Thanksgiving in Bavaria
by Zoe Strimpel
Mon, 26 Nov 2007 at 7:53 PM
updated Mon, 26 Nov 2007 at 7:57 PM
BAVARIA — Southern Germany is not, perhaps, the most obvious place to spend Thanksgiving week. This is mainly because it does not offer sun or warmth, the main incentive for a Boston family to flee home at this time of year. Instead, it lavishes visitors with a heavy and immovable grey-cold to rival that of New England any day and to make London seem a balmy paradise by comparison.
But Bavarian culture has developed around the big, brutal skies of cloud and endless brown fields. Buildings look like warming gingerbread houses in towns from the largely rebuilt Nuremberg to untouched Medieval jewels like Rothenburg. As you stagger around in the cold, nothing looks more inviting than a beer in a gothic, dim-lit beer cellar, of which there are many. But the true source of warmth is the food. This is no climate for salad. Instead, it was wursts in all forms — white sausage, red sausage, black and brown sausage in long tubes, neat rectangles, and Slim Jim-style pipes of meat. Same with cabbage — white sauerkraut, red cabbage with apples, and savoy cabbage, all piping hot. And bread: as dumplings, rolls, and rye slices. Potatoes were abundant as boiled and oiled little fellows, fries, gratins, and dumplings. Often all of the above came on one dish. The health conscious might take refuge in a plate of matjes herring, so long as they left the thick cream cucumber sauce in the pot, and the accompanying bowl of greasy potatoes alone.
Another heat source came from the consumption of hot chocolate and cake every afternoon. Cheesecake, marzipan cake, apple cake, liebkuchen (soft ginger cake). This is no place to slim down. But then, when it's that cold, plumpness may not be a bad idea.
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