EIGHT
Potatoes boiled in their jackets without salt, soup with black bread, a little lard, oat porridge supplemented by the occasional helping of ‘black’ dumplings (made from raw potatoes) – without potatoes, industrialization in Germany might not have happened, or at least not so quickly or so fully. Potatoes filled the bellies of the workforce and sustained their rapidly rising numbers. They could be grown in marginal soils and were ready to eat as soon as they were dug. Soon the poor almost abandoned bread. The change was remarkably rapid. While in 1800 legumes and bread were the staple foodstuffs in northern German poorhouses, 40 years later potatoes were set on the table twice or three times a day. The meal plan of the Brunswick poorhouse in 1842 recommended 1 kg of potatoes and 130 g of legumes per person per meal. White beans and potatoes were served on Sundays, pearl barley and potatoes on Mondays, carrots and potatoes on Tuesdays, lentils and potatoes on Wednesdays and Saturdays, peas and potatoes on Thursdays and swede and potatoes on Fridays. Additionally potatoes were served on three nights a week in the form of soup combined with oats, or just boiled in their skins.1
The circle was a vicious one in two aspects. On the one hand, reliance on a single foodstuff involved great risks in the form of plant diseases and resulting crop failures. On the other hand, with labour in abundance, employers didn’t hesitate to exploit it, something that was still regarded as morally acceptable. At this early stage of industrialization, technology was less advanced than in competing countries and progress often depended on human muscle-power. Many industrial tasks were still very simple and could be done by unskilled labour, in particular in the mining industry, which provided the essential raw material for railways and trains, machinery and tools. There the lot of children was particularly bleak. Starting work at a very young age, they were forced to attend school after long shifts at work, and survived on a diet of black coffee-substitute, black bread, potatoes and salt. Often they lived so far from the workplace that their parents lodged them with the families of fellow workers. Child labour would be only legally regulated when draft officers on recruitment drives in industrial regions failed to raise the expected numbers because of the poor health of the candidates. In 1835 a newborn child from a noble family’s chance of attaining his or her fifteenth birthday was 91 per cent, falling to just 58 per cent if they were poor and urban. The difference in attitude between British employers and those in Germany was underlined in a debate in the British parliament of 1846, when recommendations to limit the workday to ten hours were put forward but opposed; the naysayers gave as a reason the far longer hours worked in Germany.2
The nineteenth century was a period of great change in Germany. Personal freedom, universal laws and legal equality came to replace estates, privileges and feudalism. Motion and speed were the obsessions of the age. But there was a price to be paid. As the British economist Thomas Malthus observed in 1798, food production tended to lag behind population growth. Until around 1850, in spite of potatoes, the balance between the food supply and demand was at best fragile in Germany, although agricultural production rose by 40–50 per cent during this period. This wasn’t yet due to technological efficiency, but was mostly the result of extended working hours, often by women. Climatic factors contributed to social and economic changes in this precarious situation. Mass poverty, a condition labelled pauperism by contemporary commentators, was a phenomenon of the age.
The eruption of Indonesia’s Tambora volcano in 1815 led to the coldest summer on record the following year, which became known as the year without a summer. It ended in the disastrously severe winter of 1816/17. Famine followed, not least because food distribution was still disorganized. Prices varied widely from district to district and speculation was rampant. People in some rural areas walked many miles to reach towns where bread was marginally less expensive, while the destitute and desperate resorted to whatever they could find: moss, lichen, tree bark, grass roots, nettles, frozen potatoes, unripe grain, straw, sawdust and wood shavings. The same situation returned in the winter of 1846, when grain crops lost to frost had to be ploughed under and replaced by potatoes that then rotted with blight. From an agricultural point of view the situation was not disastrous, but when it was combined with an economic crisis that affected trade and the ability of banks to lend, and the fact that malnutrition and related diseases were rampant, mortality rates soared.3
For many hunger was a constant, whether they were in work or not. One often quoted report from 1844 by Friedrich List, a south German liberal revolutionary, mentions that in poor people’s houses a herring would be tied to the ceiling with string so it could be passed around the table for rubbing onto potatoes as seasoning. Work that was done in the home, such as spinning and weaving, was increasingly poorly paid as a result of cheaper industrially produced imports from Britain. In Silesia the weavers’ chronic situation was so well known that throughout the first two decades of the nineteenth century officials simply dismissed their misery as the normal way of life of the region. When the situation deteriorated in the 1830s bread was distributed to the poor and private organizations tried to help, but even their combined efforts weren’t sufficient. In their misery those who worked at home repeatedly revolted, and in 1844 factories were destroyed by the workers. The general public, kept informed through newspaper accounts, was outraged, siding with the employers. The weavers were soon left to return to their own misery, and in 1847 famine and typhoid were rampant in parts of the region. According to reports from the early 1850s many of these people hadn’t eaten bread, let alone meat, for years, some surviving on green potato leaves, old beans and cabbage, with a little tallow to bind the thin soup. Even salt was a luxury because it was subject to high taxes.
