Home Life in Germany

GESINDE-DIENSTBUCH

Then came the record of her previous situations:—

It will be seen that the characters given tell nothing about a servant's qualities and knowledge; while the vague complaint that Anna Schmidt's behaviour no longer suited her mistress might mean anything or nothing. In this case it meant that a son of the house had annoyed the girl with his attentions, and she had in consequence treated him with some brusquerie. But ten minutes' talk with a lady who knows the best and the worst of a servant is worth any Dienstbuch in Germany. And when English servants write to the Times and ask to have the same system here, I always wonder how they would like their failings sent with them from place to place in black and white; every fresh start made difficult, and every bad trait recorded against them as long as they earn their daily bread.

Wages are much lower in Germany than here. Some years ago you could get a good cook for from £7 to £12, but those days are past. Now you hear of a general servant getting from £10 to £12, and a good plain cook from £15 upwards. These are servants who would get from £22 to £30 in England, and more in America. But the wages of German servants are supplemented at Christmas by a system of tips and presents that has in course of time become extortionate. Germans groan under it, but every nation knows how hard it is to depart from one of these traditional indefinite customs. The system is hateful, because it is neither one of free gift nor of business-like payment, but hovers somewhere between and gives rise to much friction and discontent. In a household account book that a friend allowed me to see I found the following entry. "Christmas present for the servant. 30 marks in money. Bed linen, 9.50. Pincushion, 1.5. Five small presents. In all 42 marks. Was not contented." This was a general servant in a family of two occupying a good social position, but living as so many Germans do on a small income. But then the servant's wages for doing the work of a large well-furnished, well-kept flat was £14, and these same friends told me that servants now expect to get a quarter of their wages in money and presents at Christmas. A German servant gets a great deal more help from her mistress, and is more directly under her superintendence, than she would be in a household of the same social standing in this country. I have heard an English lady say that when she had asked people to dinner she made it a rule to go out all day, because if she did not her servants worried her with questions about extra silver and other tiresome details. All the notable housewives in England will say that this lady was a "freak," and must not be held up to the world as an English type. But I think there is something of her spirit in many Englishwomen. They engage their servants to do certain work, and hold them responsible. The German holds herself responsible for every event and every corner in her husband's house, and she never for a moment closes her eyes and lets go the reins. The servants are used to working hand in hand with the ladies of the household, and do not regard the kitchen as a department belonging exclusively to themselves after an early hour in the morning.

"Why did you leave your last place?" you say to an English cook applying for yours.

"Because the lady was always in the kitchen," she replies quite soberly and civilly. "I don't like to see ladies in my kitchen at all hours of the day. It is impossible to get on with the work."

But in Germany the kitchen is not the cook's kitchen. It belongs to the people who maintain it, and they enter it when they please. It is always so spick and span that you sigh as you see it, because you think of your own kitchen at home with its black pans and unpleasant looking sink. There are no black pans in a German kitchen; you never see any grease, and you never by any chance see a teacloth or a duster with a hole in it. An English kitchen in a small household is furnished with more regard to the comfort of the servants than a German one, and with less concern for the work to be done there. We supply comfortable chairs, a coloured table-cloth, oil-cloth, books, hearth-rug, pictures, cushions, inkstand, and a roaring fire. The German kitchen lacks all these things. It does not look as if the women who live in it ever expected to pursue their own business, or rest for an hour in an easy chair. But the shining brightness of it rejoices you,—every vessel is of wood, earthenware, enamel, or highly polished metal, and every one of them is scrupulously clean. The groceries and pudding stuffs are kept in fascinating jars and barrels, like those that come to children at Christmas in toy kitchens made in Germany. The stove is a clean, low hot table at which you can stand all day without getting black and greasy. In this sensible spotless workshop a German servant expects to be busy from morning till night. Neither for herself nor for her fellow-servants will she ever set a table for a tidy kitchen meal. She eats anywhere and anywhen, as the fancy takes her and the exigencies of the day permit. Her morning meal will consist of coffee and rye bread without butter. In the middle of the morning she will have a second breakfast, rye bread again with cheese or sausage. In a liberal household she will dine as the family dines; in a stingy one she will fare worse than they. In an old-fashioned household her portion will be carved for her in the dining-room, because the joint will not return to the kitchen when the family has done with it, but be placed straightway in the Speiseschrank under lock and key. In the afternoon she will have bread and coffee again, and for supper as a rule what the family has, sausage or ham or some dish made with eggs. One friend who goes out so much with her husband that they are rarely at home to supper, told me that she made her servant a monthly allowance to buy what she liked for supper. German servants are allowed coffee and either beer or wine, but they are never given tea. Except for the scarcity of butter in middle-class households, they live very well.

