Why isn't German cuisine more popular in the US?

Cafe Society
101

I see two sides to Sauerkraut. Before refigeration or reliable canning, Sauerkraut was a reliable, cheap and easy (well comparetivly, though still a lot of work) way of converting a big harvest of white cabbage into a food that would keep all winter. Sauerkraut also has a very high amount of Vitamin C (unless you warm it up for hours by putting it on a stove), which was an important bonus in the time before oranges from other countries were available all year round in stores.
For these reasons, it has come back in style among a certain segment of the organic/esoteric food crowd who prefer local-grown Vitamin-C food instead of transporting oranges and kiwis around half the world.
But if it isn’t well done (doesn’t that hold true for a lot of foods, though? There’s a world of difference between a home-made fried beef and a hamburger from McD.), it tastes … well, boring.

When I stayed on an organic farm about 10 years ago, they made their own Sauerkraut in autumn, and we ate it during winter, and there I learned that’s there a salad made from cold, unheated Sauerkraut. Sadly, I don’t have a recipe (since I don’t cook), but maybe you can find one on the net or in a good book.

Sounds simply like Bratkartoffeln. To make them well is a high art: you need the right kind of potatoes (starchy, not flowery, so they don’t soak up too much fat) and the right pan - a group of people (who incidentally also sell them) swear on cast-iron or forge-iron pans, because of the heat transfer properties of real iron as opposed as to other combinations. Then you need less fat. There’s also the trick to cook them first - usually Bratkartoffeln are made from left-over peeled potatoes - then they don’t soak up too much fat, either.

More special german potatoe recipes:

Reiberdatschi (Bavarian)/ Kartoffelplätzchen/ Kartoffelpuffer: these are regional names and variants for grated peeled potaotes - one variant with cooked (again, left-overs), one with raw - , mixing an egg or two, some bread crumbs/flour for binding (if necessary) plus spices. Form into patties and fry in a pan.
Eat them either sweet, with apple sauce (and cinnamon and sugar) or - with Sauerkraut.

There’s also “Heaven and Earth” - mashed potatoes and applesauce. So called because potatoes are also known as “Erdäpfel” = Earth apples in some regions of Germany.

Another quick way for raw potatoes is a Gratin (although that’s French in origin, to be exact). Slice potatoes, put one layer of slices into fire-proof ceramic pan, pour Bechamel sauce, add another layer of slices, etc. The last layer is potatoe slices, topped with cheese (which melts in the oven).

Mmmh, now I’ve become hungry, too.

102

I’m wondering how much socio-economic reasons play a part, both in less new restaurants being opened, and in older restaurants closing down. Now, this is all a very WAG because I don’t have any figures, but my impressions are:

In Germany itself, good but affordable restaurants are going down in favour of fast-food chains, convenience food at home or restaurants by foreigners - Italian in the south, Turkish in other areas.
In the US, there seem to be many cheap family-run restaurants by Mexicans (and Chinese) in the same niche.

Now, German cooks and German immigrants in the second and third generation are well-educated and trained and expect a certain salary. Running a restaurant is hard work - 14hr shifts or more, working on the weekend and holidays. So if the German owner or cook of a restaurant is fed up with the hard work and wants to retire, it’s more likely for an immigrant who has limited options, but is willing to put in the work, than an educated person with other choices and more options to take over the free space. (A trained cook can work as employee instead of running the restaurant with less hassle and leave or change to higher pay; an owner has to live on the profit he makes, and work the hours that are necessary).

I also wonder how much the appreciation, and lack of it, for good food plays a role. If the owner or the cook who put in a lot of work to produce quality food see that many more people are going over to McD and other chains, or eat convenience food, they may feel that their time and effort aren’t worth it, since the customers will “obviously” eat any kind of grub and not even notice the difference to good food. Maybe that makes the decision to throw in the towel and close the restaurant down easier.

103

Sadly, Grand Rapids lost an institution, the Schnitzelbank, last year, when the next generation sold out to the neighboring hospital, which tore it down for another parking lot. Thank God there will always be Frankenmuth.

