Tradition.
Jul. 14th, 2011 09:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sister_luckWe are Germans. We take cake seriously. Come to that, there's not much that we don't take seriously, but baked goods are among the most serious foodstuffs. Traditionally, we don't care much about our vegetables - cooked to slightly mushy perfection and drowned in white sauce - but Kuchen? Oh, the variety! With or without fruit topping, with butter cream, with Streusel, with chocolate, with cream cheese or Quark. I can think of half a dozen different possibilities of apple cakes or tarts right off the top of my head.
But it's a dying art and you don't find many independent specialised bakeries (Konditorei) and cafés any more where you can get coffee and a piece of cake for your Kaffeeklatsch. Our destination by the Rhine still had one of those.
Here's a look inside the tiny room where you order the cake that is then later brought to your table - you get a little piece of paper with a number, so that the waitress knows where to take your plate. It says a lot about food preferences that the same system is common in the UK in traditional fish and chip shops. This café also doubled as the local bakery and all the goods on display looked extremely good and were definitely home-made. None of your pre-fab Brötchen that are just put inside a big oven and 'freshly baked' on the premises of your local supermarket.
My lunch on Saturday was a nice Milchkaffee - thank you Italians and French for teaching us about coffee - and a lovely piece of fluffy orange cake. Most of the place looked like it hadn't changed for at least 50 years and all the locals recommended it. As it turned out, this café - under the same name - was already around in 1926, as we found out from a tourist guide from that time that one of my colleagues was seen to be carrying around and reading passages from to the rest of us. (We were identifiable as teachers from miles away, I believe.)
But it's a dying art and you don't find many independent specialised bakeries (Konditorei) and cafés any more where you can get coffee and a piece of cake for your Kaffeeklatsch. Our destination by the Rhine still had one of those.
Here's a look inside the tiny room where you order the cake that is then later brought to your table - you get a little piece of paper with a number, so that the waitress knows where to take your plate. It says a lot about food preferences that the same system is common in the UK in traditional fish and chip shops. This café also doubled as the local bakery and all the goods on display looked extremely good and were definitely home-made. None of your pre-fab Brötchen that are just put inside a big oven and 'freshly baked' on the premises of your local supermarket.
My lunch on Saturday was a nice Milchkaffee - thank you Italians and French for teaching us about coffee - and a lovely piece of fluffy orange cake. Most of the place looked like it hadn't changed for at least 50 years and all the locals recommended it. As it turned out, this café - under the same name - was already around in 1926, as we found out from a tourist guide from that time that one of my colleagues was seen to be carrying around and reading passages from to the rest of us. (We were identifiable as teachers from miles away, I believe.)