They go out on errands and to market a great deal, but they do not go out as much for themselves as our servants do. A few hours every other Sunday still contents them in most places. Their favourite amusement is the cheap public ball, and the careful German householder is actually in the habit of trusting the key of the flat to his maid-of-all-work, and allowing her to return at any hour of the night she pleases. This at any rate is the custom in Berlin and some other large German towns, and the evil results of such a system are manifold. Over and over again burglaries have been traced to it. One beguiling man engages your maid to dance and sup with him, while his confederate gets hold of her key and comfortably rifles your rooms. On the girls themselves these entertainments are said to have the worst possible influence, and most sensible Germans would put a stop to them if they could.

You must not expect in Germany to have hot water brought to you at regular intervals as you do in every orderly English household. The Germans have a curious notion that English life is quite uniform, and all English people exactly alike. One man, a notably wise man too, said to me that if he knew one English family he knew ten thousand. Another German told me that this account of German life would be impossible to write, because one part of Germany differed from the other part; but that a German could easily write the same kind of book about England, because from Land's End to John o' Groats we were so many peas in a pod. To us who live in England and know the differences between the Cornish and the Yorkshire people, for instance, or the Welsh and the East Anglians, this seems sheer nonsense. I have tried to understand how Germans arrive at it, and I believe it is by way of our cans of hot water brought at regular intervals every day in the year in every British household. I remember that their machine-like precision impressed M. Taine when he was in England, and certainly miss them sadly while we are abroad. Gretchen brings you no hot water unless you ask for it; but she will brush your clothes as a matter of course, though she does all the work of the household. She will, however, be hurt and surprised if you do not press a small coin into her hand at the end of each week, and one or two big ones at parting. One friend told me that when she stayed with her family at a German hotel her German relatives told her she should give the chambermaid a tip that was equal to 20 pf. for each pair of boots cleaned during their stay. It seems an odd way of reckoning, because the chambermaid does not clean boots. However, the tip came to £3, which seems a good deal and helps to explain the ease with which German servants save enough for their marriage outfit on small wages. It is usual also to tip the servant where you have supped or dined. Your opportunity probably comes when she precedes you down the unlighted stairs with a lantern or a candle to the house door. But you need not be at all delicate about your opportunity. You see the other guests make little offerings, and you can only feel that the money has been well earned when you have eaten the elaborate meal she has helped to cook, and has afterwards served to you.

Domestic servants come under the law in Germany that obliges all persons below a certain income to provide for their old age. The Post Office issues cards and 20 pf. stamps, and one of these stamps must be dated and affixed to the card every Monday. Sometimes the employers buy the cards and stamps, and show them at the Post Office once a month; sometimes they expect the servant to pay half the money required. Women who go out by the day to different families get their stamps at the house they work in on Mondays. If a girl marries she may cease to insure, and may have a sum of money towards her outfit. In that case she will receive no Old Age Pension. But if she goes on with her insurance she will have from 15 to 20 marks a month from the State after the age of 70. In cases of illness, employers are legally bound to provide for their domestic servants during the term of notice agreed on. At least this is so in Prussia, and the term varies from a fortnight to three months. In some parts of Germany servants are still engaged by the quarter, but in Berlin it has become unusual of late years. The obligation to provide for illness is often a heavy tax on employers, especially in cases when the illness has not been caused by the work or the circumstances of the situation, but by the servant's own carelessness and folly. Most householders in Berlin subscribe 7.50 a year to an insurance company, a private undertaking that provides medical help, and when necessary sends the invalided servant to a hospital and maintains her there. It even pays for any special food or wine ordered by its own doctor.

