Betty Crocker in Bavaria

Foreign foods and beloved cookbooks

Building a new life is never a clear-cut undertaking.

You might live somewhere else from what you consider your native soil, in a different country even. You might learn a new language so well that astute listeners will pick up your accent only when you are tired, or when you come off the phone from talking to your brother back “home.” You make new friends in the “somewhere else,” people who don’t know the old you.

Chances are, however, that some of your cooking will remain the same.

The food you grew up with will follow you around, as will that favorite bowl for mixing batter, or that measuring cup that knows ounces and pints rather than grams and kilos.

And so it happened that, come October, my American mother would drive around the alpine countryside of upper Bavaria, where she raised her family, searching for a field of pumpkins in order to badger the farmer for a pumpkin to carve for Halloween. The eerie customs of the Anglo-Saxon Halloween had not yet made it to Germany in the 60s and 70s. Now Halloween has become a fad there, whereas when I was a child, pumpkins served as fodder for cattle.

The glowing grin of the jack-o-lantern from our living room window must have been a strange sight for our neighbors.

Mom went on a similar quest for Thanksgiving when she hunted about for someone who raised turkeys and would sell her one, long before turkey became popular as a healthy choice in meat in Germany.

My mother’s kitchen equipment had crossed the Atlantic with her in June 1964, packed in one of our three steamer trunks. The bowl set and the storage jars and the Corning ware casserole – all became American crockery in a Bavarian village. The Pyrex glass bowls weren’t see-through, but milky on the inside, and solid yellow, red and blue on the outside. Mom used the big yellow bowl for everything: serving potato salad, mixing cake batter or cookie dough, and serving punch on New Year’s Eve.

1984

Mom had one set of bowls, one set of measuring cups, and one set of jars.

With the pots and pans the axiom of one set didn’t hold true, as she had a set of stainless steel pots with black plastic handles and copper bottoms that she used for straightforward cooking, and a decorative set of Dansk enamel pots employed for more elaborate dishes: Chili con carne simmered in the big blue Dansk pot, staining the white enamel interior a peppery red. Lasagna baked in the green oblong pan, bubbling over in cheesy crusts. Mom soaked their interiors in bleach to keep them white. Then there was the Corning ware glass-topped baking dish in which she baked her casseroles, her so-called “concoctions.” Canned peas baked with tuna and noodles weren’t my favorite dinner, but I must grant her that she could “always find something to fix a meal with.”

My brother, sister, and I grew up on spaghetti with meat sauce, meatloaf and baked potatoes, or Mom’s version of pizza, even though we lived in the village of Schäftlarn in Bavaria, in southern Germany, where the hills rise to the Alps. Schäftlarn became our home because our father had wanted to return to Germany after getting his PhD in engineering in the U.S. He had found a job at Siemens, one of Germany’s big electronics and high tech corporations, in nearby Munich.

With only one adult-education course in German, Mom had nevertheless been happy to move as well. She was hungry for adventure, but also hungry for a home. Mom’s family was from the Midwest, but she never grew roots there. During World War II, her father had moved the family from Connecticut to Southern California, then Texas, following his job as a submarine engineer. After the war they lived in Colorado, Wisconsin, and Michigan. As soon as Mom had broken into one of the cliques at school, she was plucked up and moved elsewhere. She didn’t want to do that to her kids. Thus, from the time I was six to until I turned nineteen, we lived in the same house, at the end of the village of Schäftlarn, with a view of the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain.

We lived in Schäftlarn, but we had French toast for breakfast, sprinkled with brown sugar from Mom’s blue ceramic jar.

If our German grandmother, Oma, wasn’t around for one of our birthdays to bake her hazelnut torte, we’d get Devil’s Food Cake. From his business trips to the U.S., Dad would bring special treats like a big box of Nabisco’s Shredded Wheat, pillowy marshmallows to roast in the summer, or achingly sweet neon orange candy corn in the fall.

Weisswurst was one of the few local Bavarian foods that regularly made it to our table. A white sausage, traditionally made from pork (Mom was thrilled when a local butcher started making it from turkey), a string of them is steeped in boiling hot water for ten minutes and then served with a special sweet mustard, accompanied by big soft pretzels. It is traditionally eaten as the workingman’s second breakfast, and local lore has it that Weisswurst must be served before 11 a.m. We had it for lunch on weekends.

