Looks delicious John. I like German bradwursten. Especially the Krakauer wurst, Bockwurst with Bockbeer. Berliner Mettwurst, Berliner Bockwurst and the Berliner Schüsselwurst.
Saturday evening I at what we call German steak, but in reality it is a Steak tartare with special spices.
German steak or Steak tartareI always get enormous hungry and curious after I see
John's recepies, images and video's. John would beat me big time in a cooking competition.
As a simple bachelor I cook simple meals and like to eat good outside the home in a good
Turkish Dutch Shawarma or
Doner kebab restaurant, or in a Dutch restaurent (french cuisine based),
Greek restaurant,
Indonesian-Chinese restaurant or a good
Belgian restaurant in Flanders or Wallonia. Folks if you are in Belgium, in Brussels, Liège, Durbuy, Aywaille, Mechelen, Antwerp, Gent, Brugge, Knokke-Heist or Ostende, go to a Belgian restaurant, because youn are closer to France than the Netherlands there. They can cook if you have the luck of having a good
chef (
Chef cuisinier («
chef de cuisine » ou plus rarement «
chef des cuisines »). And don't be impatient, for a good diner you have to wait. Making a delicious diner is high art over there and they take their time. So relax, enjoy a couple of beers, or wines. Take an aperitif to get in the mood for the diner. A real french diner can be very alcohol. They start with a rosé wine as aperitif, use red wine with the first dish, white wine with the second dish and a desert wine with or after the desert.
I have great memories of
my Polish bacia (grandmother) who was a great cook and who loved to cook and she cooked like a chef in a French restaurant, a Belgian restaurant in Brussels or Liège or New York city and for large groups of family members and friends. Her diners were five courses. With delicious Polish Barszcz (potrawa) soups, excellent Game dishes with Chanterelles, wonderful Pierogi, Lazanki, Kopytka, Gołąbki, Bigos and other Polish dishes I forgot the name of. She had a womderful own style in which she mixed Polish cuisine with what she saw in Dutch, Belgian, French and American restaurants. But the basics of her cooking remained Polish. After her death I have never eaten Polish diners that delicious like she did. My grandma (babcia) was a great cook, a chef!
She cooked sometimes for 10 or 12 people. They had a table they could enlarge with wooden pieces on both sides. My parents have the same kind of table in the Netherlands from my Dutch grandparents. This is something I miss and what will never return,
the Polish family warmth,
the cosyness of the large Polish family diners with my grandmother, my dad, mom, sister, uncles and aunts and cousins in
Poznań.
Family life is very important in Poland and together with
the Roman-Catholic family traditions,
Polishness (my old fashionate gentleman grandfather was very dedicated to my mother and American aunts
Polishness,
Polish patriotism and reminded them
not to forget Poland abroad in the USA and the Netherlands,
their Polish birth,
their Polish upbringing,
their Polish education and
their Polish lives while they were still in Poland as children, teenagers, adolescents and young adult women).