One cause of ill health amongst German servants must often be the abominable sleeping accommodation provided for them in old-fashioned houses. It is said that rooms without windows opening to the air are no longer allowed in Germany, and there may be a police regulation against them. Even this cannot have been issued everywhere, for not long ago I had a large well furnished room of this kind offered me in a crowded hotel. It had windows, but they opened on to a narrow corridor. The proprietor was quite surprised when I said I would rather have a room at the top of the house with a window facing the street. I know a young lady acting as Stütze der Hausfrau who slept in a cupboard for years, the only light and air reaching her coming from a slit of glass over the door. I remember the consumptive looking daughter of a prosperous tradesman showing us some rooms her father wished to let, and suggesting that a cupboard off a sitting-room would make a pleasant study. She said she slept in one just like it on a higher floor. Of course she called it a Kammer and not a cupboard, but that did not make it more inviting. Over and over again I have known servants stowed away in holes that seemed fit for brooms and brushes, but not for creatures with lungs and easily poisoned blood. This is one of the facts of German life that makes comparison between England and Germany so difficult and bewildering. Everyone knowing both countries is struck by the amount of State and police surveillance and interference the Germans enjoy compared with us. I do not say "endure," because Germans would not like it. Most of them approve of the rule they are used to, and they tell us we live in a horrid go-as-you-please fashion with the worst results. I suppose we do. But I have never known an English servant put to sleep in a cupboard, though I have heard complaints of damp fireless rooms, especially in old historical palaces and houses. And I have never been offered a room in a good English inn that had no windows to the open air. These windowless rooms may be forbidden as bedrooms by the German police, but it would take a bigger earthquake than the empire is likely to sustain to do away with those still in use.

CHAPTER XVToC

FOOD

Although the Germans as a nation are large eaters, they begin their day with the usual light continental breakfast of coffee and rolls. In households where economy is practised it is still customary to do without butter, or at any rate to provide it only for the master of the house and for visitors. In addition to rolls and butter, you may, if you are a man or a guest, have two small boiled eggs; but eggs in a German town are apt to remind you of the Viennese waiter who assured a complaining customer that their eggs were all stamped with the day, month, and year. Home-made plum jam made with very little sugar is often eaten instead of butter by the women of the family; and the servants, where white rolls are regarded as a luxury, have rye bread. No one need pity them on this account, however, as German rye bread is as good as bread can be. Ordinary London household bread is poor stuff in comparison with it. The white rolls and butter are always excellent too, and I would even say a good word for the coffee. To be sure, Mark Twain makes fun of German coffee in the Tramp Abroad: says something about one chicory berry being used to a barrel of water; but the poorest German coffee is better than the tepid muddy mixture you get at all English railway stations, and at most English hotels and private houses. Milk is nearly always poor in Germany, but whipped cream is often added to either coffee or chocolate.

The precision that is so striking in the arrangement of German rooms is generally lacking altogether in the serving of meals. The family does not assemble in the morning at a table laid as in England with the same care for breakfast as it will be at night for dinner. It dribbles in as it pleases, arrayed as it pleases, drinks a cup of coffee, eats a roll and departs about its business. Formerly the women of the family always spent the morning in a loose gown, and wore a cap over their undressed hair. This fashion, Germans inform you, is falling into desuetude; but it falls slowly. Take an elderly German lady by surprise in the morning, and you will still find her in what fashion journals call a negligé, and what plain folk call a wrapper. When it is of shepherd's plaid or snuff-coloured wool it is not an attractive garment, and it is always what the last generation but one, with their blunt tongues, called "slummocking." Most German women are busy in the house all the morning, and when they are not going to market they like to get through their work in this form of dress and make themselves trim for the day later. The advantage claimed for the plan is one of economy. The tidy costume worn later in the day is saved considerable wear and tear. The obvious disadvantage is the encouragement it offers to the sloven. In England whatever you are by nature you must in an ordinary household be down to breakfast at a fixed hour, presentably dressed; at any rate, with your hair done for the day, and, it is to be supposed, with your bath accomplished. Directly you depart from this you open the door to anything in the dressing-gown and slipper way, to lying abed like a sluggard, and to a waste of your own and the servants' time that undermines the whole welfare of a home. At least, this is how the question presents itself to English eyes. Meanwhile the continent continues to drink its coffee attired in dressing-gowns, and to survive quite comfortably. In every trousseau you still see some of these confections, and on the stage the young wife who has to cajole her husband in the coming scene usually appears in a coquettish one. But then it will not be made of shepherd's plaid or snuff-coloured wool.

