HOW THE GERMANS TAKE THEIR MEALS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 486, 27 July 1912, Page 7

HOW THE GERMANS TAKE THEIR MEALS.

"She (the German housewife) is more housewifely than the Englishwoman, and can keep up better appearances on smaller, resources," stated Mr. J. R. Macdonald. "If the English housewife" he goes on, 'spent as carefully as the German housewife an English workman's household could be at least 20 to 25 per cent, more comfortable than a German workman's household." That is the reason why, with high prices and bad wages, the German workman and the poorer German official manage to feed better than we do.

Perhaps to understand this we had better eat with a German through his day.

He starts off with a very light breakfast because he prizes those early morning hours, and does not want to send himself half to sleep with fat foodstuffs ; while your Englishman, who is expecting only a brief halt, with the loins girded, between now and teatime, stufis to the brim.

Our German cousin rises at seven ; at seven-thirty he takes coffee and splendidly baked white rolls, which latter are sometimes shaped liko crescent moons, and are always delicious. If he is rich he takes butter with his rolls ;> if he is a millionaire, he adds honey. WONDERFUL. SOUP.

From 8 to 12 he works— steadily. At 12 he dines. He has soup, oh ! wonderful soup. Beef soup, spagetti soup ; soupi with squares of burnt bread in it, scrap cradling tender little sausages, soup aswarm with little curly things,, soup floating huge suet balls, soups of all flavours and thicknesses, soups to satisfy the soul of a Swab. It would surprise you out of what odds and ends a German housewife can make a wonderful soup. In moderately well-off households the next dish is the meat, cooked generally not as a joint, but in slices ; veal, pork, or beef mostly, with veal for a prime favourite, and always well done. Meat tough and tasteless comes on the table as soft and palatable as a prime cut from a prize beast. Sometimes the veal is cooked with cream, sometimes the meat is fried, boiled, stewed, roasted, and each manner of meat and cooking has its proper vegetable or salad, and he who should take Sauerkraut with beef would be for ever more accursed. To a normally constituted Teuton lentils (boiled, and then fried in butter) inevitably suggest the accompanying boiled pork. But you do not take much vegetable the meat is the main thing. With the second helping of meat you take stewed fruit, and more often than not the fruit is a sort oi sublimated cranberry. That is the ordinary dinner high up into the middle and well down into the working class. The rich put a dish between the soup and the meat, which is fish in the north near the sea and a dainty olla podrida of meat and vegetables in the land locked south, and they finish up thf meal with something made of milb and eggs, or froth and pastry. Beer "s added, of course. THE MID-DAY REST.

Dmnee is over, say, at half-pas; one or two ; but the offices do not start operating; until three. Meanwhile coffee. The dinner has probably been taken at home, but if yor. male you will take your coffee ir public. In winter shut up from th< cold ; in summer under trees, or in Dpen cafes fronting the main streets.

From three till sis you work, perhaps even till seven. At half-past six or half-past seven you take your evening meal. Probably in a beer hall or beer garden. Aufschnitt (cut slices of all kinds of sausage—beautiEul mosaic stuff), with potato salad and black bread, make a good supper But if you are extravagant you mas take a few thin slabs of dark brown tender meat and a morsel of vegetable. Beer, music, laughter, and fellowship round off the day.

You will realise how food taken under such conditions will nourish you m,ore than when you gulp il down in an unfriendly coffee-house, and you will understand how much inferior quality may be compensated for by an enlightened cooking. The German does not eat so much as the Englishman, he does not swallow luge chunks of meat and bushels of greens and potatoes, but every morsel is well cooked, and every morsel nourishes.

If you went with me into a pooi household you would be surprised to and what dainty dishes could be made out of odd scraps of meat gol from the Freibank at the public slaughterhouse. There is a regular :ookery book full of dishes to be made of minced meat with infinitelj varying subtle flavours. And potatoes now—there is a way of roasting potatoes with carraway seeds thai nakes my mouth water to think of.

"If Protection came to England," said a writer recently, "the English housewife would probably learn to cook, but," he adds satirically, ''''. think she would die first."—"Daily News."