r/CulinaryHistory

It was July 1917, in the middle of the First World War, and SMS Prinzregent Luitpold, the newest of the German navy’s Kaiser-class battleships, lay immobile in the middle of the Kiel canal. Germany’s most strategic waterway was blocked, and the stokers were adamant: They were going nowhere until they received decent rations – specifically with no maggots.

For all the great expectations it had started out with, the German navy had had a lousy war. Bottled up in the North Sea and Baltic by the Royal Navy, it was unable to break the blockade that starved Germany of critical overseas imports or assist its allies in the Mediterranean. Though it claimed the sole major battle it fought in 1916 as a victory based on the fact that it had sunk more British ships than they had German ones, the situation was unchanged. Ships were sitting in port, crews growing frustrated, and the only glory, such as it was, accrued to the submarine service.

Meanwhile, the blockade that the navy was unable to break choked off Germany’s economy, leading to massive food shortages in 1916/17. The word Steckrübenwinter (turnip winter) is a remarkably cutesy name for a famine that killed an estimated 800,000 civilians. The effort of the state to enforce price limits, rationing, and adequate supplies were piecemeal and often counterproductive, leading to widespread disgust with the authorities and the wealthy. A host of off-ration goods and a flourishing black market ensured that especially the owners of arms businesses, whose profits were barely taxed, could continue to live in their accustomed comfort while working-class children starved in droves.

The situation in the fleet was less dramatic, but equally infuriating. Rations were short and increasingly of poor quality, and though officers were required to taste the food issued to the ratings, they were not required to share it. Daily, then, the sailors would watch their first officer make a show of enjoying their fare, then disappearing into the wardroom where meat, coffee, and alcohol – strictly forbidden on board otherwise – were served.

The difference this could make even at the best of times is illustrated by the fate of a North German staple, pickled herring. Both the North Sea and the Baltic had thriving herring fisheries which made that fish an affordable staple anywhere near the coast. At least since the 1500s, there was a tradition of pickling it in vinegar to produce a salty, acidic snack that could be served with bread or potatoes to satisfy the appetite and stimulate thirst. The pre-war Rendsburger Kochbuch (c. 1900) instructs us:

22. Marinated herring, to be prepared from fresh as well as salt herring. You gut them, first washing the salt off the salted ones, set aside the milt, and place the herrings in a deep bowl. If using salt herrings, you leave them and the milt to steep in fresh cow milk for at least 24 hours before.

The milt is chopped finely and stirred to a thick sauce with good wine vinegar. To the herrings, laid in a deep porcelain bowl or stoneware pot, you add finely diced sour apples, slices of salt- or vinegar-pickled cucumbers, many finely sliced onions, a few capers, a little bay leaf, peppercorns, and a few slices of lemons. You pour the milt mixture over it, cover it tightly, and leave it to steep in a cool place. Fresh herring are ready to serve after 36 hours, salt ones after 2-3 days. Before serving, a teaspoonful of Provencal olive oil can be added to the sauce for a pleasant, mild flavour. They are served with buttered bread or with hot boiled potatoes with the skin on.

Compare this with the recipe from a 1915 Kriegskochbuch published in Hamburg:

Salt herring in white sauce with boiled potatoes

2-3 herrings, 1/8 litre of vinegar, some mustard, 1 large onion, pepper, some salt

The herrings are skinned, washed, and cut in pieces. The sliced onion is boiled in the vinegar together with the spices and cooled. The milt is stirred thoroughly with the mustard and spices, mixed into the vinegar, and poured over the herring.

In case this still sounds too appealing as a meal for a family, it needs to be said that even the economical recipes of 1915 were largely fiction by 1916. If people remembered the Wilhelmine era with undeserved nostalgia for a long time, it was because the gute alte Zeit had offered modest culinary delights beyond the reach of rationing bureaucrats and industrial adulteration. It would be many years before most people would again have what the Rendsburger Kochbuch lists after its recipe for plain marinated herring:

23. Salt herring marinated. The herrings are prepared as above, but it is better to cut them open along the back and remove the heads. They must not be cut entirely through, but stay connected by the skin along the thin side (i.e. the belly side). You now spread them open, brush the flesh side with fine salad oil, sprinkle them with mustardseeds, best white ones, cover them with long, very thinly sliced strips of onion, strips of vinegar-pickled gherkins, and capers, sprinkle some pepper over them, and roll them up tightly. In order to prevent anything from falling out, tie them shut with thread. – These herrings are better yet if you first brush them with fine salad oil and roast then to golden brown on a griddle. A pan can be used if it is unavoidable, but you must prevent them from sticking with a pancake knife. Then, the herrings are spread thinly with mustard, but no mustardseed is used. Otherwise proceed as above.