The dinner hour varies so much in Germany that it is impossible to fix an hour for it. In country places you will find everyone sitting down at midday, in towns one o'clock is usual, in Hamburg five is the popular hour, in Berlin you may be invited anywhen. But unless people dine at twelve they have some kind of second breakfast, and this meal may correspond with the French déjeûner, or it may be even more informal than the morning coffee. It consists in many places of a roll or slice of bread with or without a shaving of meat or sausage. Servants have it, children take it to school, charitable institutions supply the bread without the meat to their inmates. In South Germany all the men and many women drink beer or wine with this light meal, but in Prussia most people are content with a belegtes Butterbrot, a roll cut in two, buttered, and spread with meat or sausage or smoked fish. This carries people on till one or two o'clock, when the chief meal of the day is served.

All over Germany dinner begins with soup, and in most parts the soup is followed by the Ochsenfleisch that made it. At least Ochsenfleisch should make it by rights.

"I know what this is," said an old German friend, prodding at a tough slice from a dish we all found uneatable. "This is not Ochsenfleisch at all. This is cow."

Good gravy or horseradish sauce is served with it, whether it is ox or cow, and for a time you take a slice day after day without complaining. It is the persistence of the thing that wears you out in the end. You must be born to Ochsenfleisch to eat it year in and year out as if it was bread or potatoes. It does not appear as regularly in North as in South Germany; and in Hamburg you may once in a way have dinner without soup. People who know Germany find this almost beyond belief, but Hamburg has many little ways of its own, and is a city with a strong individual character. It is extremely proud of its cooking and its food, and it has every right to be. I once travelled with two Germans who in a heated way discussed the comparative merits of various German cities. They could not agree, and they could not let the matter drop. At last one man got the best of it. "I tell you that Hamburg is the finest city in Germany," he said. "In a Hamburg hotel I once ate the best steak I ever ate in my life." The other man had nothing to say to that. Hamburg has a splendid fish supply, and Holstein brings her quantities of fruit and of farm produce. Your second breakfast there is like a French déjeûner, a meal served and prepared according to your means, but a regular meal and not a mere snack. You drink coffee after it, and so sustain life till five o'clock, when you dine. Then you drink coffee again, and as your dinner has probably been an uncommonly good one you only need a light supper at nine o'clock, when a tray will arrive with little sandwiches and slender bottles of beer. In North Germany, where wine is scarce and dear, it is hardly ever seen in many households, so that a young Englishman wanting to describe his German friends, divided them for convenience into wine people and beer people. The wine people were plutocrats, and had red or white Rhine wine every day for dinner. I probably need not tell my well-informed country people that Germans never speak of hock.

In households where the chief meal of the day is at one or two o'clock there is afternoon tea or coffee. It used invariably to be coffee, good hot coffee and fresh rusks and dainty little Hörnchen and Radankuchen, an excellent light cake baked in a twisty tin. German cakes want a whole chapter to themselves to do them justice, and they should have it if it were not for a dialogue that frequently takes place in a family well known to me. The wife is of German origin, but as she has an English husband and English servants she keeps house in the English way. Therefore mutton cold or hashed is her frequent portion.

"How I hate hashed mutton," she sometimes says.

"Why do you have it, then?" says the husband, who has a genius for asking apparently innocent but really provoking questions.

"What else can I have?" says the wife.

"Eel in jelly," says the husband. He once tasted it in Berlin, and it must have given him a mental shock; for whenever his wife approaches him with a domestic difficulty, asks him, for instance, what he would like for breakfast, he suggests this inaccessible and uninviting dish.

"There is never anything to eat in England except mutton and apple-tart," says the wife. "Your plain cooks can't cook anything else. They can't cook those really. Think of a German apple-tart—"

"Why should I? I don't want one."

"That's the hopeless part of it. You are all content with what Daudet called your abominable cuisine. I thank him for the phrase. It is descriptive."

