Recipes from German cuisine

Herring salad

Here we have one of the few examples where the currently fashionable beetroot makes sense. How ever this recipe belongs to the fame of German cuisine - if it should be typical German.

4 salted herring
2 big sour apples
375 g of boiled potatoes
2 large gherkins
125 g cooked beetroot
2 onions
200 g boiled beef or veal roast
Hering milk
1/2 l sour cream
Sugar, salt, pepper, oil, vinegar
1 tablespoon capers
Parsley or chives
2 hard-boiled eggs

Wolfram Siebeck and his wife Barbara in the local kitchen

Water, skin, burb and dice the herring for a few hours. You also dice the apples, potatoes, cucumbers, onions, beetroot and meat.

Pass the herring milk through a sieve, season with cream, oil and vinegar and season. Mix the sauce and ingredients well. Pour into a bowl, chill to allow the salad to pass well, and garnish with chopped parsley and finely chopped eggs before serving.

Chicken pot with vegetables and morels

Wolfram Siebeck and Mrs. Barbara

A filling stew that can be delicate when it comes to the quality of the ingredients.

If this delicious stew was all chicken meat, first and foremost a meat dish, there would be no question but a fresh poulard or a Bresse chicken. But at the latest when eating one notices that the vegetables are equal. A vegetable stew with meat insert could call it just as well. The work for the chicken pot consists of two parts: chicken and morels can be prepared the day before. Only the next day the vegetables come to it.

Ingredients for four persons:

1 fresh chicken

For the broth:

1 small carrot
1 small piece of celery
1 piece of leek
1 onion
1 bay leaf
6 cloves
1 parsley root
Thyme, salt, pepper, nutmeg

For the stew:

2 carrots
2 leeks
500 g potatoes
100 g peas
200 g of fresh mushrooms
at least 30 g of dried morels
port wine
Pepper salt

Clean the soup greens - bouquet garni, peel and cut into large pieces. Put everything together with the chicken in a pot of cold water and bring to a boil. Add the cloves, bay leaf and thyme and season with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Simmer gently until the chicken is cooked. It takes at least two hours, but can take three hours with an old chicken. A fresh poulard is cooked in an hour.

Remove and sift the broth into a bowl. Skin the chicken, cut it and remove all pieces of meat from the bones. Cut into small pieces and place in the broth. Refrigerate overnight; remove the grease cover the next day.

The dried morels must either be soaked the day before or the morning of the cooking day for three to six hours in water. Since they are very expensive, one expects four people only 50 grams. But they have to be small spiny morels, smaller than prunes and bigger than beechnuts. And they should be intact and not tattered. To soak one takes a white porcelain vessel and not a little water. The morels swim up, and below, the sand settles in the vessel.

About two hours before the planned meal carefully remove the morels and do not stir up the water. The fished-out mushrooms must now be thoroughly squeezed several times under running water and freed from the sand. Pour so much of the soaking water through a strainer into a casserole that the mushrooms can cook in it. Cooking in your own juice significantly enhances your aroma. So bring the mushrooms in the soaking water to a boil, salt, lightly pepper and boil 1 to 2 tablespoons port. It may also be vermouth, but not dry. The sweetness brings the taste right out. Simmer open for 45 to 60 minutes, the juice is reduced, so amplified.

During this time prepare the remaining vegetables. Peel and dice the potatoes, halve the white and light green of the leek and cut into pieces, also the carrots and finally the mushrooms; halve or quarter them, depending on their size. Fresh peas are usually thick-skinned and floury. One takes in this case better frozen ones. Add the minced vegetables, one at a time, to the previously seasoned broth, first the carrots, then the potatoes, then the leek, the peas and finally the mushrooms. The chicken can be boiled, unless you have sacrificed a noble Bresse chicken for it, which could possibly be too dry.

Just before serving, when the stew is ready, add the morels without their juice; the aroma would otherwise be too dominant. In this way, however, the individual components of the stew can assert themselves side by side. The adaptable potato ensures the reconciliation of different flavors and, last but not least, that this delicate stew also saturates.

Red fruit jelly with vanilla sauce

This Hausfrauenstolz is unfortunately often cooked with far too much sago or Mondamin with a colorful fruit mixture to a pudding stiff jelly dry. In a more natural form, red fruit jelly is a fruit compote that, in my opinion, should consist of either rhubarb and strawberries or currants and peaches depending on the market offering. For all the other berries, it would be a shame if they were taken from their character by being cooked like a four-fruit jam. And strawberries must be inevitable, because at the same time as rhubarb, no other fruit ripens; while peaches just go better with redcurrants than other fruits. It is a matter of taste whether red porridge is served lukewarm or cold. I like lukewarm, but the vanilla sauce is well chilled. As far as vanilla is concerned, the almost black, moist Bourbon vanilla is the best.

For four persons:

Red fruit jelly:

400 g rhubarb, 750 g strawberries
Or: 400 g redcurrants, 750 g peaches
150 g of sugar
the grated peel of a lemon
1 vanilla pod
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated ginger
1/8 l white wine
20 g of cornstarch

Vanilla sauce:

200 g cream
200 g of milk
60 g of sugar
3 egg yolks
1 vanilla pod

Boil cream, milk, sugar and the halved vanilla pod. Remove from fire and let cool. Add the whisked egg yolk. Heat again with constant stirring until a creamy binding is formed. Fish out the vanilla, let the sauce cool down and leave to cool. If lumps form on heating: simply pour the sauce through a hair sieve.

Peel rhubarb (peaches) and cut into pieces. Cook with the sugar, grated lemon rind, sliced vanilla pod and 1/2 tsp of freshly ground ginger in the white wine until the rhubarb (peaches) is 1/2 or 3/4 cooked. Add the quartered strawberries (the redcurrants, half crushed) and cook on. Stir the starch into 3 tablespoons of wine until smooth and add to the lightly cooking fruits. (You can also omit the starch, then the grits remain liquid.) Transfer to a glass bowl and let cool slightly.