Kaiserschmarren and carp blue
The team (from left): Dagmar Hoetzel, Nataly Bleuel, Markus Schmidt, Stephan Le Roux and Stan Engelbrecht
Unfortunately, I can not say that it was my idea - it's too daring for that. One day my sandbox friend Markus Schmidt came to visit and put a thick book on the table. "African Salad" was said to have been designed by his friend and partner Stephan Le Roux from Cape Town. The book contained large photographs of people, houses and kitchens in South Africa. And hand-written recipes. "Imagine," he said, "Stan, the photographer, drove around the country for a year and a half, rang the doorbells of 120 foreign doors and just asked people for their favorite recipes." So Stan Engelbrecht had come from the poorest huts to the kitchens of guarded villas.
Markus pointed to the broad-laughing and mud-smeared face of a woman named Miriam Moeletsane. She stood in front of a drunken hut at the foot of a Table Mountain, under the hazy blue sky of South Africa. Inside a clean tidy room with clay floor, fire pit and a single garden chair sitting there. Here Miriam Moeletsane cooked probably daily "Sotho Pumpkin Moroho", a pumpkin porridge.
There was a lot of heat in the pictures. How nice, I thought as I stroked the pages of "African Salad" and said that you get an idea of the people, their lives and their country. "Great, is not it?", Cried Markus, his nostrils flaring slightly, as he always did when he smelled an idea. "Do you think that's possible in Germany, too?" He asked casually. I sensed he had not given me the book without reason. Markus is an advertiser. Advertisers sell individual sentences. For several sentences - even books - they are not responsible. But there were several sentences in this book. Small, entertaining texts about people's lives. And for Markus, I was the specialist for writing several sentences. So in the expert case, I replied, "Theoretically, that works in every country on earth."
Cross section of the german food
The home of Beate Hartmann and her ten-member family from Weimar is designed in Bauhaus style. The strict architecture of the family sets a colorful kitchen garden, and everyone likes to eat what the garden has to offer.
And thought: It would be madness. It would cost a lot of time and money. One would have to show a cross section through all regions, cultures, layers. The photographer and a reporter would have to drive around for weeks - after all, not every two strangers open the door and have their picture taken. And then the travel costs. The fees for scribes and photographer. The editorial office. The elaborate pressure. No book publisher would pay anything like that. I flipped through the shiny pages, pulled at the ribbon and said nothing. "That's exactly what we thought!", Cried Markus. "We do everything ourselves, is printed in Singapore, there it is cheap, and YOU text!"
When I met photographer Stan Engelbrecht for the first time, a gently smiling blonde with tattoos and holes in his jeans, we ate chicken in ginger. For a brief moment I had fantasized, if I should pack my baby and my little son in a camper and gondolas with this strange man for ten weeks by Germany. Stan could not talk to the people here, he only spoke English and Afrikaans. But then we preferred to ask Dagmar Hoetzel, a Berlin architect, who was friends with the producer of "African Salad". The plan: Dagmar drives around Stan, in her 20-year-old Golf. She has an eye for good houses. She rings and talks to the residents. Stan takes pictures. I write down what the two tell me. With the third glass of wine, I raised my finger and said sternly, but that was a damn blue-eyed project! And self-publishing! Then Stan laughed at me and said, "In South Africa, we sold it over the Internet and it became a super-seller that they even give to state guests, let's just do it!" I did not answer. But it almost embarrassed me a little: for making us so fanciful and discouraged here.
We spread a map of Germany on the kitchen table and put flags in each of our 16 previously selected geographical-culinary-cultural regions. For people we knew. If the strangers did not open doors and hearts for us. "But I often had a cup of coffee in my home before I could explain to people what I wanted them to do," Stan said, smiling with confidence. I was silent.
Captain Jochim Westphalen from Hamburg-Blankenese began his career as a ship's boy. He should cook on his first day at sea. He decided on pea soup. It was so salted that he had to eat it for punishment.