"Oh, well," says the husband, "we're not a greedy nation."

So if this is the English point of view the less said about cakes the better. And anyhow, it is in this country that afternoon tea is an engaging meal. Berlin offers you tea nowadays, but it is never good, and instead of freshly cut bread and butter they have horrid little chokey biscuits flavoured with vanilla. Old-fashioned Germans used to put a bit of vanilla in the tea-pot when they had guests they delighted to honour, but they all know better than that nowadays. The milk is often boiled milk, but even that scarcely explains why tea is so seldom fit to drink in Germany. Supper is a light meal in most houses. The English mutton bone is never seen, for when cold meat is eaten it is cut in neat slices and put on a long narrow dish. But there is nearly always something from the nearest Delikatessen shop with it,—slices of ham or tongue, or slices of one or two of the various sausages of Germany: Blutwurst, Mettwurst, Schinkenwurst, Leberwurst, all different and all good. When a hot dish is served it is usually a light one, often an omelette or some other preparation of eggs; and in spring eggs and bits of asparagus are a great deal cooked together in various ways: not asparagus heads so often as short lengths of the stalk sold separately in the market, and quite tender when cooked. There is nearly always a salad with the cold meat or a dish of the salted cucumbers that make such a good pickle. The big loaves of light brown rye bread appear at this meal instead of the little white rolls eaten at breakfast. Beer or wine is drunk, and very often of late years tea as well. Sweets are not usually served at supper, unless guests are present. They are eaten at the midday dinner, and each part of Germany has its own favourite dishes.

Soups are nearly always good in Germany, and some of the best are not known in England. The dried green corn so much used for soup in South Germany can, however, be bought in London from the German provision merchants, so at the end of this greedy chapter I will give a recipe for making it. Nudelsuppe of strong chicken stock and home-made Nudeln used to be what the Berliner called his roast goose—"eine jute Jabe Jottes," but the degenerate Germans of to-day buy tasteless manufactured Nudeln instead of rolling out their own. Nudeln are the German form of macaroni, but when properly made they are better than any macaroni can be. If you have been brought up in an old-fashioned German ménage, and, as a child likes to do, peeped into the kitchen sometimes, you will remember seeing large sheets of something as thin and yellow as chamois leather hung on a clothes horse to dry. Then you knew that there would be Nudeln for your dinner, either narrow ones in soup, or wider ones boiled in water and sprinkled with others cut as fine as vermicelli and fried brown in butter. The paste is troublesome to make. It begins with a deceptive simplicity. Take four whole eggs and four tablespoonsful of milk if you want enough for ten people, says the cookery book, and make a light dough of it with a knife in a basin. Anyone can do that, you find. But then you must put your dough on the pastry board, and work in more flour as you knead it with your hands. "The longer you knead and the stiffer the dough is the better your Nudeln will be," continues the cookery book. But the next operation is to cut the dough into four, and roll out each portion as thin as paper, and no one who has not seen German Nudeln before they are cooked can believe that this is actually done. It is no use to give the rest of the recipe for drying them, rolling each piece loosely and cutting it into strips and boiling them with salt in water. If you told your English cook to make you Nudeln she would despise it for a foreign mess, and bring you something as thick as a pancake. If you want them you had better get them in a box from a provision merchant, as the Hausfrau herself does nowadays.

English people often say that there is no good meat to be had in Germany. I would say that there is no good mutton, and a great deal of poor coarse beef. But the Filetbraten that you can get from the best butchers is excellent. It is a long roll of undercut of beef, so long that it seems to be sold by the yard. If you cook it in the English way, says my German cookery book, you rub it well with salt and pepper and baste it with butter; while the gravy is made with flour, mushrooms, cream, and extract of beef. I should like to see the expression of the English plain cook if she was told to baste her beef with butter and make her gravy for it with mushrooms. I once came back from Germany with a new idea for gravy, and tried it on a cook who seemed to think that gravy was made by upsetting a kettle over a joint and then adding lumps of flour.

"My sister's cook always puts an onion in the tin with a joint," I said tentatively, for I was not very hopeful. I know that there is always some insuperable objection to anything not consecrated by tradition.