Once all rolls are complete, you prepare a pickle as for marinated herring No. 22, but add neither apples nor cucumbers. Instead, add a little tarragon and stir in a few spoonfuls of sour cream.

The rolls must steep in this marinade for several days before they are ready to serve.

This is colloquially known as Rollmops and is still extremely popular up and down the coast (there is even a song about it). Most modern recipes are extremely simplified by comparison, though. Back in the days of Vorkriegsqualität, a sailor could get one of these at a waterfront restaurant and wash it down with good beer. The memory was fresh enough to rankle in 1917.

However understandable to us, going effectively on strike was an extremely risky thing to do. The sailors were subject to the infamously strict military discipline of the Kaiserreich, after all, and their officers were not the forgiving kind. Still, the initial response was remarkably restrained. The crew was even allowed a voice in managing their rations through a joint Menagekommission of officers and men. Their complaints were, after all, understandable and, that dreaded German word, unpolitisch.

This needs to be understood in the context of its time: The German high command was terrified of losing control. There had been strikes in factories all over the country earlier in the year. As yet, the military was unaffected, but across the borders they could see the French army dealing with widespread mutinies while the Russian one was effectively dissolving in an epidemic of insubordination. That was why, when they could not bring the protests in the fleet under control with disciplinary measures quickly, the navy high command turned to brutal repression. They feared – not without reason – that Socialist and democratic ideas were spreading among the men and demands for better food and service conditions could turn into calls for peace and political reform. The question how to end the war was controversial, and the left wing of the Social Democratic party gained support for its peace policy.

The crackdown was brutal and targeted. Men who had participated in strikes and walkouts were arrested by army reserve troops and put on trial. Those deemed ringleaders were sentenced to death, two sentences carried out by the army in Cologne, far from the navy base. Others were imprisoned or demoted and sent to the front as naval infantry. The admiralty further mandated vaterländische Erziehung throughout the fleet; Officers would school the men in patriotic thinking to counter Socialist subversion. There were further attempts to organise protests, but whenever they were caught, punishments were severe.

As far as the navy’s leadership was concerned, that was it, and they could get on with the business of winning the war. Had they managed that, it might have been. That was not how history went, though. The German battlefleet turned out for one more successful operation against Russia before rotting in port again. It was not until October of 1918 that the prospect of action returned. The admiralty wanted to sabotage peace negotiations with a final suicide mission to force a decisive battle against the Royal Navy. The crews refused, and the commanders transferred the mutinous ships away from the North Sea ports to Kiel, where they felt secure enough to arrest ringleaders and basically replay the successful procedure of 1917. On 1 November, 150 men were taken off the ships by the army. Their comrades protested, marching into town to call for their release. On 3 November, they were joined by workers from the dockyards and factories. That day, shots were fired by a shore patrol.

On 4 November, the navy base was under the control of a revolutionary sailors’ and workers’ council.

By 9 November, the emperor abdicated.

Nobody had actually prepared for this. There had been no deep conspiracy, no foreign interference like there had been in Russia., There are just limits beyond which you push people at your own risk. Few sailors and workers had been democrats or Socialists before the war, but now they found that the Socialists were talking sense. In improvised meetings, the voted on demands, elected spokespeople, and sent out delegates to other military bases where similar organisations mushroomed. The apparatus of repression – officers, military police, prosecutors and courts-martial – watched helplessly as it turned out there was nobody they could trust to follow their orders. The revolution took a week, and when it was over, there were no kings or princes left in the country.

We know there was no happy end to this. Germany had still lost a war, and the price of defeat would be steep. The blockade continued until 1919, putting the country through another Hungerwinter as the economy collapsed. Discontent with the democratic government that ultimately had to shoulder the burden of territorial losses and reparations undermined the republic from the start. But none of this was foreordained. What happened in 1918 stands as a lesson to autocrats in what can happen once they lose the trust of their people. Not every regime goes down in the flaming ruin of their capital. Often, they simply disappear because people no longer believe in them.