104

You people have me salivating like Pavloff’s dogs. In the bad old days in the wooded hills behind Panzer Kaserne in Kaiserslautern, tucked into a hillside by Miesau Depot, there was a little country Restaurant called the Wald Pension. Wednesdays were physical training days. About a half dozen of us chose to do our physical training at the Wald Pension. Ox tail-goulash, rahmschnitzel with white gravy, wonderful crunchy pom friets and Pfaltzer wine from an earthenware pitcher. We’d come out of there after a three hour lunch so full we could hardly waddle and potted to the gills. If there was a place like that around here I’d weigh 300 pounds. Lord, it was good.

And then there was the condietori across from the Herte’s department store. Strawberry tort with a pint of whipped cream, good coffee and all sorts of newspapers in all sorts of languages. What a great place to waste a Sunday afternoon.

Don’t talk to me about Huhner Hugo or Weinerwald. I’m in nirvana, here.

105

Their sweet kolaches are great, and the savory ones are even better- the jalapeno cheese/sausage ones are heavenly.

That part of N. Central Texas is pretty heavily Czech, and so is the Shiner/Schulenburg/Halletsville area(Caldwell being pretty much at the northern end), and the Ft. Bend/Brazoria county area.

There are all sorts of tasty goodies out there, especially the sausage. If you don’t want klobase/kolbasz, there are usually German varieties available also.

106

I don’t think it’s so much that. Ethnic or nationality based restaurants whose quality is at least decent, is usually interesting to the native population. The culture doesn’t need to be propagated, and, as far as I’ve seen, immigrant cultures have seldom if ever felt the need to assimilate the local diet.

But what has happened is that there are extremely few Germans or Scandinavians still immigrating to keep the restaurant trade alive. In 1965 the immigration laws that had formerly favored Europeans were abolished. More importantly, perhaps, in the last few decades of the last century Germany and Scandinavia, like the rest of Europe, became prosperous enough that, given their social philosophy of spreading the wealth around, any economic incentive to head to the U.S. was gone.

On the other hand, I suppose that doesn’t explain why there still seem to be plenty of recent Italian immigrants in their restaurants–and I’m talking about Los Angeles, not New York. I thought what has worked to make the Germans happy where they are was also at work in Italy. Similarly, I was flabbergasted to learn that our local Catholic parish holds Masses not only in English and Spanish, as one would expect, but Italian and French. Who knew!

107

If your Ohio trip takes you to Cleveland, http://www.freetimes.com/stories/15/15/bavarian-rhapsody DerBraumeister is a really good bet.

What happened to the link-thing?

108

The link thing is still there. I’m looking right at it as I type. The icon is of a globe with a chain link.

109

Yes, I tried that. However, when I enter:

http://link.com

This happens, no opportunity to add the covering text.

110

Straight Dope.
Works fine for me.

111

With regards to scandinavian cuisine:

Like most of Europe we were very influenced by French cooking because they were the first to produce best-selling cookbooks. Also migration and simple fads make it hard to say: “Oh this is the Danish kitchen!”

We have some things that are very typical but I dare not say unique (every time some ones says that in mixed company some will say “oh we have that home in X-country”). There’s the whole obsession with rye bread - I love it when they have about one third softened whole rye grains in addition to rye flour. But the Germans and the Russians and everything in between have rye bread and the Swedes sweeten it for some reason. Then there’s the pickled herring and so on. Lots of stuff with cream: Strawberry “porridge” with cream (nowadays whole milk), sliced potatoes in cream in the oven (which is pretty much the same as the bechamel one), gravy, and so on.

Thing is though that the Danes love food. And to cook it ourselves. Which gives us incredible talented chefs and not very many restaurant patrons. And we like to spend time with our families so a lot of chefs become in-house chefs for major companies.
But that’s a different story. I was going to talk about Nouvelle/New Nordic.
Ok, so there’s these talented chefs and they aren’t French but many of them were trained in France. They return to Denmark to work and they figure out little by little that there are lots of things that you need that you can’t really get and there are these awesome raw materials that have no use in the French kitchen. So they scrap the French crap and look at what their great grandmothers were cooking and maybe cut down on the fat and go to the farmers and fishermen and ask them what they have that’s awesome.
Not many of the New Nordic restaurants are cheap but they are delicious. Noma in Cph has two Michelin stars and the flag ship of that style. NYC has one called Akvavit.