"It gives the gravy a flavour," I went on,—"not a strong flavour"—

I stopped. I waited for the objection.

"We couldn't do that HERE," said the cook.

"Why not?—We have tins and we have onions."

"It would spoil the dripping. What could I do with dripping as tasted of onion?"

I had never thought of that, and so I had never asked my sister what was done in her household with dripping as tasted with onion.

"I should think," I said slowly, "that it could be used to baste the next joint."

"Then that would taste of onion," said the cook, "and I should have no dripping when I wanted it."

I have always thought dripping a dull subject, and I know that it is an explosive one, so I said nothing more. I went on instead to describe a piece of beef stewed in its own juices on a bed of chopped vegetables. We actually tried that, and when it was cold it tasted agreeably of the vegetables, and was as tender to carve as butter.

"How did you like the German beef?" I said to an Englishwoman who had been with me a great many years.

"I didn't like it at all, M'm."

"But it was so tender."

"Yes, M'm, it made me creep," she said.

So this chapter is really of no use from one point of view. You may hear what queer things benighted people like the Germans eat and drink, but you will never persuade your British household to condescend to them.

Except in the coast towns, sea fish is scarce and dear all over Germany. Salt fish and fresh-water fish are what you get, and except the trout it is not interesting. A great deal of carp is eaten, cooked with vinegar to turn it blue, and served with horseradish or wine sauce. At a dinner party I have seen tench given, and they were extremely pretty, like fish in old Italian pictures, but they were not worth eating. At least a pound of fresh butter was put on each dish of them, handed round, and you took some of it as well as a sort of mustard sauce. Perch, pike, and eel are all eaten where nothing better is to be had; but the standing fish-course of inland Germany is trout. Most hotels have a tank where they keep it alive till it is wanted, and in the Black Forest the peasants catch it and peddle it, walking miles to make good sales. We went into the garden of our hotel in the Wiesenthal one day, and found the basin of the fountain there crammed with live trout. It was so full that you could take one in your hand for a moment and look at its speckles, as lovely as the speckles on a thrush's breast. The man who was carrying them on his back in a wooden water-tight satchel was having a drink, and he had put out his fish for a drink while he rested. I have never been within reach of fresh herrings in Germany, and have never seen them there, but smoked ones are eaten everywhere, often with salad, or together with smoked ham and potatoes in their jackets. Neither the ham nor the herrings are ever cooked when they have been smoked, and the ham is very tough in consequence. The breast of a goose, too, is eaten smoked but not cooked, and is considered a great delicacy. Poultry varies in quality a good deal. Everyone knows the little chickens that come round at hotel dinners, all legs and bones. A German family will sit down contentedly to an old hen that the most economical of us would only use for soup, and they will serve it roasted though it is as tough as leather. I think it must be said that you get better fowls both in France and England than in Germany. The German national bird is the goose. In England, if you buy a goose your cook roasts it and sends it up, and that is all you ever know of it. In Germany a goose is a carnival, rather as a newly killed pig is in an English farmhouse. You begin with a stew of the giblets, you perhaps continue with the bird itself roasted and stuffed with chestnuts, you may have a dozen different dishes made of its remains, while the fat that has basted it you hoard and use sparingly for weeks. For instance, you cook a cabbage with a little of it instead of with water. In South Germany, goose livers are prepared with it, and are just as much liked as pâté de foie gras.