Post-revolutionary postcard honouring the mutineers. The caption reads: “The world belongs to the brave”, the rising sun is labelled “Kiel” and “Liberty”. Image courtesy of wikimedia commons.

On the second day of being stuck at home sick instead of in Paris with a dearly beloved person (boo to food poisoning), at least there is the upside of time to dedicate to my hobby. I found a modern rendering of this fourteenth-century poem a while ago, and now I was able to track down the original and translate it.

The Rossauer Tischzucht survives in three copies, so it clearly was a modestly popular piece of literature. It is named after Rossau in Vienna, where it was recorded in a monastery. The manuscript is in the Nationalbibliothek today (Cod. ser. Nova 2584). The rules as such are not unusual – much the same is repeated in every Tischzucht poem – but there are some interesting bits, and it makes a good foil to compare the König vom Odenwald or the feasting scenes from Wittenwiler with. Also, it clearly depends on the thirteenth-century Tischzucht attributed to Tannhäuser for some of its rhymes, but is not derivative.

Those who have such knowledge
That they already mastered honourable conduct (zuht und ere)
I ask them on my behalf
That they not be angry
When I now admonish young children
That are about seven years of age
And do not yet have that knowledge
Nor understand proper manners.
But whoever wishes to hear of proper manners
Should now abandon impropriety (unzuht).

Remember that when you go to the table
You must not leave your hands unwashed.
Cut the nails on your hands closely
If they are long, it dishonours you.

If you do not want to sit like an unmannerly person (gouch)
Loosen the belt around your belly.

If you want to cut bread mannerly
You must avoid doing this: 
Do not brace it against your chest
As weak women will do
Who are obliged to do this because of their weakness
At court, this will be greatly mocked.

Nobody should together sup 
From one spoon, this is clear.
It is not proper to drink from bowls
And whoever improperly takes those
And drinks up as though he was mad (als er tobe – prob. Noisily)
Though many praise this bad behaviour (unfuor)
I cannot think but that these are
As bare of honour as an empty cask. 
(er ist der ern ein itel vaz)

Those who bend over the bowl
And smack uncleanly
With their mouth like a pig
Should be eating with other animals (bi anderm vihe).  

Some bite off their bread slices (sniten)
After the manner of peasants
And dip them back into the bowl;
Courtly people abandon this impropriety.

Some even eat so greedily
They no longer feel what their mouth is doing
And bite their own hand 
Courtly people will avoid this gluttony (gitikheit).

Those who snort like a seal (wasserdahs)
Or smack their lips like a salmon (lahs)
And eat this way, as many do,
How badly they reject proper manners (sich der zuht verwigt).

Those who clear their throats (wiphitzt) when they are supposed to eat
And blow their nose in the tablecloth
Those two things are unmannerly
As far as I can recall.

No mannerly man will do these things:
Lying down on the table
Or leaning back
It is not well received when that happens.
Do not lean on your elbows
Sit upright, not bent over (gesmogen)
And do not touch yourself with your bare hand
But cover it with your clothes
If you must touch yourself. 

Do not put your fingers on the blade of the knife
When you cut thick bread slices
To empty out your bowl,
You must not forget these manners.

Wipe your moth before you drink
This courtliness is always proper
And only in proper measure (i.e. not too deeply)
Should your mouth enter the cup.

Some blow into their drink
I am not sure they will be thanked for that.

When your companion drinks
You should not be eating. 

And count this for an evil deed (mizzetat):
If someone has food in their mouth
And drinks with that, like an animal.
If I see this poor behaviour (unzuht) with anyone
I advise them honestly 
To stop doing it immediately.

I also think it is not well regarded
That if you have eaten meat off a bone
To put it back into the bowl
Courtliness must be guarded from this.

Whoever wants to eat and speak at the same time
Or even speaks in his sleep
Whoever wants to to both at once
Will have little rest.

Those who like to eat mustard and sauces
Should do without the impropriety
Of sticking their fingers into it
They should be accustomed to (not doing) this.

Nobody should reach for salt with their bare hand 
Be reminded of this courtesy.

