Posts Tagged ‘Food Culture’

Beer and Sausage, and Beer…and Sausage…and Sausage, and Beer

IDsteve,

If you’re hungry or thirsty in Germany, well, you don’t have much of a choice. You drink beer. You eat sausage. And that’s just how it is.

Sure, German cuisine has started to become adventurous with the influx of immigrants—particularly evident in the prevalence of currywurst and doner kebab shops—but this is a national diet that has and always will be built firmly on the staples: beer and sausage.

The average German gulps down 116 liters (or 31 gallons) of beer every year, and consumes more than 60 pounds (27 kilos) of sausage. While there are 1500 varieties of sausage produced in Germany (who would have guessed there were so many different ways to put meat in a thin casing?), the heavy hitters here include wurstchen, or tiny cocktail-like sausages often used as snacks or appetizers, and bratwurst, a heartier meal staple. Salami cold cuts are also huge here, often as a part of breakfast.

On the beverage side of things, Germans are masters of the craft of brewing. The home of a huge variety of beers—alt, bock, dunkel, kölsch, lager, malzbier, pils and weizenbier—it is no surprise that beer is often cheaper than water here. It’s perfectly normal to see some brands of beer sold in supermarkets for just a few cents a bottle.

So eat well and drink heartily while you’re here—just make sure you learn to like sausage and beer.

Beer at 39 cents a bottle

Beer at 39 cents a bottle

Types of sausage on the menu

Types of sausage on the menu

A "fancy" dinner

A “fancy” dinner

 

Kegs....kegs....kegs

Kegs….kegs….kegs

Currywurst

Currywurst

SKK_7774

SKK_7771

Italian Food as a Source of National Pride

IDsteve,

That Italy is a culture of proud machismo is well established. That Italian food is one of the most popular around the world is also fact. Put those together, and you have an extreme sense of nationalistic pride in the country’s culinary offerings—pride that can be so over the top as to create some opportunities for humor at the Italians’ expense.

Spend enough time with Italians, and it can be a great joy to watch their reaction to any creative alterations to Italy’s staple dishes; you will never see any kind of “Italian fusion” being embraced by Italians. You want to try to make lasagna with a cheese other than ricotta? Not here, you won’t. You want to add something fancy like turkey or mushrooms to spaghetti al pomodoro (simple spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce)? That’s just blasphemous. And don’t even think about using a cheese-based sauce with seafood.

Secondly, it can provide a laugh when you erroneously pair ingredients that you are genetically supposed to know don’t go together. For example, if you prefer a seafood-based sauce with your pasta, you use long noodles. If you want meat sauce, that’s when you need short noodles. Get it mixed up, and your Italian friends will have a (comical) fit. While you’re at it, try cutting your pasta with a  knife, or cooking your pasta too long so it’s soft and mushy as opposed to the preferred al dente. You may not have friends anymore.

Finally, because Italians are so proud of their cuisine—and indeed, it is the only suitable cuisine on earth—you are likely to get humorously defensive reactions when you suggest that while Italian food is good, you prefer Peruvian, or Thai, or Japanese, or Lebanese. Just rubbish. Have they actually tried those other cuisines? Doesn’t matter…you’re not only wrong, but silly for even suggesting such foolishness.

And when you do encounter this, it’s only fitting to laugh, given that over-the-top pride exemplified even from the country’s leadership—among his many other blunders, Silvio Berlusconi managed to offend an entire country (Finland) by knocking their cuisine while serving as Italy’s Prime Minister.

Make sure you treat your Italian food wisely...

Make sure you treat your Italian food wisely…