One time, my brother and I had lunch at our neighbor’s, Frau Meier, who set a wooden plate with cold cuts and sausages in front of us. While we surveyed the plate to find something we could identify, she sliced open one of the four-inch thick sausages, and a bloody mass oozed out. Yellowish tidbits swam in a maroon liquid that pooled on the plate and seeped into the wood.

Fortunately Frau Meier did not urge whatever this was upon us. I settled on a liverwurst sandwich and chewed on it for a long time. The bitter taste of the bread’s caraway seed crust was the lesser evil. When we later told Mom about the bloody mass, she smiled and said, “Yes, you kids don’t know such things. That must have been Press-Sack.” (A sausage made of pig’s blood and fatty meat from various pig body parts, stuffed into a boiled intestine casing.)

As I learned to cook in my mother’s kitchen in the 1970s, I could have investigated local Bavarian cooking beyond the sausages, but I didn’t. American cooking seemed exotic and more attractive for a girl trying to acquire culinary skills in Bavaria. I first investigated baking. When I had friends over to mess around in the kitchen, we made chocolate chip cookies, or oatmeal cookies if the supply of American staples like chocolate chips had run out that my American aunts included in their Christmas parcels. I was proud that I could offer my friends something different, something special.

American baking was a way to be distinctive, to show off, to rise above the sea of mediocrity and sameness that my teenage self was hungry to escape from.

I baked high-piled angel food cakes for my birthday parties and tried my hand at braiding lattice tops for cherry pies. I monopolized Mom’s Betty Crocker Cookbook and studied its ring-bound recipes, with her scribbles on the margin next to the ones she had tried: Silver White Cake – Tried on Birthday 1978 = good; Banana Nut Cake – Baked Jan. 15, 1969; Chicken Curry – Good.

Some recipes featured quips that offered a glimpse of the culinary history and gastronomic elegance across the Atlantic:

Miracle Marble Cake

Rich chocolate and dainty white … an intriguing marbled effect. “Guests at my home exclaim over it especially when I serve fingers of it with pink strawberry ice cream on white milk glass plates,” says N. Faye Woodward of Lawrence, Kansas.

Lord Baltimore Cake

Named for George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, the English statesman who founded the state of Maryland.

Mom picked up German cooking where it suited her, but it tended to be her mother-in-law’s (our Oma’s) recipes, which she would follow from a notebook Oma had created for her: paprika-spiced Goulash stew, veal cutlets in cream sauce, pork roast with bread dumplings.

Mom learned that the North Italian red wine Kalterer See with its high acidity was best to marinate rack of venison for Sauerbraten. She learned to spike the venison with peppercorns and let the sealed pot sit overnight in the cool of our basement. Mom even became adept at preparing Bries Muscheln, a delicacy my father’s family traditionally served as an appetizer at Christmas or New Year’s. Bries is the meat from a breast gland of a lamb or calf that would have to be special-ordered at the butcher’s, then cooked in saltwater, ground and baked in a thin layer in buttered shell-shaped dishes.

Oma’s recipe notebook survived all the years in our kitchen.

Eventually Oma saw to it that her three grandchildren each had a copy, and I still love to refer to it when I bake her

Hazelnut Torte for Passover

It’s a simple recipe, and I know it by heart, but I still love to see Oma’s handwriting:

Similarly, I love, love, love the fact that I have a copy of my mother’s Betty Crocker Cookbook. For years I nudged her to give it to me, but she refused.

Eventually, my brother gave me one of the best presents of my life:

He borrowed the cookbook from Mom and made a copy for me. Those were the days of copy shops, where he spent hours Xeroxing each page. Two-sided copying wasn’t a thing either, so he painstakingly turned pages. The separating index pages he copied on differently colored pastel paper, cutting them to size and gluing two sheets together so they’d be sturdier.

These are the true treasures on my cookbook shelf: Oma’s small handwritten notebook, and the copy of Mom’s Betty Crocker Cookbook, with all its wonderful illustrations of housewifery in the 1960s, and Mom’s scribbles that offer traces of her housewife life in—yes, the 1960s and beyond.

---

This story will go into my Book of My Things—the basic premise is to leave our heirs with the stories that go along with the things we cherish and will leave behind.

I am thinking about offering my course Capturing Family History in a Book of My Things again soon. I am not sure in what form yet, but do check it out here and let me know if you’re interested.

Meanwhile, my short Publishing Pointers course is still open but will close November 23, 2024. Check it out here!