When you want to eat eggs,
Well enkentzet (chosen?) and shelled
Beforehand you must wisely 
Shape the bread into points with your fingers 
So that you are never obliged
To shape it with your mouth later.
Also do not use your finger 
To reach into eggshells, as often happens
And do not practice such ill manners
To put the shell back into the bowl. 

Also, dear comrades of mine,
Do not poke around your mouth with the tongue
that is poorly regarded
When you leave the table.

Here ends this poem of table manners
May God protect us from all misfortune. Amen. Those who have such knowledge
That they already mastered honourable conduct (zuht und ere)
I ask them on my behalf
That they not be angry
When I now admonish young children
That are about seven years of age
And do not yet have that knowledge
Nor understand proper manners.
But whoever wishes to hear of proper manners
Should now abandon impropriety (unzuht).

Remember that when you go to the table
You must not leave your hands unwashed.
Cut the nails on your hands closely
If they are long, it dishonours you.

If you do not want to sit like an unmannerly person (gouch)
Loosen the belt around your belly.

If you want to cut bread mannerly
You must avoid doing this: 
Do not brace it against your chest
As weak women will do
Who are obliged to do this because of their weakness
At court, this will be greatly mocked.

Nobody should together sup 
From one spoon, this is clear.
It is not proper to drink from bowls
And whoever improperly takes those
And drinks up as though he was mad (als er tobe – prob. Noisily)
Though many praise this bad behaviour (unfuor)
I cannot think but that these are
As bare of honour as an empty cask. 
(er ist der ern ein itel vaz)

Those who bend over the bowl
And smack uncleanly
With their mouth like a pig
Should be eating with other animals (bi anderm vihe).  

Some bite off their bread slices (sniten)
After the manner of peasants
And dip them back into the bowl;
Courtly people abandon this impropriety.

Some even eat so greedily
They no longer feel what their mouth is doing
And bite their own hand 
Courtly people will avoid this gluttony (gitikheit).

Those who snort like a seal (wasserdahs)
Or smack their lips like a salmon (lahs)
And eat this way, as many do,
How badly they reject proper manners (sich der zuht verwigt).

Those who clear their throats (wiphitzt) when they are supposed to eat
And blow their nose in the tablecloth
Those two things are unmannerly
As far as I can recall.

No mannerly man will do these things:
Lying down on the table
Or leaning back
It is not well received when that happens.
Do not lean on your elbows
Sit upright, not bent over (gesmogen)
And do not touch yourself with your bare hand
But cover it with your clothes
If you must touch yourself. 

Do not put your fingers on the blade of the knife
When you cut thick bread slices
To empty out your bowl,
You must not forget these manners.

Wipe your moth before you drink
This courtliness is always proper
And only in proper measure (i.e. not too deeply)
Should your mouth enter the cup.

Some blow into their drink
I am not sure they will be thanked for that.

When your companion drinks
You should not be eating. 

And count this for an evil deed (mizzetat):
If someone has food in their mouth
And drinks with that, like an animal.
If I see this poor behaviour (unzuht) with anyone
I advise them honestly 
To stop doing it immediately.

I also think it is not well regarded
That if you have eaten meat off a bone
To put it back into the bowl
Courtliness must be guarded from this.

Whoever wants to eat and speak at the same time
Or even speaks in his sleep
Whoever wants to to both at once
Will have little rest.

Those who like to eat mustard and sauces
Should do without the impropriety
Of sticking their fingers into it
They should be accustomed to (not doing) this.

Nobody should reach for salt with their bare hand 
Be reminded of this courtesy.

When you want to eat eggs,
Well enkentzet (chosen?) and shelled
Beforehand you must wisely 
Shape the bread into points with your fingers 
So that you are never obliged
To shape it with your mouth later.
Also do not use your finger 
To reach into eggshells, as often happens
And do not practice such ill manners
To put the shell back into the bowl. 

Also, dear comrades of mine,
Do not poke around your mouth with the tongue
that is poorly regarded
When you leave the table.

Here ends this poem of table manners
May God protect us from all misfortune. Amen. 

This is interesting in all kinds of ways and illustrates some of the rules and realities of medieval upper-class dining.

