American Interpretations of German Food: Maybe Surprises are Better

Vegetable Strudel: A Traditional German Vegetarian DishI firmly believe that you can find out a great deal about a culture by treating the food of the given group as a cultural artifact. Studying the food has a great deal to do with how the people have historically been able to process their natural environment for their own sustenance, and do it in a way that has provided them with all the essential elements being fulfilled. In studying the food the Germany has to offer, I find myself overwhelmed with meat. In researching German restaurants (menupages.com, New York Magazine), I found that it was almost entirely impossible for the food not to be reduced to purely, almost stereotypical, meat dishes. Traditional schnitzels and fish (carp and herring, especially) overwhelm the representation of German food in New York City. Again, I find myself worried. As a vegetarian, I'm concerned about how possible it will be to maintain my eating habits in Germany itself as it seems impossible to maintain based on German restaurants in the city.

Because I found myself so lost about how I was to experience German food in New York City, I let myself sleep on it, or rather take Thanksgiving break on it, before attempting to attack the issue. It turns out that my American Thanksgiving actually solved the problem for me. Every year I go to visit family in Binghamton, NY, a small city about 4 hours outside of New York City, that I never particularly thought of as culturally aware. This year for Thanksgiving, my family went to a different restaurant than usual so, then, I had to figure out a different way of asking for no turkey on our celebrated turkey day. When I asked for "the vegetarian option" from the waitress, she said that there wasn't one. When I responded that it meant I couldn't eat, she said that the staff had already started one of the later evening entrées: a vegetable strudel. Both intrigued and apparently optionless, I bit. And, as it turns out, biting into vegetable strudel was one of the best things I'd done. Both reflective of traditional German cuisine and my vegetarian diet, it was delicious and creative. Where I'd never considered strudel outside of being some type of breakfast with a nutritional value synonymous with doughnuts, or equivalently as a dessert, it turns out that traditional German strudel is a savory dish that can and actively is made using only vegetables and cheeses. It was surprisingly light and flakey, not glazed, but I still think it may have made its way to the top of my list of comfort-food. I hope to have it again in the future.

In the meantime, I'm still entertaining the idea of getting emerged into the German food that New York has to offer. Nearly right across the street from me is Rolf's, a French-Bavarian restaurant that I'd like to explore simply for the cultural iconography it has to offer. The entire room, since the season's first wind-tunnel, I imagine, have been decorated flawless with somewhat over-the-top displays of lights, garland, boughs, and statues of St. Nick, just as what might be imagined in Bavaria. While this looks like a fun place to go, the prices are definitely reflective of the overhead entailed in creating such a decorative display. Maybe I'll save it for my departure dinner, or maybe it would be better for me to personally stop trying to view Germany through New York's lens. It seems that so much of the modernity of Berlin is lost to the presentation of traditionalism of southern Germany, the horror of the Third Reich, or the decadence of Berlin's 20's and 30's.