But as a precaution telephoned around and said: "First drive to a guy here near Hamburg, he is globetrotter and lives in a garden." Rhett Treinies opened Dagmar and Stan's garden door a crack. When they told him they just wanted to know his favorite recipe, he left. And even told them a lot more, for example, about his hippie days in the 1970s, when he moved to flowery California and from there to Mexico, and then how he took a 13-year bus through Asia ...
Then he gave them several recipes for Mexican tortillas. Later, the three drowned in a Portuguese pinte in the industrial area of Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg. The following day, Dagmar and Stan rang at all the houses around Hamburg, which seemed sympathetic to them. All doors remained closed.
Stan was astonished. He did not know that. In South Africa one is not so reserved. Dagmar was getting nervous. In the afternoon, her car collapsed and had to go to the workshop. For so long, former captain Jochim Westphalen from Hamburg-Blankenese told them the story of his very first ship's fare, an over-salted pea soup. A colleague had given him quickly by phone.
The two spent the night with a friend of Dagmar, in the Lower Saxon spot Bleckede-Barskamp. The acquaintance mentioned one of her tai-chi students, an old lady, who came to class with her walker. She lived in a house in which Dagmar immediately fell in love - because it looked "so German" with his cultivated red clinker.
The story of the carp
Sister Maria Regina Winter (middle) is Superior General in the Crescentia Monastery. in Kaufbeuren. Anyone who wants gets a free lunch. For example, Pilgrims soup according to the mother's mother's favorite recipe
Stan impressed the accurately lined garden rakes. And so the two Brunhilde Steinhauer met. And heard her story of the carps that she had always fished out of the village pond, a few hundred meters down the street. And the flower her son carved for Jeff Koons while working at a carpentry shop designing for the American artist. The flower now hangs next to an archangel on Brunhilde's wallpaper wall. When she said goodbye in broad Masurian German that Dagmar and Stan had "taken roots in their hearts," the two regained their courage. And drove on, to almost a hundred addresses. On the island of Pellworm, to Görlitz, Bochum, Erfurt, Hinterzarten, the Swabian Alb and Kaufbeuren, where sister Maria Regina Winter Pilger soup distributed.
Harriet Danz-Neef, an internist from Adelheidsdorf in Lower Saxony, loves dogs and hunting. Shooting is not an end in itself for her, she does it if need be. And then there's the Neefs' fresh beef steaks with carrot and kohlrabi vegetables
Sometimes they used the little flags we had put. Sometimes Dagmar spoke to people on the street, so they were more accessible. But not everyone fit in the book: Because we wanted a good mix of city and country, old and young, locals and new citizens. The extra wishes: Stan loves dogs. Stan photographed many dogs. Dagmar wanted more houses. Markus more Postcard motifs: Fishermen on the Chiemsee, farmers in the mountains. I found garden gnolls good. And from Stephan Le Roux from South Africa came the astonished question, whether there are only old people and row houses with us? We made everyone right. Stan's previously blurred image of Germany gained in shape. What surprised him most was that we follow the traffic rules. And how many photos and heirlooms are in our homes. We Germans, he said, were rich in family stories.
And they touched us all. After all, once people understood what we wanted from them, they also let us into their homes - and into their memories: for an old stonemason, the beer sauce preserves the taste of his childhood in Lower Silesia. Because of his grandma's Kaiserschmarrens, he has become a punk chef. Little Greta saved a horse from ending up as Sauerbraten.
And if a few people bought the book now. , , - then I would be interested to know what people like to cook in India. Or in Italy. Or in Iraq? You get the ludicrous ideas, if you just dare something.
This is (s) t Germany. People and their favorite food
The book "This is (s) t Germany People and their favorite food" by Nataly Bleuel, Stan Engelbrecht and Dagmar Hoetzel can be found at www.das-isst-deutschland.de for 39.90 euros (plus 3.90 euros shipping ) to order. The website also contains all the recipes for this article.
