If there’s one thing almost everyone new to Germany soon learns, it’s that the Germans take their food very seriously. Anyone who then spends time in anything more than one part of Germany also learns that they take their regional food even more seriously.

Serious means: regions, cities and small villages with their own cookery books. Serious means: dishes that are not only unknown in other parts of the country, but frequently impossible to pronounce there, too. Serious means: don’t use the wrong word for bread-rolls in a bakery if you value non-spat-on wheat and rye products.

Here in Hamburg, for example, bread rolls are called Rundstücke. Schrippe, a word originally from Berlin, is tolerated, as is Brötchen, a general word for bread roll that everyone north of Cologne considers to be Standard German and that everyone south of it claims not to understand.

Indeed in Munich, so I hear, the key word for getting a bread roll is Semmel; I tried it out once up here at my regular baker’s, just for a laugh, like: there followed a patronizing half-hour explanation of how Germany is divided into various cultural areas with their own dialects. The baker then disserted on the precise differences between a North-German Brötchen and a Southern German Semmel until I lost all will to live and started running through my shopping list and laundry schedule in my head.

“… Are you concentrating, Brian?!”

“Er… coloured wash tomorrow if the weather’s good and I can hang it out to dry…”

“Brian! I’m explaining an important fact about German culture to you. You don’t want to get you bread spat on, do you? Now, as I was saying, North Germans eat very differently to South Germans…”

The reason I’d tuned out, you understand, was not because I’m not interested in this sort of stuff. Quite to the contrary. The reason I tuned out was because this has been clear to me for some time now and I don’t take kindly to having my jokes mistaken for a greenhorn lack of cultural knowledge.

The food specialities in northern Germany

After all, you don’t have to live in Hamburg very long to notice that North Germany has a rather different diet not to just South Germany, but even to neighbouring Lower Saxony and Westphalia, areas with which it traditionally shares strong cultural ties (e.g. the Hanseatic league, the Low German Language, Protestantism).

Yet while Hannoverians, Münsteraners and Dortmunders stuff sausages down their face at all hours of day and night, the Hamburgers have – perhaps ironically considering their name – developed a much bigger taste for fish.

Now, I’m British by birth and quite a fish eater by nature, so it takes some doing to surprise me with your consumption of seafood; but a former flat-mate of mine from Kiel managed it when I caught her breakfasting on pickled herrings (Rollmops) one morning.

She was eating said herrings, of course, with a dark, sour rye-bread – often called Schwarzbrot (“black bread”), another speciality of the North. Somewhere south of Cologne, not only does the word Brötchen disappear, but along with it all tolerance of any bread that isn’t ovinely fluffy and virginally white. Receiving a visitor from Bavaria is like suddenly having a child: to get nourishment down them, you need plain white-sliced with the crusts cut off.
After all, you can’t expect them to eat much else up here. Your stereotypical sausage-munching German is, for starters, deprived of sausage and sauerkraut – neither of which seem popular up here. Instead, he’ll have to get his chops round Labskaus, a bizarre mash of potatoes, beetroot and salt-beef served with a fried egg and – yes, you guessed it – a pickled herring.

Or there’s the (in)famous Aalsuppe, containing a truly mouthwatering combination of prunes, dried apple rings, celeriac, eel and vinegar: although, to be fair, it wasn’t the Hamburgers who dreamed up such madness, but rather tourists who jumped to conclusions about the syllable “Aal”. In Standard German, this means “eel”; in North German dialect it simply means “all” and was a term for a type of suicide-soup whose aim was use up odds and ends in the larder – mainly scraps of meat, vegetables and dried fruit. Restaurant customers from other parts of Germany, however, felt that they were being ripped off by paying for what sounded like an eel-soup and not getting any eel; so the Hamburgers, being more than willing to use fish as it is, started adding chunks of fresh eel.

Just like mix-ups in the bakery, this is yet another incidence of Germans ruining each other’s food due to linguistic confusions; having said that, as odd as the Aalsuppe may be, at least no-one will spit in it if you ask for it in South Germany – they simply won’t understand you.