One interesting aspect is the rules for cutting bread. We know from many sources that the proper way to cut bread at the table was to hold the loaf in one hand and the knife in the other. Especially if your loaf was large and dense, as medieval bread often was, bracing it against your body would be far easier, and we know this was how people did it frequently. I used to assume doing it differently just because was sufficient explanation for the upper-class rule, and the smaller loaves of semmel or schönroggen made this practical, but the suggestion here is that it also was a test of strength and dexterity. Cutting loaves without bracing them and thick slices without putting pressure on the blade with your finger can be challenging. This ableist aspect is part of many rules of propriety, as anyone who has been instructed in manners can attest, and it makes sense in the context. Chivalric society was still a warrior aristocracy, every secular man at the table a trained cavalryman. They would show off that sort of thing.

The second observation is the rule that underlies the entire principle: Food moves one way. Anything that was in your mouth should never be in contact with the food on the table. This was made challenging by the fact that bowls and drinking cups were shared. Typically, diners shared one bowl and cup between two, using the hand facing away from their companion to eat with to avoid jostling each other’s elbows. Your bodily fluids had no business in the shared bowl. Thus wash your hands before eating, wipe your mouth before drinking, do not drink with your mouth full, do not touch shared condiments with your fingers, generally keep them clean, and never put bread or food that was in your mouth back in the bowl. Spoons were never shared and the bowl would not touch your moth, so you had to spoon or sop up any liquid in it. The mere suggestion of saliva touching the food – bending over the bowl, smacking your lips, or talking with your mouth full – is prohibited. None of this is unfamiliar to modern eaters, but many do not realise how consistent this system is and how much individual plates and cutlery helped defuse its tension points.

This is also where the rules for eating eggs are interesting. The egg is soft-boiled, eaten in the shell. You prepare a sufficient number of small bread wedges to sop up the egg first. Then you hold the egg in one hand, crack it open at the pointy end, and use the bread held in your other hand to eat it. If you lacked the forethought to prepare enough bread, you only have one hand free – there are no eggcups – so you will be forced to shape the bread with the mouth. This is unmannerly and disgusting for the reasons outlined above. Any well-mannered diner would understand how many wedges to cut and be dextrous enough to do it.

Another interesting point touched on briefly is the rule that you should not eat – that is, have food in your mouth – while your companion is drinking. In other Tischzucht poems, this is expanded to the rule nobody should be eating while the host drinks. It may be something to do with displaying self-control and reassuring the other you are not gobbling up the best bits while they are busy, but it also underscores an important aspect of commensality: Drinking is the more important social activity. Most symbolic actions center on drink, not food.

The final question is why a salmon is particularly notable for smacking its lips. there might be no more to it than that lahs (salmon) rhymes with wasserdahs (seal), but there is a parallel to consider. In Tannhäusers Tischzucht from the 13th century, the respective lines are:

He who snorts like a seal (wazzerdachs)
And smacks his lips like a Bavarian Saxon (payr sachs)
When he eats, like many do;
How very much he forgets his manners!

Clearly, the earlier poem provided the influence here. I have no idea why a Bavarian Saxon (geographically difficult to imagine in itself) was particularly known for lip-smacking, but I suspect there is a political background to this. It seems the anonymous author – or someone before them – liked the couplet, but also could not understand that word and substituted a different rhyme. It is a common phenomenon in folk music to this day.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/07/18/houses-by-the-harbour-feeding-the-revolution-xxx/

Hamburg has lately become a popular tourism destination, and one of the things many visitors do is take the ferry line 62 down the Elbe for a scenic ride. As it glides past the 1912 tunnel entrance building towards the old fish market hall with its impressive 19th-century cast iron windows, the ferry passes a beach club, a firefighting ship’s mooring, a retired Tango-class Soviet submarine, and a set of houses painted in bright colours and usually festooned with banners. These are the Hafenstraße houses, one of Germany’s most famous anarchist squatter communes, and the story of its emergence is one of street fighting, skulduggery, and deep embarrassment.

It all started in a way that is drably familiar to anyone from any Western European city. The houses were owned by SAGA, a municipal housing corporation, and they were old. Around 1900, they had been state-of-the-art, but by 1980, age and neglect had taken a severe toll. Apartments stood empty, no repairs were made, and the corporation was looking to demolish them and get an investor to build an office block. This kind of modernisation had already swallowed up entire neighbourhoods, much of it technically illegal, but carried out by connected landlords with impunity.

