Today, I had my last class with my April student. She really was wonderful. I will miss talking with her. She will be working for a German firm that will work with an American agricultural firm based in Atlanta, so part of the fun with working with her was using my southern accent to help her get used to some of what she might hear on the phone. I hope the best for her. She is really a great person!! Hopefully, though, it also means the last day of being late on my blogs. Thanks for sticking around while I had these time adjustments.
Biblically, bread is "the shnizzle". (Yeah, I know - rap does not become me.) But my point is that for most of history, bread was and still is the most important thing to people wanting to survive since humans began making it. For Germans, this is no different. Bread is so much a part of the life here, that I just can't imagine a day going by without it being a vital part of it. As I've mentioned before, about every two blocks or less, there is a bakery. You can get MANY varieties of bread -different bread grains, bread textures, and bread sizes and shapes. But again, I have to confess that I terribly miss bread here - good bread, that is.
Although bread is very much a part of everyday life, the bread here in Germany is very hard. It has a crusty outer surface and sometimes the inside is also a bit "crusty" or stale seeming. Grocery store bread loaves come in hard or harder. Pretzels, which are the preferred substitute to our icky sweet birthday cakes or icky sweet breakfast breads, are large and soft, or I should say soft-ish because they can have that day-old feel to them when you bite into them. Part of this is because they are in fact a day old. Although there are many bakeries nearby, there are actually only a few places where all this bread is baked. It is then trucked around town to the local branches of the main bakery at night or early the next day where it is then sold. Pretzels are often filled with butter or cream cheese and frequently act as the morning meal or an afternoon snack called Brotzeit. Sometimes bread in smaller rolls are also stuffed or baked, covered with cheeses. But regardless of how it is prepared, as a sandwich, as a snack or pretzel, or as an entire loaf, it is always served cold and day-old.
I asked my friend why this might be. I miss soft, freshly baked chewy bread like a good sour dough loaf. I miss going to the grocery store and buying the softest, most squishable loaf in a variety of flavors in order to make sandwiches or little pizzas. She explained that she was told a long time ago about why this practice developed. After World War II, the children were not allowed to have fresh baked bread because it tasted too good. Because the children would be tempted to eat more of it than there was to go around, the bread had to cool and wait until the next day before it could be served. Then, although good and life-nourishing to the very impoverished survivors of the war, the temptation to eat too much was gone. Over time, the people began to acquire a taste for this cold, crusty bread. I have no way of knowing if this story is true, but it sure made sense to me. Now, when Germans come to live in the US for Bosch, I have heard them say how much they miss the bread from home. All this soft bread is too gooey for them. It seems undercooked.
Our longings for bread are not totally unsatisfied, though. We have found a bread vendor at the local farmers' market that comes to town on Wednesdays and Saturdays that bakes fresh, yummy bread that is like sour dough. (We've been told that they are actually Irish, and not German - perhaps that is the reason it is so good.) We make a point of going there whenever we can to get our fix. We also stumbled upon one of those bakery locations in Blaichach (a small town nearby) that bakes all the bread for its branches, and there, we were able to get fresh, hot pretzels. It was like going to Krispy Kreme as the doughnuts came off the line. Mmmm - Krispy Kreme. Ah - wait - better not go there. That's another thing - nothing like Krispy Kreme here (it would definitely be too sweet for the locals). They do have jelly doughnuts (called ein Berliners - kids, for extra credit: which US president once compared himself unwittingly to a jelly doughnut?), but they remind me of grocery store doughnuts - again, at least a day old.
One last ironic thought - despite how important bread is on a daily basis, we cannot get served bread before or with our dinner in restaurants. It just isn't done. When it has happened, it was because they knew we were American and not because it was normal. Perhaps it is because bread here does not have the preservatives in it that a lot of American bread does, so for restaurants, it would be hard to keep good bread. Perhaps, though, it is just because it is not done, so no one thinks about it as being odd - just as we don't think about it being special when bread comes out before our dinner. That question will have to stay unanswered, I'm afraid.
The word for today is bread: das Brot (brote).
The question for the day is "Why is May 1st important in most of the world but not the US?"
Auf Wiedersehen,
Frau Spitzer