The lot of agricultural labourers wasn’t much better. The population increase led to depressed wages, while in bad years they found themselves without employment. In Württemberg, Baden and the Palatinate the situation was particularly desperate, with local councils often imposing severe restrictions on marriages and new settlements in a vain effort to keep the situation in check. The expression Kohldampf schieben, feeling famished, is not, as might be supposed, a reference to a diet overly dependent on Kohl, cabbage, but apparently owes its origin to the hard times of the 1830s. It is a combination of two words for hunger in the Yeniche language, which was spoken by an impoverished nomadic people who travelled the roads of Central Europe at the time.
Revolution was in the air, and even the more prosperous middle classes felt increasingly threatened by pauperism. They were also still struggling to find their own food identity. Bürgerliche Küche in its Biedermeier form was unobtrusive, good, solid fare. It was just as much about emancipation from the nobility, the middle classes’ former role models, as it was about keeping an anxious distance from the lower classes. Porridge, gruel and related dishes by now symbolized rural backwardness and were deemed only suitable for old people and children. The higher incomes of the middle class translated into more variety in their diet, and they were much less vulnerable to rising food prices. Engel’s Law, formulated by a German statistician in the 1850s, pointed out that the lower a household’s income the higher the percentage spent on food; 70 per cent was by no means unusual. The prices for eggs, milk, butter and meat, though much more stable than those for grain and potatoes, were nevertheless always beyond the reach of the lower classes.
In retrospect it is easy to analyse this situation and come up with political explanations, but it still seems amazing that the hungry didn’t resort to violent protests against the cake-eating upper classes, as they had done in 1789 in France. It could be argued that this was due on one hand to the belly-filling potatoes, but on the other to the essential drugs of the German industrialization, sugar-sweetened coffee and schnapps, as the tubers had also introduced the wider populace to harder stuff. Until around 1800 spirits had been very expensive to produce and were made mostly from grain. They were an exceptional treat mostly consumed in public inns. Distilling from potatoes was not only cheaper, but also capitalized on the fact that the tubers needed to be used in a shorter timespan, since they did not store as well as grain. Once potatoes began to be distilled, schnapps entered the daily diet of the poor.
Both coffee and schnapps were readily available, even to working women who were too time-pressed to cook; they kept workers awake and helped to overcome the feelings of powerlessness and anger as well as the pangs of hunger, be it on the fields, down the mines or, later on, in factories. It thus seems ironic that schnapps in particular was much lamented by the establishment. Miners would get drunk on payday rather than handing over their wages to their wives, the outraged middle classes claimed, while seated in their comfortable armchairs with no need whatsoever to seek an escape from reality. Even more ironically, strong spirits were rendered affordable by the state itself. Potato schnapps was mostly produced on the large estates east of the Elbe. Faced with difficulties in exporting their grain surplus, they converted significant areas to the potato, a cultivar that didn’t require major capital investment and, if unsold, could be made into storable spirit, with the mash used as pig feed. The state had succumbed to their strong lobby with extremely low taxation that more or less guaranteed a good market for the spirit. In another ironic twist Silesian home weavers, although extremely poor, had access to expensive real coffee, since the cloth they produced was sold by merchants to Central America in exchange for coffee beans. These were passed on to the weavers instead of money – a telling link between one form of slavery and another.4
The German borders in 1850.
In spite of these poor people’s drugs, food riots did occur. In Bavaria, where potato consumption was relatively low, rising grain prices often led to riots. Landless and desperate unemployed day labourers and field workers resorted to blocking and plundering grain transports and attacking merchants, millers and bakers. Trouble in the grain market obviously affected the price of beer, which in Bavaria had long been considered a staple foodstuff, not least because viticulture had virtually disappeared there in the eighteenth century for climatic reasons. As breweries flourished their owners accumulated wealth and status. The long tables in beer gardens attracted an unusually wide span of social groups: labourers sat next to soldiers, and students mixed with middle-class families. When beer prices rose by more than 20 per cent in 1844, thirsty customers protested violently. In Munich in particular bar-room brawls spilled out onto the streets, especially when the heavier and more expensive summer beer was being tapped and the new season’s price was announced. These beer riots, however, were poorly organized and achieved even less than the grain riots of rural Bavaria, since beer could not be stored at home. More innovative and considerably more effective were the beer boycotts staged by Munich factory workers at around the same time, the forerunner of a modern form of consumer protest that would be revisited in the 1890s by industrial workers in Berlin.5
In many cases the socially concerned members of the establishment set up local charities, trying to help as best they could. Private relief organizations joined town councils’ efforts, in many cases distributing firewood and bread. Soup kitchens, the so-called Rumfordsche Suppenanstalten, opened all over Germany; they were based on the principles of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. When he developed his famous recipe for a nourishing soup to feed the poor in the 1790s, Count Rumford was in charge of the Munich poorhouses. The ingredients of his inexpensive but filling water-based soup that could be produced in large quantities were potatoes, pearl barley, stale white bread, salt and vinegar or sour beer, with the addition of a nominal amount of meat cut to the size of barley grains. In 1805 a magazine in Görlitz in the Oder region published a proposal to set up Rumford soup kitchens in medium-sized towns, complete with financial and organizational plans, since ‘the growing distress of the poor, with the constant rise of prices in all areas, calls for serious thinking about the best way to reduce hardship and save a large part of a town’s working inhabitants from total ruin’. The anonymous writer declared that the money distributed by relief funds was insufficient and therefore came up with a strategy in four points: to encourage industriousness, support agriculture, lower prices of the most essential foodstuffs with officials’ help, and finally procure healthy and affordable meals for the poor. He further stressed his view that the soup should not be given away for free, as it wouldn’t be valued appropriately.6
L. Gradmann, Soup Distribution, c. 1817, aquatint. A soup kitchen modelled on the Rumford idea. The recipients look quite decently clad and pay for the soup.
