In the Bavarian village the inns were filled all through the summer
with people from Nuremberg, Erlangen, Augsburg, Erfurth, and other
Bavarian towns. The inn-keeper used to charge five shillings a week
for a scrupulously clean, comfortably furnished room, breakfast was
sixpence, dinner one and two-pence, and supper as you ordered it. For
dinner they gave you good soup, _Rindfleisch_, either poultry or roast
meat, and one of the _Mehlspeisen_ for which Bavaria is celebrated,
some dish, that is, made with eggs and flour. There was a great
variety of them, but I only remember one clearly, because I was
impressed by its disreputable name. It was some sort of small pancake
soaked in a wine sauce, and it was called _versoffene Jungfern_. Most
of these inns kept no servants, and except in the Kurhaus there was
not a black-coated waiter in the place. Our inn-keeper tilled his own
fields, grew his own hops, and brewed his own beer; and his wife,
wearing her peasant's costume, did all the cooking and cleaning,
assisted by a daughter or a cousin. When you met her out of doors she
would be carrying one of the immense loads peasant women do carry up
hill and down dale in Germany. She was hale and hearty in her middle
age, and always cheerful and obliging. At that inn, too, we never had
a meal indoors from May till October. Everything was brought out to a
summer-house, from which we looked straight down the village, its
irregular Noah's Ark-like houses, and its background of mountains and
forest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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