vanilla, cherry, apricot, apple, and plum are throughlines for the sweets. Weiss ties several of these foods and flavors, plausibly, to the ur-foods of German lands.
In sifting through annual best-of cookbook lists, I was sorry to see Classic German Cooking left off. Adventure-seeking Millennials and Gen Zers who seem to be in charge of creating such lists now are more intent on exploring food with playful, anarchic inventiveness. But there should be space in everyone’s kitchen for classics.
Elena Heatherwick’s handsome photography helps. She brings a gentle, natural-lit perspective that serves Weiss’s text and tone well. Since many of these foods will be unfamiliar to readers outside Germany, inviting visuals go a long way to helping us imagine what these dishes will look like on our plates.
Since this review is appearing in TRINK, I would feel remiss if I didn’t at least touch on the role German wine could play with these dishes. In many parts of Germany, food and wine have co-evolved over millennia. Yet some lovers of German wine are shockingly in the dark when it comes to appreciating the food and foodways of Germany itself. There is much to learn from the dishes these wines were born to accompany. When flipping through Weiss’s book, you may find, as I did, pairings floating into your consciousness, unbidden. A simple dish of Eier in Senfsosse (jammy eggs in a creamy mustard sauce) conjures a briskly piquant dry Riesling, flashing with sunlit herbaceousness.
As winter deepens and the world rattles and threatens outside our doors, these are recipes to hold tight to. Germans have cooked their way through it all before.
Classic German Cooking, Luisa Weiss, Ten Speed Press, 2024 is available from Kitchen Arts and Letters, Bookshop.org or wherever you purchase books.