For various reasons emigration throughout the period was deemed by many as the solution to overpopulation and misery. Charity often took the form of collecting money to fund those who could not afford the passage to America. Cologne reported to Berlin in 1816 that ‘frequently nowadays persons not provided with passports float down the Rhine on rafts towards Holland. Almost every day people arrive here both by land and by water with similar intentions.’ The Dutch ports were crowded with German emigrants, especially from Baden and Württemberg, whose governments actively encouraged people to leave in their efforts to cope with pauperism. From 1830 onwards the economic situation deteriorated, with the imposition of monetary taxation in place of the system of tithes and ground rents paid in kind by the peasantry. To meet these demands peasants had to sell land, further reducing their ability to pay. Since industry was not yet developed enough to provide alternative work, the poor saw no other solution but to leave the country. Emigration remained high until the 1880s, the point at which German industry began to absorb the rural overpopulation. Thereafter and until the First World War, emigration decreased steadily, until it ceased completely during the war.
Labour-hungry Prussia and Russia were among the popular destinations at first, but throughout this period the United States took the vast majority of Germany’s emigrants, with Brazil and Australia the next most popular destinations. Of the total number of immigrants to the U.S. from 1820 to 1924, Germans were the second largest ethnic group (only surpassed in numbers by UK citizens, which included the Irish until Eire achieved independence in 1920), representing about 15 per cent of the total populace. Most of them joined relatives and compatriots who had sent for them and often provided funds for their journey. The establishment back home distanced themselves from the lower-class emigrants by pointing at their supposedly unsophisticated food. This reaction was also seen in England, where it was known as ‘trollopizing’ after Frances Trollope’s book Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832 and three years later translated into German.7
Germans were by no means newcomers to the Americas. The first German-speaking immigrants had landed on American soil as early as 1607. By 1683 thirteen families from around Krefeld had founded Germantown in Pennsylvania. In the years that followed a steady stream of emigrants left Germany for America, particularly peasants from the Palatinate region around Mannheim, who were prepared to risk the expensive and hazardous crossing in order to escape from the poverty caused by interminable wars with France as well as religious and political persecution. These immigrants settled in New Paltz on the Hudson River at first but soon heeded William Penn’s call for new settlers to take up the challenge of the South. It was among German immigrants of the East Coast that the style of cooking known as Pennsylvania Dutch was born. In spite of the implied connection with the Netherlands, the name is actually a linguistic corruption of deutsch, German; German roots are clearly visible in dishes such as Schnitz un Gnepp (apple slices and dumplings), Schmierkaes (quark), Gfillder Seimaage (stuffed pig’s stomach) and Ebbelkuche (apple pie).
Most German immigrants quickly found their place in the new surroundings and many of their foodways became ‘as American as apple pie’. In the 1840s German immigrants in New York were concentrated in the five- or six-storey brick tenements on the Lower East Side. The area became known as Kleindeutschland, Dutchtown, and soon stretched from 14th Street to Division Street in the south and from the Bowery to the river on the east. Low wages and high rents made for overcrowded, dark, stuffy rooms, conditions more suited to immigrants from urban areas, while rural immigrants tended to travel on to the farming regions of Missouri, Wisconsin and Illinois.
In New York many Germans made a living as tailors, printers and carpenters, but a large number worked as dairymen, grocers and butchers. By the late 1850s German family businesses dominated the baking trade. Unsurprisingly their bread tended to be on the dark and sour side, and yeast-raised cakes were offered under the German term kuchen, cake. German grocers (whose range later on would often overlap and merge with Eastern European Jewish immigrants and the delicatessens of today) offered brine-preserved herring, while German brewers, similarly small-scale family enterprises, introduced Americans to German bottom-fermented beer: lager tasted more refreshing than the previously dominant English ale and proved very popular.