Links:
http://www.scandcook.com/

http://www.thepaul.dk/index.html

The first site has recipes (with wine suggestions). The second is from Condé Nast’s concierge.com about Noma and the third is the paul in Tivoli. Which has an English chef of course =]

My mom’s cooking is an eclectic mix of Italian, Danish, French, Spanish, whatever strikes her fancy. Definitely European though. I’m more the one into Asian cuisines.
One thing that I think may actually be uniquely Danish is ‘Øllebrød’ (beerbread). It’s a porridge made of rye bread soaked overnight in beer. Served with cream of course (mostly milk though).
PS BrahtKartofflen or whatever you called them are called brasede kartofler in Danish. Boil potatoes till boiled but still firm. Eat them with whatever you eat boiled potatoes with. Put leftovers in fridge. Those that you don’t plan on eating on rye (with pepper and maybe chives/salami/mayo/butter depending on taste) you fry on a pan in generous amounts of oil or butter. Not quite deep frying but I think the recipe is from before deep fryers. And I’ve never heard of anyone deep frying in butter.

112

Hmm, when I type http://www.straightdope.com in the link box, and hit “enter” it puts it in the reply box and there’s no opportunity to type the covering text like I was used to doing.

113

I think the tapering off of immigration, and the tendency for a lot of Germans, post-WWII, to assimilate and hide their German-ness, probably didn’t help much.

To that I’d add that restaurants tend to be a last-ditch occupation, more for immigrants that might lack other skills and career opportunities. Germans today are more known for applied sciences, tend to know English pretty well, and you generally don’t pass up a tech career to make sausage.

In contrast, poorer, less skilled Mexicans, Chinese, Italians, Thai, and others immigrating in larger numbers today are less likely to work as hard to hone their English, so cooking is a good way to make a living. It’s probably not the PC answer, but I think it’s a big part of the equation.

BTW, regarding British food, I think animal abuse laws probably trip up the proliferation of those restaurants. Add in health department rules against poisoning your customers, and it’s simply a no-go. :stuck_out_tongue:

114

Can you give any evidence of Germans “hiding their German-ness” after World War II? I just don’t think that happened. As America’s largest ancestral group, it just wasn’t necessary.

115

I have always heard that anglicization of German names was common during World War I (not II). There’s a reference to the phenomenon here:

…but I’m having trouble finding a more authoritative source. (Which makes me wonder if it might be an urban legend.)

Another source here says:

116

Radio?! in 1917? It was strictly a tool for wireless telegraphy and experimentation. at that time. It certainly wasn’t playing music to any meaningful number of people - the home reception boom didn’t start till 1920.

117

This is where I call “urban legend”. The U.S. government ordered all non-military radio stations to cease when the U.S. entered the war in April 1917; there were only a handful of stations even then, and most of them broadcast in Morse Code, not music and voice broadcasts. The ban wasn’t lifted until 1919.

118

Just got back from there about 2 hours ago…we go up for Oktoberfest most years. Had our usual gigantic meal at Zhender’s (the 3-meat Bavarian platter is my favorite…sauerbraten, pork loin, and schnitzel). Yum.

There are still a few large German restaurants here in Chicago, but a couple that were practically institutions have closed. Sad.

119

I haven’t read the thread, but I do like German food.

When I went to New Orleans a few months ago I went to a place in the Quarter called Jagerhaus. I liked it enough I remember the address: 833 Conti.

The Wienerschnitzel was quite good, though it was pork instead of veal. The owner is actually Czech, so I also had the goulash one time. It was also tasty. Both dishes were served with a choice of sides, and I chose Spätzel. For appetizers, the first time I had a ‘half-and-half’ order of potato salad – a half-serving each of German potato salad and another one that is more familiar to most Americans. The German potato salad was not as warm as I’ve had other times, and not as vinegary. The other was more of an American style, but with a touch of fruit (pears?). Both were good. Another time I started with the rabbit liver paté with bread. Delicious.

The only problem was that an appetizer and the dinner amounted to too much food. I should have brought someone with me to help. Prices were good. IIRC the appetizers were around $5 and the dinner order was under $10. Plus it was in freakin’ New Orleans! :smiley: I need a transporter beam.

120

You might be right. Or maybe Anglicization was more common in areas where Germans were distinct minority of the population.

I know there was a substantial German community in North Carolina in the 18th century, and that many of its members followed typical migration patterns into the deep south, yet German names in the south today are fairly unusual. (I wouldn’t call them rare, exactly.)

Makes me wonder if some did anglicize their names during the Great War.