Imperial German Military Beverages (1887)
https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/10/10/imperial-german-military-beverages/
After the amazing find of the 1910 field service manual of cocktail mixery (Bowlen und Pünsche für den Manöver- und Feldgebrauch der Deutschen Armee), I recently chanced on an 1887 publication called Des Soldaten Kochbüchlein (The Soldier’s Little Cookbook) that instructs the other ranks in the art of field cookery. The book was printed in Hildburghausen in the state of Sachsen-Meiningen, but since the troops of that state were integrated by convention with Prussian XI Corps, the customs described here apply to the Prussian military as well. It is certainly intended for all German troops whose equipment and training had been standardised at that point. The German army did not issue official cooking manuals, so it was produced commercially. The cheap, unillustrated monochrome print suggests that the target market was indeed enlisted draftees.
The recipes and details are fascinating, including legal advice on looting, and I am wondering whether it might be worth translating the whole thing for sheer nerd appeal, but for today, because this can be done quickly without much research, here is the section on drinks. For quick reference, the cooking vessels mentioned here are standardised: A canteen holds 1 litre, a drinking cu 250ml, and a cooking pot (Kochgeschirr) consists of a 3-litre bottom and a 1-litre top section. I am trying to find out more on these and suspect that the measures the book gives are approximations. The teaspoon and tablespoon appear to be non-standardised household items.
German soldier in pre-1909 uniform. The cooking kit and canteen are visible on his baggage.
K. Beverages
a) warm
Have you cleaned your cooking pot? Have yo boiled a piece of soda in it and scrubbed it with fresh water? If you haven’t, the coffee is liable to taste like fatty dishwater. Now, as you will not always have as much water for cleaning as you need or might wish in the field, indeed, often might just be able to hurriedly scrub it with earth, grass, or straw, agree to cook as a group with comrades and use the cooking pot of one of you ONLY for coffee, as I suggested at the beginning of this little book.
Your coffee ration in peacetime is 15 grammes, which only makes one good brew of coffee (e.g. in the morning). The field service ration is 25 grammes, which brews a good coffee twice a day. — Grind the coffee very fine; Have patience with a bad coffee mill as there are many bad coffee mills. — Take two drinking cups = 1/2 litre water (hard) and boil it in the cooking pot. Pour the ground coffee into the strongly boiling water; remove the cooking pot from the fire and cover it firmly. After 1-2 minutes, stir the coffee with a clean spoon, then cover it firmly again and let it stand for another 3 minutes. When it has settled, drink it. — One cooking pot can be used to make coffee for 4-5 comrades as it will comfortably hold 8-10 drinking cups; Each then will receive 1/2 litre of coffee. If you want to drink more coffee, yo must make it thinner (Blümchenkaffee – flower coffee). In summer (heat), cook much thinner coffee because you want it to quench your thirst and carry some in your canteen; In winter, cook less and stronger coffee because yo want to invigorate your body (nerves); In winter, your canteen should hold “Schnaps” (liquor), or better yet, wine; In summer, you must not carry Schnaps in it, it is against regulation because otherwise, you can easily suffer heatstroke; In winter, Schnaps in the field (enjoyed in measure) is healthy and will be provided to you.
2.Tea
Black tea is preferred to green tea by many. Pekko (pekoe, i.e. from India) is fine, as is Souchong (lapsang souchong) or Congo (congou). — Take one tablespoon full in your cooking pot (which must be clean!), pour on two drinking cups full of strongly boiling water; Set the tea in a hot place, but not so close by the fire that it boils again because that must not happen. — After 3-4 minutes, pour it off. That is when it has a fine aroma (If you do not know what an aroma is, ask a comrade who does duty as a Bursche (officer’s servant). If you do not pour off the tea, it will be much stronger and loses its aroma; In the field, it is practical to drink strong tea and do without aroma. Generally, everything needs to be stronger in the field than when taking tea (in der Theegesellschaft) at home. After you have drunk your tea, pour boiling water over the tea leaves a second time; That is the second brew. It is almost as strong as the first; Fill your canteen with it. An old soldier told me: “Tea quenches thirst better than any other beverage; And he should know as he has a great deal of experience with it, having had to quench his thirst a good deal more often than you.”
2 tablespoons of tea leaves are needed to make an entire cooking pot full of tea, from which 10 drinking cups can be served.
3.Cocoa
Cocoa powder. Add one teaspoon full of cocoa powder (= 16 grammes) into the drinking cup; pour on boiling water; stir or whisk until the cocoa has dissolved completely; sweeten with sugar.
Cocoa bars. Take as much as you can cover with a coat button, pour a drinking cup full of water into the cooking pot, and boil up the cocoa several times until it has completely dissolved.
