German cooking isn't very highly regarded in France, where it has the reputation of being too heavy and stolid--and as well, the sweet and sour flavours beloved of central and eastern Europe don't have much appeal for a lot of French people. But they do for me! I've always loved good sausage, sauerkraut, heaven-and-earth potato and apple, smoked fish, pickled red cabbage, and the like. Not that I'd want to eat it all the time but it is delicious once in a while.
So the other day I made a bit of a Germanic-inspired meal, which was just great with a good glass of Alsace riesling.
Here's the menu: Entree: a salad of pickled herring(rollmop style), with fish cut up in small pieces and mixed with very finely sliced onions, gherkins, chopped pickled beetroot, and mixed with sour cream, a little mustard and pepper, and served with a grated carrot salad surrounding it--very colourful! Main course was bratwurst(from a Germanic smallgoods producer in Queensland): the sausage was very nice but to me ressembled more weisswurst than bratwurst--still, very tasty with mustard and/or horseradish cream(Saskia Beer's lovely version.)Vegetables were rosti, a grated potato pancake which is really easy to make: you just grate raw potato and fry it in oil till brown and crisp, half way through cooking add cream and cheese and stir through, it melts nicely in the potato and makes it stay together, and red cabbage cooked in a little wine, cider vinegar and brown sugar(recipe in my post on cabbages). Dessert wasn't particularly German but not outrageously not: we had meringues left over from another time, so had those with whipped cream. It all worked out really nicely indeed!
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