By late 1981, the last tenants, including a left-wing youth organisation, were facing eviction. The final New Year’s Eve party drew a crowd, including many anarchist activists and punks who played music, ate, drank, greeted 1982 – and stayed put. Under the eyes of the management, a squatter community had popped up. In the ensuing standoff, the squatters defied several attempts to evict them until SAGA’s management sent in a contractors under police protection to brick up the ground floor doors and windows.

The next day, they found someone had bricked up their main office’s entrance overnight.

The fight was on.

Though conservative media framed this as an assault on lawful society, the activists had a solid legal case. Under West German law, you could not, in fact, do with your property as you saw fit. Property carries the obligation to use it in a socially responsible manner – it is in the constitution (§14.2). Though squatting as such was illegal, the SAGA could not just evict them or destroy the houses. Not to mention that, despite all efforts to paint them as terrorist sympathisers, drug dealers, and a Communist fifth column, the occupants enjoyed significant support expressed in practical aid, demonstrations, and votes.

There was, in fact, something to the accusations; The people who occupied the Hafenstraße houses were an eclectic leftist community embracing anarchist principles of self-organisation. Most of them were opposed to drug criminalisation, proudly internationalist, and critical of capitalism, though it is amusing to imagine how a 1980s Soviet functionary would have responded to these comrades. Fifth columnists, they were not. But neither were they pacifist. Nonviolent resistance was not a realistic option in the face of riot police.

Internally, they were well organised and effective. One reason they enjoyed support was that they organised repairs and improvements to the houses that the owner had neglected. They organised a communal kitchen that fed them and a large number of visitors as well as local homeless. Cultural events and solidarity concerts drew crowds. The occasional violent demonstrations and police raids made headlines, but most days were filled with a quiet activism working patiently towards an eventual resolution.

This was a consciously egalitarian, internationalist group, often dismissive of traditional patterns and willing to try new things, including new foods. Today, the anarchist scene in Germany has gone almost completely vegetarian or vegan both for ecology and inclusiveness, but by all accounts, this was still uncommon in the 1980s. One of the most popular cookbooks emerging from this scene, Peter Fischer’s Schlaraffenland, nimm’s in die Hand, which we already quoted on the issue of ‘authentic’ pizza, gives us a large number of recipes from distant countries, including many that are suitable for cooking in quantity. One of them is for stir-fried pork with soybean sprouts, then a great novelty:

Pork with Soybean Sprouts heo xao gia

Cut 400g pork shoulder into thin slices and sautée in olive oil with two split onions. Stir well continually. Salt and pepper, add a pinch of glutamate and 1 glass of water and simmer for 10 minutes. Then add 500g fresh sprouts along with 10g of black mushrooms and again simmer 10 minutes on low heat.

If no fresh sprouts can be had, use tinned ones. In that case, use the water from the tin for cooking.

Better variant: Use loin in place of shoulder. In that case, first brown the onions, then sautée the meat.

(…)

Consider: With Vietnamese as with all East Asian meals, there is always a large bowl of rice on the table to serve yourself. Rice means: Rice without any other ingredients, plain boiled. It is eaten from a rice bowl next to the bowl for the main or other course.

Prepared nuoc-mam also accompanies all meals. It is the axis of Vietnamese cuisine. You either season a dish with it or dip salad herbs in it. Salad eaten this way is incredibly delicious, only Italian salads can compete. At any rate – if you have tried nuoc-mam, which tastes just as good based on Hong Kong fish gravy, three times, it will never be out of your kitchen again.

Further: Whenever adding a glass of water is mentioned, it means warm water. But a collective cook will already know these things anyway.

Of course, the author has things to say about preparing nuoc mam in the introduction to the chapter:

… Not the pure extract, but a mixture made according to individual preference is used (at the table). I have adopted the following formula:

Keep in a well-stoppered small pitcher to be stored in the refrigerator if the sauce is not used up entirely during the meal. First, put 5 tbsp lukewarm water into the pitcher. Then cut the flesh of 1/2 a lemon into pieces, lightly squeeze them between the fingers, and add them to the water. Follow with 2 tbsp (good) wine vinegar, 2 crushed garlic cloves, 1 shredded small hot red pepper. Finally, top up with nuoc man to taste and add sugar to balance the saltiness. This tastes best if it is allowed to steep overnight.

