Posted on 11/01/2003 8:06:10 AM PST by OESY
MAHLBERG, Germany — You could say that Wolfram Siebeck's almost single-handed campaign to transform the way Germans eat began with his discovery that shallots were unavailable in Germany.
This was many years ago, in the 1960's. At the time, Mr. Siebeck, who is a sort of German version of Martha Stewart (before Ms. Stewart's legal troubles and without her expansion into a conglomerate), was a culture critic for the weekly Die Zeit and used to attend film festivals in Italy and France.
"There I discovered haute cuisine," Mr. Siebeck said, "and I wondered why there is nothing like this in Germany, even though we are getting richer and richer."
"So I wrote a column asking why are there no échalotes in Germany," he continued, speaking in English and using the French word for shallots. "We had nothing but onions, and onions stink compared to échalotes. This had an influence on my readers, who went to their markets and asked, `Do you have échalotes?' And then, after six months, there were échalotes."
Over the years since then, Mr. Siebeck, 75, has come to be known as Mr. Food in Germany, the influential restaurant critic and professional epicure who has prodded this country away from its near exclusive reliance on traditional items like wurst.
He still writes an influential column in Die Zeit; he has published many books on food, including some of the first haute cuisine cookbooks published in German. He holds cooking contests among his readers.
Slowly under his tutelage, Germany has emerged from the culinary Dark Ages, as many thousands, probably millions of people, have changed their eating habits.
But while Mr. Siebeck is certainly a food writer, he is also a literary figure and social critic whose writing implicitly links what you eat with who you are.
He is in this sense in the same school as the 18th-century French writer Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who said, "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are," though Mr. Siebeck sees something close to a social, certainly an aesthetic, responsibility in his work.
I'm a skeptic," he declared near the end of an interview in his home in southwest Germany. "You have to be a skeptic when you reach a certain age, otherwise you haven't seen anything.
"For me personally," he continued, "good food is just something to make my life more enjoyable. But it's also more, it's even political, because if you're satisfied with everything you're given, you're not a political citizen. One has to be critical on every occasion and in every way, and to protest loudly."
Mr. Siebeck does his protesting, and his very widely read writing, from a large wing of a 15th-century castle that he and his wife, Barbara, rent from its owner in this tidy town in Baden-Württemberg not far from France.
The place is exactly what you would imagine in the residence of a connoisseur and critic — an ochre-colored, half-timbered palace with stained wood beams and thick walls painted in muted Provençal pastels offering views of the Black Forest on one side, the hills of the Vosges in France on the other.
That is for the winter. For the other half of the year, the Siebecks live in Provence — "not the fashionable Côte d'Azur," Mr. Siebeck said, but on the edge of Provence, where the house and garden they own there, not far from Montpellier, are lavishly portrayed in a new book, "Barbara's Garden."
It was a long way to these two abodes from Mr. Siebeck's origins in the industrial Ruhr area of Germany where he was born in 1928. When he was 15 years old he was drafted into the army, serving for half a year in an antiaircraft unit and then at the end of the war spending a year in a British prisoner of war camp in Northern Germany.
When he got home, he became an illustrator for German magazines; then what he called a "satirical and humoristic columnist" for Die Zeit and the weekly magazine Stern. He was influenced in his work by writers for The New Yorker like James Thurber and E. B. White as well as by Michael Frayn, who used to write for The Observer before becoming a playwright.
"This is the kind of writing I still produce," Mr. Siebeck said. "There's no article of mine that's 100 percent earnest. There's always something a bit twisted."
Mr. Siebeck is not twisted, but rather robust and affable. He showed a visitor the shelf in his library where his own books are, including titles like "I Didn't Order the Hair in My Soup" and "Lady Chatterley's Foot," his first book, consisting of witty drawings on a podiatric theme.
He has also written three guides to the bistros of Paris; another three books on Vienna, on cozy restaurants, coffee houses and wine bistros; and many others.
He does believe that Germans are eating better, saying that when he began writing about food, there were four good restaurants in Germany, while now there are perhaps 300.
Why was there so little good food in Germany before? "It can only be explained by German history," he said. "It all started in 1618 with the Thirty Years' War, which devastated this country in a way that has never been repeated," even, in Mr. Siebeck's view, in World War II.
While other countries flourished, Germany, he believes, went from war to war, catastrophe to catastrophe and was, as he put it, "never at a civilized level long enough for a refinement of eating to be realized."
Of course there were other factors, the climate among the most obvious. Mr. Siebeck allows that as you move in Europe from west to east, the quality of the cuisine goes steadily down.
"We are on the edge of Russia," he said, elaborating on the point. What does Germany have? A lot of pork, cabbage and potatoes. There are no fields of lavender and thyme like in Provence, no olive trees, no Mediterranean.
"I made ginger root popular in Germany," Mr. Siebeck said, illustrating two elements in the current situation. One is that Germany is moving ahead in the world of gastronomy and the other is that globalization has made things like fresh ginger root readily available.
"You go to the oyster stand at the KaDeWe," he said, referring to Berlin's biggest department store, which includes a world-class food emporium occupying the entirety of one of its floors, "and you have oysters from Ireland, from Brittany, from Normandy, from Scotland. Wow!"
But all is far from perfect. There are other forces at work, too, the most important being the encroachment of a certain bland standardization — too much sugar, garlic that has lost its sweetness, cheese made of pasteurized milk that has lost its aromatic power.
The only good thing about bland standardization is that it arouses Mr. Siebeck to the state of colorful ire familiar to his many readers.
"People prefer their food to be mild," he said. "That's something that gets me on the barricades, because mildness in food — it's a castration."
Personally, having recently visited areas where I was stationed with the Army, I can recommend the following restaurants that didn't exist when I was first sent there: Waldhotel Sonnora in Dries near Bernkastel, Rockendorf's outside Berlin, Trabe Tonbach in the Black Forest, Tantris in Munich (I've not been to Aubergine) and Landhaus Scherer in Hamburg. However, if you are in southwestern Germany, don't miss Auberge de L'Ill in the Alsace -- especially around Christmas. Absolutely beautiful!
(I've been told Russian cooking, which I've never tried, is even heavier.)
A cookbook?
And I thought it was pork I was eating.
My sisters and I still tremble at the thought of having to eat them when we were kids.
They may not have had French-style haute cuisine, but not civilized? What about their music? What about their philosophy? What about their scholarship in fields like the classics?
And I had a dinner of liver dumplings, fried potatoes, sauerkraut, and dark beer at the German restaurant around the corner from my office on Thursday that was so delicious that I went back to have it again on Friday.
Wo wir Deutschen sind, functionierts!
Life doesn't get much better than that.
Oh yes the jacobs coffee.
I've never had too much German food (odd, considering I'm about 90% Kraut) except for these Limberger cheese/onion sandwiches on rye my Grandmother used to punish me with. Pretty hardcore 'food' by any standards, but made much more palatable when washed down (in later years) with gallons and gallons of BIER!!!!!
A nice wheat beer (can't remember the brew's name) with a wedge o' lemon trumps any haute cuisine in my opinion.
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