German cooking has a reputation for heaviness that it partly deserves and partly does not. It is a set of strong regional cuisines — Bavarian, Swabian, Rhenish, Saxon — built on pork, potato, vinegar and dark bread, with a serious baking tradition that most visitors never get to.
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Beef marinated for days in vinegar and spice, then braised and served with a dark, slightly sour gravy.
The marinade can be a week or more, and it is the vinegar that does the work — it breaks the fibres down so the meat is tender without being cooked to rags. The Rhine version uses raisins in the sauce; the Swabian one is sharper.
Swabian egg noodles layered with grated cheese and fried onions. Macaroni cheese's better-organised relative.
The noodles are scraped off a board or pushed through a press into boiling water. The cheese is a hard mountain cheese, and it is layered rather than stirred so it melts into ropes. The fried onions on top are not a garnish — they are structural.
Breaded veal cutlet, beaten thin and fried until it puffs. The pork version with mushroom sauce is Jägerschnitzel.
Properly made, the breading separates from the meat into a hollow crust — that separation is the sign it was fried hot enough. A schnitzel served flat and stuck to the meat was cooked too cool. Lemon, not sauce, is the traditional accompaniment.
Pork meatballs in a white sauce with capers and lemon. A Prussian classic, and much lighter than the rest of the menu.
The meatballs are poached rather than fried, which keeps them soft, and the sauce is a roux lightened with the poaching liquid. The capers and lemon make it sharp — it is the dish to order when you have had enough cream and pork.
Sliced sausage with ketchup and curry powder, sold from street stands. Berlin's contribution.
It was invented in post-war Berlin, and the sauce is a proper recipe rather than just ketchup — paprika, curry, vinegar, sometimes Worcestershire. It comes with a paper tray and a wooden fork, and the stand is as important as the sausage.
Thin beef rolled around bacon, onion and pickle, braised and served with red cabbage and potatoes.
The pickle inside is what makes it — the vinegar cuts through the beef and bacon over a long braise. It is a Sunday dish, and the sauce is usually built from the roasting liquid with a little cream and mustard.
Black Forest gateau: chocolate sponge, cherries, cream and kirsch. Far better in Germany than the export version.
Kirsch — cherry brandy — is mandatory for the name to be used, and the good versions are generous with it. The sponge is light and the cream is fresh rather than stabilised, which is why it does not travel well and why the shop version abroad tastes so different.
A lye-baked pretzel with butter, or with Obatzda — a spiced soft-cheese dip. The Bavarian beer-hall standard.
The lye dip gives the pretzel its dark, shiny crust and its faintly soapy tang, and it is what separates a Brezel from a bread roll. Obatzda is camembert mixed with butter, paprika and onion, and it is the correct thing to order alongside a beer.
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