A culinary place in time: Rogacki, a Berlin deli
Today Rogacki in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district conveys some of the atmosphere New York delicatessens are renowned for. Unlike the rubbernecking tourists at luxurious department store Kadewe’s famous sixth floor, people at Rogacki (www.rogacki.de) come to buy. In spite of offering more or less everything except fresh fruit and vegetables, its name above all stands for fish. In 1928 Lucia and Paul Rogacki started selling smoked fish in the working-class district of Wedding. Lucia looked after the shop while Paul went with his sister Marie and a handcart to the Alexanderplatz market. Business was good, and in 1932 they moved to the present address, where they started to smoke their own fish. The enterprise now employs 116 people and the present owner, Paul’s grandson Dietmar, still uses the old so-called Altona ovens to hot-smoke herring, haddock, salmon and much more at the back of the store. Salads are homemade, as are all manner of pickled and salted herring and cucumbers, and the catering service, or Stadtküche, has no hesitation in offering decorated platters which include old-fashioned cheese hedgehogs and pigs formed out of minced pork. Food available to eat in store includes all the traditional German favourites: fried fish, Schnitzel and Leberkäse (meatloaf), blood and liver sausage, Eisbein (boiled ham hock), fried potatoes and potato and cucumber salad, with semolina pudding for dessert. All Berlin stands cheek-by-jowl at the narrow tables, overalls rubbing elbows with fur coats. Ignoring all trends, Rogacki remains unselfconsciously old-fashioned, providing a link to the pre-war food world in a mix of German and Eastern European elements typical of Berlin in the early years of the twentieth century.
Besides beer, sauerkraut became synonymous with being German in America. Until the end of the Civil War itinerant krauthobblers, cabbage-shredders, went from door to door slicing cabbage for homemade sauerkraut, an activity which took place between late October and early December. Henry John Heinz of ketchup fame started his company in 1869 in Pittsburgh with grated horseradish. True to his family roots (he was born in Kallstadt/Palatinate), in the 1890s he built a sauerkraut factory on Long Island. In the bars, saloons and meeting halls of the city itinerant peddlers provided hungry patrons with potato salad as well as sauerkraut and frankfurters, which were kept hot in a metal container slung round their necks. Surprisingly sauerkraut was explicitly kept to a minimum on ships of the Lloyd Line which brought emigrants to the New World. In 1878 official regulations indicated that between-deck passengers were entitled to morning, afternoon and evening tea or coffee with milk and sugar, and white and rye bread with butter; the midday meal was to consist of soup with fresh or dried vegetables, along with 1.7 kg meat per person per week. The meat was to be fresh on two occasions (a hint at the general order of preference), while the third could be salt-cured and take the form of sauerkraut with bacon and potatoes. This requirement, however, might not have corresponded to reality, much like the optimistic assumption in a German historian’s dissertation of 1939 that ‘good cooking on the emigrant ships was guaranteed by a law which decreed that an experienced cook had to be on board.’8
Traditional sauerkraut making in our times at the Kimmich factory near Stuttgart.
German speakers were renowned for dining as a family and enjoying their food, often congregating in large groups. Shooting clubs and singing societies hosted parades, picnics and Volksfeste, open-air festivals. Some of those were impressive affairs, with herring salad, sauerkraut, potato pancakes, Frankfurter sausages, beer and honeycake on offer. Cavernous beer halls lined the Bowery with hearty simple fare including wurst and pretzels. More sophisticated luncheon rooms, known as Rathskeller or Postkeller, attracted an additional client base of non-German fellow Americans. In 1882 August Lüchow, a waiter from Hanover, took over a simple beer hall at 110 East 14th Street and transformed it into a huge multi-roomed palace lavishly endowed with German Gemütlichkeit, coziness. Lüchow’s was possibly the most successful and longest running of all German restaurants in the U.S. The restaurant served traditional German and Austrian fare using local ingredients, and offered imported beer from Würzburg and Pilsen as well as the best American beers and the finest Rhine wines. Customers were serenaded by live music from opera to brass band, and in December the restaurant installed a Christmas tree of legendary height. Lüchow’s closed in 1986 after having moved to the Theater District two years earlier.9
Lüchow’s was paradise on earth compared to paupers’ situation back home in the 1830s and ’40s, where even minor offenders in their desperation often insisted on serving prison sentences in order that they would be fed (needless to say, with price rises, offences involving food increased exponentially). Compared to Silesia’s hard-pressed home workers, inmates of institutions such as workhouses did indeed live a life of luxury: meals might well have been meagre, but at least they were guaranteed. The meal plan in a Munich prison at the time consisted of bread and soups made with flour, beans, peas or potatoes, to which meat was added twice weekly.10 Prison food had always been controversial. Those involved in nutritional science, a growing area of study, made it clear that water and bread did not represent an adequate diet. The public view was that inmates only deserved the barest minimum. As new scientific findings redefined what this should be, fears were expressed that too much food would lead to an increase in the prisoners’ sex drive. A more genuine problem was developing a meal plan that could cater to a diversity of age groups, be affordable and keep prisoners reasonably healthy.