4.Chocolate
16 grammes to one drinking cup; Boil the chocolate for ten minutes over a strong fire in a thoroughly cleaned cooking pot. If it boils down too much, add hot water. Got milk? Then dissolve the chocolate in very little water; add the fresh milk, and boil all of it for 10 minutes.
5.Grog
Boil water in a thoroughly cleaned cooking pot; Place a few lumps of sugar in your drinking cup, and fill it not entirely full, but only to 3/4; Add 2-3 tablespoons of rum or arrack or cognac to the hot sugar-water; That is grog.
6.Glühwein
Pour 1 drinking cup full of red wine into the thoroughly cleaned cooking pot; Add 1 piece of cinnamon, 1-2 cloves, and sugar to the wine. Let it heat by the fire, but do not let it boil.
b) cold
1.Lemon lemonade (Citronenlimonade)
Fill cold water into the drinking cup; squeeze the juice of half a lemon into the water; add sugar. Keep the pressed-out lemon in your backpack; You can find good use for the lemon peel in all kinds of foods cooked in bivouac.
2.Lemonade of other fruit juices
Juices of cherries, raspberries, strawberries and currants preserved with sugar are suitable for this. Take 1 part juice to 6 parts water. The resulting lemonade is not weak. Preserved berries can also be used, e.g. blueberries, currants, strawberries, raspberries, cherries etc.
Take a drinking cup full of water, 3 spoonfuls of preserved fruit, a little sugar, stir it, and enjoy.
Aside from the profoundly condescending voice – the author is identified as an older woman giving maternal advice to soldiers – and the idiosyncratic punctuation, which I have tried to preserve as much as possible, this section shows us three things. First, though there are marked differences in the range and quality of drinks, the other ranks appreciated variety and alcoholic impact as much as their officers did. Second, the idea of what constitutes good coffee or proper tea has changed significantly since the 1880s. And third, though being a soldier in the Kaiser’s army was no bed of roses, the fighting men of the German Empire lived reasonably well by contemporary standards.
This is borne out both by other recipes in this book and general anecdotal evidence of the time. Especially rural labourers, but more generally almost everyone from a working class background, found that regular servings of meat and bread, actual coffee, tea, and cocoa, ample sugar, a warm bed and sturdy clothes compared favourably to what they came from. There were enough reasons to complain, from arrogant officers and senseless regulation to tyrannical NCOs enforcing discipline with humiliating punishments, but the standard of living was decent. The same was true in most Western European armies of the time; Late nineteenth-century soldiers ate better than their forebears had, and better than many of their contemporaries did.
The drinks themselves are also interesting. Coffee, obviously, plays the starring role. It is issued with rations, a standard part of the military diet, and some care goes into its preparation. It was, of course, the most popular of the Early Modern triad, a drink that had sparked riots in the previous century and that would still give the Communist rulers of the GDR headaches. By modern standards, 15 grammes of grounds to 500ml of water is relatively weak, but the method – fine grinding and long steeping – is designed to extract the maximum of flavor. Adding still more water will produce Blümchenkaffee (flower coffee), so known because you can see the flower motif at the bottom of the porcelain cup through it. This kind is fit to be carried in a canteen to drink during the day – a questionable pleasure to my mind, but apparently appreciated.
Tea, though not issued as rations, was also popular and gets a recipe for group cooking. There is even a degree of conoisseurship about the sorts of tea, with a preference for assertive flavors. The method and dosage is fairly close to modern gastronomy practice. If anything, a tablespoon of leaf to 500ml of water is on the strong side. Steeping it for over 3 minutes will make it strong and bitter, the kind of brew that much of working-class Britain ran on, and taking the second brew in the canteen is economical and practical, though probably not very enjoyable.
By contrast, cocoa (treated with the Dutch process) and chocolate (cocoa solids including the natural fat) are prepared as individual portions, presumably something not every soldier had, or enjoyed. The milk, ubiquitous today, is treated as optional. 1887 is before the modern dairy technology revolution, so not having ample fresh and safe milk available could not be taken for granted. The ratio of 16 grammes to a cup also matches modern recommendations for a mild drinking chocolate.
Grog and Glühwein, hot, sweet alcoholic treats similar to what officers drank, must have been welcome in wintertime, but the recipes are rather cursory. That may be because encouraging the troops to drink more alcohol was not high on the list of good ideas as far as their leadership was concerned. Interestingly, beer is not mentioned here, though it is mentioned elsewhere in the recipes both as an ingredient and a popular drink. Presumably it was not mixed or cooked in any way.
What I find most interesting is the mention of lemonade. Non-alcoholic cold beverages were known in the nineteenth century, but seeing them listed in a book aimed at common soldiers in the Prussian military is a little surprising. It is a salutary reminder that fashions could spread fast, poor people could read, and it is unwise to rely on stereotypes. The majority of the men no doubt drank beer or water in summer, but they knew what the alternative was. Some also packed lemon peel to add zest to a nice pot of stewed beef in the evening.