This recipe may not sound like anything special to us today (neither would it have to me, as I grew up around people like that), but it is hard to overstate how much of a break with tradition it was for Germany in the mid-20th century. Vietnamese cuisine had a special status as a left-wing identity marker, with the war barely ended and visiting the country still viewed as close to treason by conservatives, but even beyond this, Germany was not a place where culinary adventurism held much sway. Its own culinary tradition had been devastated by war, displacement, and austerity, and for a generation, eating well had mostly meant getting enough calories and then, enough status-bearing ingredients to make a ‘proper’ meal. Interest in ‘foreign’ foods never died, of course, and immigrant communities helped the spread of Italian, Greek, and Yugoslav foods through the country. Going to less familiar worlds represented a vast leap, though. In 1981, spaghetti was still adventurous to many.

Contrast this with the conscious internationalism of a cookbook that has room for Italian and Spanish, Maghrebi, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indonesian recipes. The author prides himself on his knowledge of flavours and places that German backpack tourists visited when that was still uncommon and is solicitous of authenticity in a way that we recognise as typical ‘foodie’ behaviour, but that was still a novelty then. Getting your hands on nuoc mam, or even decent olive oil, was not easy in 1981 Germany, though you stood a better chance in Hamburg than just about anywhere else. Soybean sprouts were often cultivated at home because they were equally hard to find. In the end, you had to make compromises, and what passed under the name of ‘curry’ or ‘nasi goreng’ at the time was often wildly improvisational.

A compromise was also what ended the standoff at the Hafenstraße. Though conservative hardliners in and out of government longed to crack heads and tried violent solutions several times, in the end the mayor Klaus von Dohnanyi decided to deescalate. At this point, the inhabitants had used their renovations to fortify the buildings with razorwire and steel doors, and the police estimated 5000 officers would be needed to clear them out. Support from other German states would have provided the numbers, but the confrontation was averted in a dramatic last-minute round of negotiations in 1987. The squatters were offered a rental agreement, the fortifications were removed, the police stood down, and an uneasy peace began.

Things did not wind down easily on either side. Radicals resented being tenants to the state as much as the right-wing press did the ‘surrender’. It was not until 1995 that a cooperative of inhabitants and supporters was able to buy the houses outright. The city sold at a steep loss, and many resented that violent radicals could have prime living space while many law-abiding citizens nearby were turfed out of their apartments by gentrifying real estate investors. Ironically, the anarchist commune turned out to be a better investment than either 1980s office space or 1990s luxury condos in the long run. It proved a draw for artists, musicians, and activists, providing alternative tourist cachet close to the city’s preeminent drunk party location and its most overpriced souvenir shops, and it cost less than two embarrassing failures to convince the people they really wanted an Olympic bid. It may not have been what the first occupants of the houses envisioned when they set up their revolutionary commune, but this really is a happy end, to the extent we get these in history.

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This morning, I read a comment on a culinary writing group that people preferred printed cookbooks to online recipes because they did not cram ads into their pages and – well – they often used to. Just this weekend, I managed to pick up a remarkably late example of the type at a flea market. But to start at the beginning…

In the early 20th century, there was a great deal of concern over the fact that modern women could not properly cook or run a household, were refusing to have enough babies, and generally were not in line with their biological destiny. This was generally a very strange time, and especially so in Germany, so we should probably not be surprised if odd things cropped up even in very mainstream places. One such place was the Standesamt, the registry office where marriages and births were officially recorded. Starting in the 1920s, it became customary for every newlywed woman to be given a book on how to be a proper housewife – the Hausbuch für die Deutsche Familie.

Hausbuch is one of those terms that hard to translate adequately. Noble families had books that Hausbücher served as chronicles, collections of essential texts, and family heirlooms. But this was just a cheaply mass-produced collection of texts commissioned from experts on marriage, housekeeping, childrearing, and, centrally, cookery. It had been produced on the initiative of the association of registry officials to educate the regrettably modern women of their time, but of course actually giving away a copy to each bride was not something the state was going to afford. Tnere were more important things to spend money on, like war reparations, war debts, and preparations for the next war. The Standesbeamten thus came up with a different way of funding the production: advertising.