Hospitals, prisons, poorhouses and workhouses established in the eighteenth century typically began as independent economic entities that produced most of their own food. With the help of inmates, they grew vegetables and fruit, kept dairy cattle and pigs and processed their own grain and meat. By the early nineteenth century, however, these institutions were becoming ever more crowded. The rapid growth of cities converted rural areas into urban ones, with a subsequent loss of productive farmland and animal husbandry. At the same time the institutions themselves were obliged to tighten their belts and take a long, hard look at food costs. Outsourcing was often cheaper than home production. In prisons as well as hospitals, the goal was a quick and cost-efficient reintegration of inmates into the workforce while providing re-education in good citizenship. Until around 1850 medical care in hospitals took second place to general care, since most patients, predominantly unskilled labourers, servants, craftsmen and travellers suffering from minor complaints, were accepted because they couldn’t cater for themselves.
Until that point sickness had commonly been countered by fasting as a direct method of purging the body of ‘poisonous’ substances. The medical standard of the time (before the advent of modern science) was set by Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, a friend of Goethe and personal physician to the Prussian queen Louise. In 1797 Hufeland published his very successful Kunst, das menschliche Leben zu verlängern (The Art of Prolonging Human Life, renamed Makrobiotik in later editions) which was focused not on illness but on the human being as a whole. Hufeland recommended balance and harmony in all things. This was in fact a return to classical medical ideas and a sign of how former influences had not been forgotten, in spite of the obsession with all things French and the court in Versailles: the Grand Tour to Italy was popular and when Goethe went to Rome, he returned with a love of virgin olive oil, artichokes, stufato and Parmesan cheese. A return to holistic medicine meant that the connection between health and food was renewed – as long as you ate right, you’d be all right. This conviction would be reinforced – albeit underpinned by a new system – in the course of the nineteenth century by the nascent field of food science. It has stuck in the German culinary psyche up to the present day.
An inmate of the municipal workhouse of Rummelsburg in Berlin receives his meal: a bowl of soup and a slice of bread, c. 1900.
Hufeland spawned a whole generation of cookbooks based on his classification of foodstuffs and preparation methods, and stated that the cook’s duty was to follow dietetic principles. His recommendations were to become the foundation of vegetarianism and the Lebensreform or life reform movement. In 1791 one of Hufeland’s colleagues, Johann Christian Reil, had published a rant against apicische Lekkermäuler, gluttony in the style of Apicius (anticipating the like-minded gastro-philosopher Karl Friedrich von Rumohr), while the Wolfensbüttel physician Johann Bücking in his Diätetischer Hausarzt (The Dietetic Family Doctor) gave very exact recipes on the same theme. In the 1820s and ’30s numerous works followed based on homeopathic principles. These were first conceived in 1796 by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann and were based on the belief that like cures like. They followed the principle that remedies were only needed in extreme dilutions. Under this school of thought, the use of spices in the kitchen was to be extremely reduced and all foods that might interfere with the efficacy of remedies were prohibited, among them cheese, sausage and fish as well as beer and coffee.
Physicians and medical men in general increasingly regarded institutions as a rich source of material for research. The consequences of this were given a public airing by the writer Georg Büchner, who studied medicine. His stage play Woyzeck (written in 1836 but published posthumously in 1879) dealt with the establishment’s reaction to pauperism. Out of desperation the impoverished protagonist sells himself to a ruthless physician for food-based experiments, referring to the first feeding experiments (on dogs) which took place in the 1820s, during the early days of nutritional science. Medical men became the ultimate authority on hospital food. By 1880 standardized meal plans had been introduced into all institutions. Compared with standard practice in 1800, these plans offered considerably less bread and much more meat, some fish and above all fresh milk, which was regarded as digestible, nourishing and healthy. Potatoes, however, didn’t make an appearance until the early years of the nineteenth century, and even then were only recommended in comparatively small quantities. Alcohol was progressively banned, while coffee was only introduced at the end of the nineteenth century, when it was prescribed as a stimulant for medical reasons. Nevertheless, records from the Berlin Charité in 1819 indicate that nurses were enthusiastic consumers of coffee, especially on night shifts. Finances, meanwhile, became more secure as hospital costs were increasingly covered by insurance schemes. Kitchens were better equipped and staff better trained. Public opinion, however, required that meals should