That family atmosphere,
that Polish food we bought in communist Polish peoples republic state supermarkets called
Sam and in Peoples Republic Poland style bakeries, butchers, greengrocers and grocery stores. As children it was a great adventure to go and get the groceries with a list we carried with us and with Polish zloty's which were given to us. The Polish personal in the supermarket and the sam considered these little foreign kids funny and helped us, because we weren't able to speak Polish. We were very proud when we returned wit the groceries to our mom and grandmother. And we were curious what grandma would be making that evening in her huge, ancient, old fashionate pre-war or war time style kitchen in which nothing had changed since the previous owner a German (Nazi)
Volskdeutsche had lived there before they arrived there in early 1945. I know that he was a Nazi, because we found his books and magazines that my grandparents had put away for 42 years (my grandma died in 1987). After her death I was looking with biological fascination at the nazi tressure before me on the ground. I was 17 years old. Jahrbücher des Drittes Reich (
NSDAP party books) from 1934 until 1938 (lot's of images with endless
Nazi parades, nazi meetings, marching workers [Reichsarbeitsdienst; RAD], marching Hitler Youth, marching girls [League of German Girls; Bund Deutscher Mädel], SA, SS, NSDAP meetings, and the Nazi leaders. In every magazine and every book there was a portrait of the Führer Adolf Hitler. There were 3 books, 1) Luftwaffe 1940, 2) Wehrmacht 1940, 3) Kriegsmarine 1940 and there was a wonderful drown comic book with highly realistic fighting Waffen-SS soldiers. Ofcourse drawn in heroic propaganda style drawings. There was a full colour art magazine. To my surprise an old fashionate reproduction of an oil painting with a black woman was in one of the images. A beautiful painting, but I was surprised that a beuatiful painting of a handsome black woman who looked normal and human was in a Nazi art magazine. In that old fashionate, nearly early 20th century apartment room on a wooden floor on concrete I was sucked into a Nazi atmosphere of 50 years earlier. There were also luxerly editions of Schiller, Goethe and other German writers in that collection. The
Volksdeutsche (ethnic German minority in Poland)
collaborator with
the Nazi occupiers had left, but left nice furniture, paintings, drawings, furniture and other stuf my grandparents could use and mixed with possessions they could take from Warsaw where they lived during the war to Poznań. They left Warsaw to live in Poznań in 1945, because Warsaw was completely demolished. Not their home in Mokotow, but the rest of the city. Their neighborhood Mokotow became a Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (1945–1954), Polish communist secret police, neighborhood. Next to their apartment was the notorious Mokotow prison.
My grandmother, because she was an excellent cook, excellent organiser, and a energetic and dominant person, who could protect her daughters, cooked for
Russian Red army officers and
soldiers at the end of the war in
Poznań. Thank good these officers were no brutes, not blunt thugs like other rapist
Red Army officers and soldiers. These guys were disciplined, decent, gentle, soophisticated men. Sometimes even sentimental and melancholic, because
my slavic mother and her sister were looking like their daughters in Russia. One of the young Russian soldiers who was 17 or 18 years old was very fond of my mothers older sister, a young girl back then. He had no chance, because my grandmother was garding her like a golden egg. No way he would touch her daughter. And the Russian officer made clear he stayed away from her, because he wouldn't want to lose his excellent cook. My grandmother had dealt with German Waffen-SS officers in Warsaw, with Austrian SS-Totenkopf SS Mauthausen concentrationcamp guards, and with Ukrainian Nazi thugs in Warsaw, so she knew how to deal with the Russians. But they were very lucky that for Russians these Sovjet Red army officers and soldiers were decent. Like ofcourse you also had decent Wehrmacht officers and soldiers during the war who weren't fanatical nazi's but just forced to fight a war they didn't choose. By cooking for the Russians my grandmother got food and a supply (stock) of food. That way they managed to survive in the first months of the new Poland after the Nazi occupation when everything was scarse and there was a lot of poverty and hunger in Poland, because everything was damaged and broken by the war. The heavy battle for Poznań had damaged large parts of that city too and destroyed industries and companies. Thank god my babcia's familymembers of her Pantoflinksky family lived in Poznań. Her brother and her sisters with his wife and their husbants. Via the husbant of one of her sisters who was half German they got the apartment of
the Volksdeutsche, because he knew Germans in the city during the war, without being a collaborator, but because half of his family was German.
My grandmother also learned a lot of cooking skills in working for
the Red army (
Sovjet armed forces in Poland) as a cook, and being able to use their supplies. After that she had a good life for 42 years in her apartment. Her husbant enjoyed the apartment for 32 years, because he died unfortunately 10 years before my babcia in 1977, when he was killed by a drunken driver in
Poznań while he walked over a Zebra crossing and was hit by the car of that drunken lunatic. The drunken driver got life long prison sentence in
Communist Poland for his unresponsable and deadly behavior. Thank god my grandmother had her brother and her sisters and their husbants in
Poznań, and the cousins and the daughter of her brother, the mother of my cousins. And for that large family and for her girlfriends she loved to play bridge until the end she cooked until the end. We received a cake she had baked just before she died via a Polish friend who came to the Netherlands.
Cheers,
Pieter