In each of these books, a number of pages were set aside for ads that local businesses could purchase. Since the intellectual property was free, the income from these funded the printing and the books could be given to every newlywed couple in the district, making sure the ads hit them just as they were facing the major expense of setting up a household together. It was a winning formula – so much so that it continued for almost a century, at least in West Germany, and in some more traditional places still does. I own three such books – two editions of the Hausbuch from 1936 and 1950 respectively, both from Kiel, and a less obtrusive Goldenes Kochbuch from 2013 produced in Hamburg.

Reading these is alternately fascinating and horrifying (in case you ever wanted to know what the Nazis thought was proper infant care), and it quickly makes it clear that family life was very much a political issue. But they are also an interesting resource for tracing the development of German cookery over the past 100-odd years. Frequent changes in marital law and less frequent ones in government outlook meant thy were regularly revised, and the opportunity always served to also update the recipe section. After the 1970s, the legal aspects vanished, leaving only tracts on housekeeping and cookery funded more or less lavishly by local businesses. With the rise of online ads, this source of funding is drying up and the last of Standesamtskochbücher are disappearing. This may be the last we see of them.

As an exercise in this, here are three recipes for Gulasch, a staple of 20th-century German cuisine that people here insist is as Hungarian as spaghetti bolognese is Italian (and they are probably right about that). In 1936, the Hausbuch had fairly terse instructions:

Gulasch

1 1/2 pounds of beef, 2 tablespoons fat, onion, salt, a little paprika, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 1/2 pounds potatoes

Quickly sautée the cubed meat together with the chopped onions in the fat. Dust with a little flour, deglaze, salt, add paprika, and then add the raw, cubed potatoes to the meat. Steam in a covered pot for 1/2 hour, season, serve.

I am, fairly sure this dish would have carried a prison sentence in Hungary, but the style is quite fitting for a political movement whose major publication arm gave us the memorable word Kochvorschrift for recipe. In 1950, the new edition gave:

Gulasch

1/2 – 3/4 kg beef, ample onions, a little fat, salt, paprika, 1/2 – 3/4 kg raw potatoes

Free the meat of skin and sinews, wash it, drain it well, and cube it coarsely. Sautée it well with a large quantity of onions, deglaze with a small amount of liquid, salt, add the paprika, and steam it very slowly in a covered pot. About 1/2 hour before serving, add the coarsely cubed potatoes and continue steaming. If you wish, you can bind the sauce (Tunke) with 1 spoonful of flour, but raw potatoes serve the same purpose.

All honour to domestic economy, but deciding raw potatoes will do just as well as flour to bind a sauce is one of those “tell me you lost a world war without telling me you lost a world war” moments. West Germany in 1950 may have ended food rationing (prematurely, many economists believed), but it was still a desperately poor country where many working families could barely afford meat and any serviceable thing was made to last. What a change from here to 2013, where both ingredients and instructions are available in abundance:

Beef Gulasch

Working time: 20 minutes. Cooking time: 90 minutes

1 kg beef, 500g onions, 120g pork lard, 40-50g sweet paprika, vinegar, meat broth or water, salt, 1 tbsp tomato concentrate, 1 tbsp Gulasch spice mixture (2 tsp marjoram, 1/4 tsp caraway, 1 small garlic clove, some lemon peel, all finely minced), 20g flour

Cut the meat into bite-sized cubes. Sautée the sliced onions in hot fat until they are golden brown, stirring continually. Add a heaping tablespoon of paprika and immediately deglaze with a small amount of meat broth or water that had a dash of vinegar added. Add the cubed meat, some salt, the tomato paste, and the Gulasch spices. Slowly simmer in a covered pot, stirring occasionally and adding hot liquid (meat broth or water) as needed. Once the meat is tender, add a little liquid, bring to a full boil, and season to taste. This Gulasch in its own juices (Natursaftgulasch) should be rusty brown. To produce a thicker sauce, dust the meat with flour before the final boiling, only then add the liquid and boil quickly.

This is still industrial cuisine, but there is art to it – and wealth. Note the absence of potatoes. You get to choose what, if any, carb you want with this Gulasch. I remember it being served with the kind of spiral noodles that have become visual shorthand for poverty, but it also goes with knödel, spaetzle, or indeed, potatoes. At this point in history, economising food is no longer a concern. Relearning the skill will not be easy for the next generation of Germans.

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