not exceed what the average workman could afford, although views differed on what a workman actually ate. After all, institutions were run by middle-class administrators concerned with maintaining appropriate social differences, as symbolized by food. Such limited statistics as are available for workers’ households reveal that institutions in general spent more on meat and milk and less on bread, potatoes and vegetables than workers, while hospitals served a richer diet than the average working family could afford. However, records from Berlin in 1879 also show that physicians and staff consumed most of the meat, sausage, fish, butter, cheese, eggs, bread, potatoes, vegetables, fruit, sugar and beer that appear in hospitals’ consumption statistics. Patients were only allowed their fair share of milk, rolls and legumes. It is similarly difficult to know how much of the prison food that was officially bought in was actually consumed by inmates, as it might have been sent back as unwanted, or been subject to underhanded deals by the staff.11
In the 1840s the liberal ideals that almost paved the way to national unity and a constitution had long been around in the kitchens in the form of Hausmannskost. ‘Houseman cooking’ is the literal translation of a term whose origin can be traced back as far as the final years of the Middle Ages. It fitted the spirit of the nineteenth century well, since it stood for simple, down-to-earth, everyday fare, the very opposite of the nobility’s upper-class excess. One of the strongest advocates of the idea that simplicity in food was preferable to indulgence was the German art critic and historian Karl Friedrich von Rumohr. He published his Geist der Kochkunst (The Essence of the Art of Cooking) in 1822 in Weimar under the pseudonym of his chef, Josef König. Rumohr was a highly rational, reality-obsessed empiricist whose culinary masterwork preceded Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût (1826) and represented the intellectualization of cookery begun by Grimod de la Reynière in his Almanach des Gourmands (1803–12). Rumohr’s guiding principle was to ‘develop out of edible things that which best suits their natural characteristics’. To prove his point, he ridiculed the classical cuisine of the Romans, ‘which through mixing and working completely destroys the original character of the dish’, and wrote admiringly of the philosophical principles of Horace and Rousseau. Declaring himself in favour of simple meals, it was, he explained, much more important to eat well every day (though not more than was appropriate) than to indulge in occasional extravagant feasts. Even dishes commonly associated with the lower classes and therefore deemed untouchable by the good bourgeois, like soup, were in his opinion viable, and he cited Olla podrida as a case in point, presenting this popular stew from the Middle Ages as a culinary relict. Originating in Spain, this rather wild mix of edibles could take awesome dimensions. In 1581 Marx Rumpolt’s recipe ran to several pages, bringing together capon and game with offal and garlic, but was pronounced fit even for the king. The patrician upper middle class of the time developed special serving dishes for the Holiprotiden, with liquid and solids served separately. In late seventeenth century the term was also used for a ragout made from crayfish, morels and sweetbread, reminding modern German cooks of Leipziger Allerlei. At the French court, from the late seventeenth century, all the lowly ingredients in the pot d’oille were gradually eliminated: cabbage and leeks were replaced by delicate primeurs, and pork by smoked ham. The result was served in expensive silver dishes, making soup, once a lowly dish, respectable, and in the eighteenth century the base for restorative consommés. Rumohr himself claimed to have rediscovered and modernized the Olla on the occasion of a stay in Rome and his health problems with its (in his perception) heavy cuisine. The courtly version of the dish disappeared with the Habsburg monarchy, whose palace in Vienna had a separate Spanish soup kitchen with its own cook. At that time the oglio (or olio) was a clear soup served at midnight in small cups on the occasion of large court balls. A pared-down version of the Spanish original, certainly much more to Rumohr’s taste, survived in Alfred Walterspiel’s classic Meine Kunst in Küche und Restaurant (My Art in the Kitchen and Restaurant), first published in 1952. It used carrots, Savoy cabbage, leeks, onions, potatoes and some herbs as well as bacon, a shoulder of mutton, a chicken and, if possible, two fried partridges or a pheasant and some ham, with some small sausages, chickpeas and finely shredded lettuce added to the resulting clear broth.
Among Rumohr’s contemporaries who also disapproved of excessive consumption at mealtimes were Eugen von Vaerst, whose Gastrosophie was published in 1851, and Gustav Blumröder, who published Vorlesungen über Esskunst (Lectures on the Art of Eating) in 1838. The same ideas were taken up by novelists such as Adalbert Stifter, who vigorously deplored ‘general wretched depravity’ in his fellow citizens. Heinrich Heine, a fervent admirer of French cuisine, likewise denounced the gluttony of the moneyed classes of the Biedermeier period in Germany, filling his pages with food-related incidents as examples of culinary vice or virtue.
