A slightly ambiguous photo of a park sign… "Please BBQ dogs" (Flickr: bleicher)

If I said to you barbeque, you’d say to me: America! After all, it is the land of BBQ sauce, rib and steak cook-outs and, oddly enough, a variety of grilled “dogs” – which, I have to confess, I always had the Koreans down for, but whaddya know?

Anyway, I’m not the only one who’s a little limited in his range of associative thinking when it comes to barbequed food: after all, how many of you would instantly think of Germany when you smell charcoal and singed sausages?

Frankfurt's Kleinmarkthalle has a lot to offer. Photo (c) Jen

Baby, I hit the JACK POT.  I discovered Frankfurt’s Kleinmarkthalle, an indoor market that has fabulous produce, cheeses, meats, breads, desserts, fish, exotic fruits, wine, exotic spices, flowers…it’s all a veritable foodgasm.

Sure, Frankfurt (and my local village) has its share of open-air food markets (and I’m not discounting them, not one bit), but Kleinmarkthalle has fresh cilantro (I finally found cilantro in Germany!) and fresh pasta. It also has an array of international/regional food specialty stands such as Italian, Greek, Persian, Tyrolean, and most exciting of all…a stand for Asian/Latino specialties! Some of my Mexican food problems will now be solved. I may still have to learn to make my own tortillas, but at least now I have the right flour to do it with.

Chanterelles in the woods (Flickr: EdWohlfahrt)

One of the most challenging things about writing is trying to sum up entire places and periods in a few words so that you’re able to move on with your story. Yet if I were ever to need, for some reason or other, to briefly describe Germany in mid-September, I know exactly how I’d do it: chanterelles and plums.

That sounds better in German, since chanterelles are called Pfifferlinge and plums Pflaumen, which would give any such description a poetic alliteration of the first order. Yet apart from the usual writer’s aesthetic considerations, why consider these two particular foodstuffs?

Thanks to merze (Flickr)

One of the really great things about Germany besides – obviously – the beer, is its penchant for seasonal vegetables. Germans really understand just how pleasant it is to punctuate the otherwise somewhat amorphous flow of the year with food: while other countries speak of winter, Germans talk of the Grünkohlzeit or “curly kale season”; what the British or French might call late spring/early summer is known here as Spargelzeit or “asparagus time”. And what other people generally refer to as “the onset of spring” is known throughout Germany as Bärlauchzeit.

“Only the Krauts!” is not an expression of surprise a British person should get into the habit using when confronted by examples of Teutonic eccentricity. After all, “Krauts”, derived from one of the many German words for cabbage, has long been a disrespectful way of referring to Germans. Today it smacks of the nasty kind of knee-jerk anti-German prejudice purveyed by the British gutter press.

Flickr: wstuppert