As I said before, the Englishman has no great variety of things to
eat, but he is always eating them; and when he is not eating them he is
swigging tea. Yet in these regards the German excels him. The Englishman
gains a lap at breakfast; but after that first hour the German leaves
him, hopelessly distanced, far in the rear. It is due to his talents in
this respect that the average Berliner has a double chin running all the
way round, and four rolls of fat on the back of his neck, all closely
clipped and shaved, so as to bring out their full beauty and symmetry,
and a figure that makes him look as though an earthquake had shaken
loose everything on the top floor and it all fell through into his
dining room.
Your true Berliner eats his regular daily meals--four in number and all
large ones; and in between times he now and then gathers a bite. For
instance, about ten o'clock in the morning he knocks off for an hour and
has a few cups of hard-boiled coffee and some sweet, sticky pastry with
whipped cream on it. Then about four in the afternoon he browses a
bit, just to keep up his appetite for dinner. This, though, is but a
snack--say, a school of Bismarck herring and a kraut pie, some more
coffee and more cake, and one thing and another--merely a preliminary
to the real food, which will be coming along a little later on. Between
acts at the theater he excuses himself and goes out and prepares his
stomach for supper, which will follow at eleven, by drinking two or
three steins of thick Munich beer, and nibbling on such small tidbits
as a rosary of German sausage or the upper half of a raw Westphalia ham.
There are forty-seven distinct and separate varieties of German sausage
and three of them are edible; but the Westphalia ham, in my judgment, is
greatly overrated. It is pronounced Westfailure with the accent on the
last part, where it belongs.
In Germany, however, there is a pheasant agreeably smothered in young
cabbage which is delicious and in season plentiful. The only drawback
to complete enjoyment of this dish is that the grasping and avaricious
German restaurant keeper has the confounded nerve to charge you, in our
money, forty cents for a whole pheasant and half a peck of cabbage--say,
enough to furnish a full meal for two tolerably hungry adults and a
growing child.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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