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Introduction

One recent morning in late spring, my family—my husband, Max, and our sons, Hugo and Bruno—and I drove southwest from Berlin, where we live, to Petzow on the banks of the Schwielowsee, one of Berlin and Brandenburg’s three thousand lakes. We were there for a guided tour of Schlossgarten Petzow, a privately owned garden that had originally been created in the nineteenth century as part of a larger project that included a palace, a church, and a small village by three renowned Prussian architects and landscape designers, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Friedrich August Stüler, and Peter Joseph Lenné.

We thought we were there to spend a few hours in a pretty walled garden; what I didn’t expect was a history lesson that spanned from the Bronze Age to the reunification of Germany. Though after so many years in Berlin, I should have known that in any context here, history is never very far away.

After World War II, the occupying Soviet military expropriated the family that owned the garden, and it was divided into allotments for local villagers and refugees to grow food during the devastating hunger of the postwar years. Later, during the years of the German Democratic Republic, the garden became the site of an agricultural cooperative. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the garden fell into disrepair. It became a dumping ground, with nearly a million kilos of garbage removed from it in later years, until the current owner, a wealthy West Berlin businessman named Klaus Kosakowski, bought it and set about restoring the garden’s former glory.

It was Kosakowski who gave us the tour, proudly pointing out the efforts of the past twenty years: the beautifully crafted wooden hut for the beehives, the handmade bricks for the restored walls of the garden, the meticulously planned lines of sight throughout the garden to better contemplate the countless rosebushes and perfectly laid-out vegetable garden. Kosakowski also explained that during the multiyear cleanup of the gardens, excavators unearthed a Bronze Age–era holy site, which he decided to leave intact, an ancient clearing at the edge of all the manicured beauty.

A few steps farther and we were standing in front of a wizened elderberry tree. A small brass bell hung from one of its branches. Why the bell? Kosakowski explained that elderberry, known as Holunder in German or Holler in Austria, had been given its name by Germanic tribes who associated the tree with the goddess Hulda. She was rumored to inhabit the trees, shaking the branches free of their tiny white blossoms in spring, a storyline picked up by the Grimm Brothers’ nineteenth-century fairy tale “Frau Holle.” Since ancient times, elderberry trees have also been considered to be the threshold to other worlds inhabited by dwarves and fairies, Kosakowski solemnly explained, or maybe even the underworld. It was considered risky to fall asleep under an elderberry tree because you could end up trapped in the other world forever, and so, to avoid that, the bell was hung to keep drowsy visitors awake.

As we stood there listening to Kosakowski, everyone nodding thoughtfully about the elderberry tree, I thought about how emblematic this mixture of seriousness and whimsy is to Germany, and to German food, too. Germans are widely considered to be models of efficiency and solidity, their humor (and their food) stodgy and serious. And there is some truth to that. But believe it or not, this was not the first time that I’d been spoken to straight-faced about fairies in an otherwise unmagical context, and Germans can be far more carefree and twinkly-eyed than they are often given credit for. Butchers slip children slices of ham from the counter with a wink, older neighbors secretly place foil-wrapped chocolate Santas in the freshly polished childrens’ shoes parked outside their apartment doors on the Eve of Saint Nicholas, and it is perfectly normal to serve children rice pudding or jam-filled pancakes for lunch. Pork, potatoes, and cabbage may be a large part of the traditional German diet, but so are the flavors of fresh milk and sour cheese, elderberries and red currants, mugwort and nutmeg, quince and pears.

The story about the elderberry tree stayed in my mind for a long time after our visit. I had grown up with the fairy tale of “Frau Holle,” could still hear in my mind the rich timbre of the actress’s voice who told the story on the recording I listened to as a child, but I had never known about elderberry’s ancient history. Berlin’s boulevards and parks are filled with wild elderberry trees; their creamy disk-shaped umbels are spring’s most delicious harvest. My friend Joan taught me how to gather the umbels, always careful not to shake off any of the fragrant pollen, and to macerate them with lemon before turning them into elderflower syrup. In various regions of Germany and Austria, the delicate umbels are dipped in a light batter and fried, then served with a gossamer dusting of confectioners’ sugar. In late summer, after the umbels wither and dark purplish-blue berries appear in their place, they are gathered and turned into inky jelly or cooked down into compote, delicious with sweet, tender dumplings made with Quark.

Elderberry isn’t the only food the Germans have been eating for millennia. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing in the first century CE, described the diet of Germanic tribes as consisting primarily of wild berries, game, beer (though he didn’t call it that), and lac concretum, or solidified milk, which anyone living in Germany today might recognize as Quark, a fresh cheese that is still a staple of the local diet. In fact, when one contemplates traditional German cuisine today, with its braised venison, berry puddings, Quark spreads, and ever-present glasses of cold beer, it is remarkable how many of these ancient flavors are still at the table. Though one must also keep in mind the influence of poverty on the German diet; for most Germans for many centuries, porridges made from grains such as wheat, barley, and millet were one of the main sources of nutrition, and were mixed with little more than milk or lard.

Over time, geopolitical events from all four directions influenced the German diet. To simplify it somewhat: The northern spice routes via the Hanseatic League brought things such as cinnamon and cardamom to the German sweet kitchen; from the west came braised and roasted meat; from the south came noodles and dumplings; from the east came cucumbers, caraway, and paprika. Knights returning from the Crusades introduced saffron, pepper, and raisins. A particularly impressive example of culinary influence is from the French Huguenots who fled to Berlin and Brandenburg in the seventeenth century after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. I once saw their contribution illustrated at an exhibit at Berlin’s Märkisches Museum, which is devoted to the history of the city and surrounding region. A long table was filled with the foods those French Protestants introduced to Berlin—meat patties, asparagus, button mushrooms and porcini, carrots and cabbage, pears and apples, green beans and cauliflower, white bread and Mischbrot, which is a blend of white and rye flour bread. Even the cream puff! One shudders to think of what the average Berliner was eating before the arrival of the French.

And perhaps the most famous addition to German cuisine: potatoes. Today potatoes are such a part of German identity that a derogatory term for Germans by non-Germans is Kartoffel (potato) but potatoes weren’t part of the German diet until the eighteenth century, when Friedrich II, king of Prussia, ordered Germans who were suffering under recurring famines to start eating the tuber of a plant that they had largely considered only decorative since its importation from Spain in the mid-sixteenth century. (It turns out they were cooking the tubers wrong.) Today, as a token of gratitude, visitors leave potatoes on the gravestone of Friedrich II in the gardens of his pleasure palace Sanssouci in Potsdam.

But perhaps more than anything, German cuisine reflects the influence of the Protestant Reformation as well as the trauma of constant, unabating hunger. As Wolfram Siebeck, an influential German food journalist, said to the New York Times in an interview twenty years ago, “It all started in 1618 with the Thirty Years’ War, which devastated this country in a way that has never been repeated.” Siebeck also believed that Germany was “never at a civilized level long enough for a refinement of eating to be realized.”