The middle classes found themselves caught in the same dilemma with music. As with food, they had to feel their own way between upper-class excess and the perceived vulgarity of the streets. In households that consulted and followed works like Sophia Wilhelmine Scheibler’s Küchen-Zettel-Buch (1832), a collection of menu suggestions, music was an established aspect of the ritual of dinner. For dinner on a Tuesday night in January, Scheibler proposed potato soup, pike made blue (cooked with vinegar) with horseradish and butter, stuffed milk rolls, roasted partridges and a pie. Additional side dishes included anchovies, potatoes, cherries and cabbage dressed as salad, while dessert consisted of either apples, meringues, macaroons, a cake or butter and cheese. Music was played during meals and at in-house concerts both before and after dinner. Bursting into song at table, as is described in the novels of Theodor Fontane, was considered perfectly normal. Johann Sebastian Bach had thought nothing of playing in church one day and in a coffeehouse the next. Nevertheless table music was increasingly regarded as an inferior genre, rejected not only by Rumohr but by serious musicians, and dismissed out of hand by Richard Wagner. The tradition nevertheless continued in the form of light entertainment in spa towns and as an attraction in city cafes. At the opening of Café Kranzler in Berlin in 1825 a band from Italy was announced as a ‘divertissement’. Light music was also an important feature of the drinking gardens of Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin and other major cities, where customers were offered artificial mineral water, created in 1820 by physician Friedrich Adolf Struve and based on the medicinal spring waters of Karlsbad.12
In a further effort to distance themselves from the lifestyle of the nobility, their indulgence in luxury and the pursuit of leisure, bourgeois circles reprimanded those women who only issued orders to their servants. Many expected them instead to take an active part in the management of the household and join the servants in the kitchen. During the nineteenth century cookbooks changed accordingly: for instance, they took into consideration the fact that urban households increasingly depended on buying their food instead of producing it themselves. Shopping and storage needed special knowledge and diligence. Scheibler in the Küchen-Zettel-Buch strongly advised against keeping anything prepared in any way longer than a day, especially in summer. Technological improvements rarely extended to cooling, mostly consisting of new cooking stoves, which permitted a more efficient use of fuel. From the 1860s onwards the most widely accepted of these was the Sparherd or economic stove originally developed by Count Rumford. It was a closed iron range equipped with regulated air supply and up to five hot plates with a separate oven and hot-water cistern; factory-produced, it was easy to transport and install, making traditional stove fitters redundant.
Pauperism and the ensuing migrations disrupted the traditional transfer of cooking skills from one generation to another, adding to the rising demand for cooking advice. Girls of working age from large rural families were obliged to learn new ways when entering service in urban households. When they returned home to marry, these young women in turn brought their household and kitchen experiences with them, imitating their employers’ lifestyle in so far as economic conditions allowed, an enterprise ably assisted by practical cookbooks such as that of Henriette Davidis.
Davidis was a pastor’s daughter from the Sauerland region of Westphalia. Her mother, a Dutchwoman from an urban background, originally found herself without any of the skills necessary to maintain a rural household. She often found this lack very embarrassing and it led her to take steps to ensure that her thirteen children would be better prepared. Living in a region that had seen early industrialization, young Henriette was familiar with the lifestyle of the lower classes. Religiously and socially motivated to better herself and her fellows, she found work as a teacher and governess. The future cookbook author sympathized with the young women she observed trying to run a household on a tight budget without servants. Her Praktisches Kochbuch (Practical Cookbook), published in 1845, was intended as a helpful companion to these young housewives, not least since much of the work previously undertaken in rural households had gradually disappeared, making cooking the focus of attention. Written in a thoroughly accessible style, the book was immensely successful, reaching its 21st edition within the author’s lifetime and going into its 61st edition a century after its first publication. German immigrants took the book to the U.S, and in 1879 a German bookstore owner published its first American edition in Milwaukee. This was followed by the first English translation in 1897.13 Interest in the work was not confined to the kitchen. In 1891, German novelist Wilhelm Raabe pointed out in Stopfkuchen, a work of fiction which examined the lot of outsiders in a small town in northern Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century, that Davidis’s cookbook would always repay study, if only as an opportunity to dream of other worlds. Contemporary proof that Henriette Davidis’s masterwork is still regarded as a culinary bible can be found in Nobel Prize-winner Günter Grass’s novel Der Butt (The Flounder) of 1977, in which Davidis is used as symbol for the bourgeoisie.
A proliferation of female authors followed in Davidis’s footsteps. Among those who were successful and went into numerous new editions were Sophie Wilhelmine Scheibler, Marie Susanne Kübler, Mary Hahn and Katharina Prato. The authors often used regional titles for their books, though the content was designed to appeal to certain social groupings rather than focusing on regionality. Not infrequently the same content was sold under several titles, while dishes described as regional were usually stereotypical rather than distinctive or authentic.
In many cases the word wohlfeil (affordable) was included in titles, appealing to the conscience of both middle-class author and audience. Among these, first published in 1815 in Berlin, was Sophie Scheibler’s Allgemeines deutsches Kochbuch für bürgerliche Haushaltungen oder gründliche Anweisung wie man ohne Vorkenntnisse alle Arten Speisen und Backwerk auf die wohlfeilste und schmackhafteste Art zubereiten kann (General German Cookbook for Bourgeois Households; or, Thorough Advice on How to Make All Kinds of Dishes and Bakery Goods Without Any Prior Knowledge in the Most Affordable and Delicious Way). While the title promised thrift, the book included recipes for luxuries such as chocolate, asparagus and all kinds of meat, including pigeons, capon and game, along with elaborate cakes and frozen desserts.
