The Big Apfel: German Food In America

Mimi Sheraton, longtime observer of New York’s culinary landscape, on her lifelong love of Rouladen and Baumkuchen, and other pleasures of German food in America

- Mimi Sheraton

Although I am sure that the first German words I knew were danke and bitte, I doubt that Rouladen, sauerkraut, and marzipan were far behind. Credit for my early fluency goes to one Anna Müller, a Frankfurt-born housekeeper in our Brooklyn home until I was about 7 years old. Cooking was not among her duties, but occasionally she treated us to a specialty she knew we favored. Foremost among them were Rinderrouladen—beef pounded thin, then rolled around bacon strips and minced onions, braised, and finally sauced with aromatic pan juices and sour cream. Anna also prepared sauerkraut to the perfect state she proudly pronounced as “dry but juicy.” That was served with various wursts purchased from Trunz, a local German meat shop close to our home and probably the place where I developed an abiding passion for liverwurst in many of its unctuously varied forms. The marzipan came from Königsberg each Christmas as Anna’s gift to me. Fitted into a bright red heart-shaped box, the almond paste was baked in the classic Königsberg style to impart a cookielike texture and modify the cloying sweetness that confection otherwise has. The brown glaze on the heart’s ruffled edges framed jewel-like dottings of red candied cherries, orange and lemon peels, and glassy, citrine-green angelica. I have often seen it in my dreams.

Having a long history with that lusciously nurturing cuisine, I intermittently missed many of its flavors and textures, not unlike some of the Eastern European–Jewish food that I mainly grew up with: soul-comforting, volcanically hot soups such as cabbage or split pea or cold fruit soups for summer; meats mellowed with softly simmered onion and garlic, the reassuring blush of sweet or smoky paprika, and the airy accents of dill and caraway seeds.