A similar contradiction surrounded horsemeat. Long tainted by Christian taboo for its association with pagan rituals, during the nineteenth century it returned to the menu. On the one hand it came to be associated with the poor, while on the other Hippophagen-Vereine, horsemeat-eating associations, promoted it as nutritious. In 1848 Henriette Davidis published Praktische Anweisung zur Bereitung des Rossfleisches, offering practical advice on the preparation of horsemeat. However, horse slaughter, butchering and selling of the meat was restricted to separate establishments by law (a requirement in place till 1991). In 1860 an economist mentioned the opening of horse butcheries for the less affluent in several large cities in northern Germany. Berlin counted seven of these in 1868, with around 1,300 animals slaughtered in 1863–4. According to official records, in 1895 in Saxony, the state reputed to have the greatest horsemeat consumption, between 1 and 2 per cent of all meat consumed was horsemeat. Today consumption is about 50 g per head per year, with Rheinischer Sauerbraten frequently cited as being originally made from horse.14
Another new category of cookbooks were those for children, by now regarded as a distinct social group. The dolls’ cookbooks of Christine Charlotte Riedl and Julie Bimbach, both published in 1854, were followed by Henriette Davidis’s Puppenköchin Anna (Anna the Doll Cook) in 1858. Adult concern for children’s well-being did not preclude strictness. In addition to professionally written recipes, in Davidis’s work the voice of the schoolmistress can be heard stressing the importance of politeness, thankfulness, thrift and cleanliness. Struwwelpeter, literally shaggy Peter, was another enormously successful book directed at children and even more open in its educational purpose. Consisting of ten short stories, it was originally written in 1844 by a physician in charge of the Frankfurt lunatic asylum as a Christmas present for his three-year-old son. From a food historian’s viewpoint the most interesting of those stories is Suppenkaspar, about a small boy, Kaspar, who refuses to eat his soup and is dead within five days. While this may well be the first case of anorexia nervosa described in literature, in the context of pauperism it becomes particularly intriguing, since the title, Suppenkaspar, is used to this day to admonish difficult children at table.
Map of the minor German states, 1864.
Henriette Davidis, Anna the Doll Cook (1858).
Dr Oetker, childrens’ cookbook from 1961.
In the second half of the nineteenth century food crises still occurred, but they were less severe and more local. Pauperism didn’t disappear overnight, but in the wake of the famine of 1846/7 the economy improved and by 1850 the remains of the feudal system were abolished all over Germany. Hardship was not seen as god-given any more, and insurance companies and banks attempted to share burdens among a larger proportion of the population. In some regions redemption payments by the peasantry to former landlords were state-funded. In the long term, with increasing industrialization, employment in urban factories offered an alternative to the paupers’ misery, and the poor gradually became the urban proletariat.
The actual timing of the switch from agrarian to industrial society depends on one’s point of view, as in the 1840s the agricultural sector made for less than half of the net inland product but still employed more than half of all working people until the 1870s (the percentage declined, but absolute numbers were stable or rose as agricultural production intensified). At the same time the industrialization of the agricultural sector only started in the 1870s, with yields rising significantly from the 1890s, mostly due to the introduction of modern technology.
Although in 1840 Germany’s economy still lagged more than 50 years behind that of Britain, by the end of the century Germany would be one of the leading industrialized nations. Two factors above all others were responsible for this dramatic change. The first was the abolition of internal trade tariffs, a process initiated by Prussia and leading to the foundation of the Deutscher Zollverein, the German tariff union, with eighteen states and a population of 23 million under Prussian leadership forming a single market. The other factor was the development of faster and cheaper transport, above all by ship and railway, allowing raw materials and labour to meet at new urban production centres. The iron industry moved to the coal mines in the Ruhr area, the Saar region and upper Silesia and began to use steam power. As with the first modern agricultural equipment, early locomotives had to be imported from England. But by 1858, 1,000 engines had been domestically produced.
The percentage of the population working in factories rose from 4 per cent in 1850 to 10 per cent in 1873. In response to this the feminist writer Lina Morgenstern started large Volksküchen, or people’s kitchens, in Berlin. These offered affordable, healthy takeaway food. The first opened in 1866, and within three years a total of ten were operating in the city, providing up to 10,000 meals daily at cost price. Only one dish was cooked each day, and the list of these provides what is effectively a roll-call of Berliners’ favourite dishes: green peas with smoked bacon and potatoes, rice pudding with braised meat, sour potatoes with pork and beef, kohlrabi, potatoes and beef, potato dumplings with dried fruit and bacon, potatoes with apples, pork and beef, braised cucumbers with bacon and potatoes, spinach with potatoes, pork and beef or meatloaf. Berlin’s rival gastronomic outlets rose in protest against what they saw as unfair competition, but Morgenstern persisted, publishing her Volksküchen recipes in the form of a cookbook in 1868. Even more importantly, the plight of injured troops and prisoners during the Franco–Prussian war in 1870/71 led her to form a committee to hand out meals in the barracks at Berlin’s railway stations, thus establishing a precedent for more humane treatment of the victims of war.