Hares are eaten and most carefully prepared in Germany. They are skinned in a way that an English poulterer has been known to learn from his German customers and pronounce very troublesome, and the back is usually served separately, larded and basted with sour cream. Vegetables are cooked less simply than in England, and you will find the two countries disagree heatedly about them. The Englishman does not want his peas messed up with grease and vinegar, and though he will be too polite to say so, he will silently agree with his plain cook who says that peas served in the pod is a dish only fit for pigs and what she has never been accustomed to; while the German will get quite dejected over the everlasting plain boiled cabbage and potatoes he is offered week after week in his English boarding-house. At home, he says, he is used to mountains of fat asparagus all the spring, and he thinks slightly of your skinny green ones or of the wooden stuff you import and pay less for because it is "foreign." He likes potatoes cooked in twenty various ways, and when mashed he is of opinion that they should not be black or lumpy. He wants a dozen different vegetables dished up round one joint of beef, and in summer salads of various kinds on various occasions, and not your savage mixed salad with a horrible sauce poured out of a bottle; furniture polish he believes it to be from its colour. In the autumn he expects chestnuts cooked with gravy and vegetables, or made into light puddings; and apple sauce, he assures you, should be a creamy white, and as smooth as a well made purée. If he is of the South he would like a Mehlspeise after his meat, Spetzerle if he comes from Würtemberg; one of a hundred different dishes if he is a Bavarian. He will not allow that your national milk puddings take their place. If he is a North German his Leibgericht may be Rote Grütze. This is eaten enormously all over Denmark and North Germany in summer, and is nothing in the world but a ground rice or sago mould made with fruit juice instead of milk. The old-fashioned way was to squeeze raspberries and currants through a cloth till you had a quart of pure juice, which you then boiled with 4 oz. ground rice and sugar to taste, stirring carefully lest it should burn, and stirring patiently so that the rice should be well cooked. But where fruit is dear you can make excellent Rote Grütze by stewing the fruit first with a little water and straining off the juice. A quart of currants and a pound of raspberries should give you a good quart mould. The Danes make it of rhubarb and plum juice in the same way; and my German cookery book gives a recipe for Grüne Grütze made with green gooseberries, but I tried that once and found it quite inferior to our own gooseberry fool.

Food is so much a matter of taste and custom, that it seems absurd to make dogmatic remarks about the superiority of one kitchen to another. If you like cold mutton, boiled potatoes and rice pudding, most days in the week, you like them and there is an end of it. The one thing you can say for certain is that to cook for you requires neither skill nor pains, while to cook for a German family, even if it lives plainly and poorly, takes time and trouble. In trying to compare the methods of two nations, one must naturally be careful to compare households on the same social plane; and an English household that lives on cold mutton and rice pudding is certainly a plain and probably a poor one. In well-to-do English households you get the best food in the world as far as raw material goes, but it must be said that you often get poor cooking. It passes quite unnoticed too. No one seems to mind thick soups that are too thick and gravies that are tasteless, and melted butter like Stickphast paste, and savouries quite acrid with over much vinegar and anchovy. I once saw a whole company of English people contentedly eat a dish of hot scones that had gone wrong. They tasted of strong yellow soap. But I once saw a company of Germans eat bad fish and apparently like it. They were sea soles handed round in a Swiss hotel, and they should by rights have been buried the day before. I thought of Ottilie von Schlippenschlopp and the oysters. But the soles were carefully cooked, and served with an elaborate sauce.

Green Corn Soup.—For six people take 7 oz. of green corn: wash it well in hot water, and cook it until it is quite soft in stock or salt water. Put it through a sieve, add boiling stock, and serve with fried slice of bread or with small semolina dumplings.

Green Corn Soup.—Another way. For six people take 5½ oz. of green corn, wash it well in hot water, and let it simmer for a few minutes with a little stock and 1½ oz. butter. Then add strong stock, and let it simmer slowly with the lid on till the corn is soft. Then stir a tablespoonful of fine flour with half a cupful of milk, and add it to the soup, stirring all the time. This must then cook an hour longer. When ready to serve, mix the yolks of two eggs with a little sour cream, and add the soup carefully so that it is not curdled. The soup is not strained through a sieve when it is served without dumplings.

The little dumplings are first cooked as a panada of semolina, butter, milk and egg, and then dropped into the soup and cooked in it for ten minutes.

CHAPTER XVIToC

SHOPS AND MARKETS

Berlin people compare their Wertheim with the Bon Marché at Paris, or with Whiteley's in London; only always adding that Wertheim is superior to any emporium in France or England. So it really is in one way. A great artist designed it, and the outside of the building is plain and stately, a most refreshing contrast to most Berlin architecture. On the ground floor there is a high spacious hall that is splendid when it is lighted up at night, and a staircase leads up and down from here to the various departments, all decorated soberly and pleasantly, mostly with wood. You can buy almost anything you want at Wertheim's, from the furniture of your house to a threepenny pair of cotton mittens with a thumb and no fingers. You can see tons of the most hideous rubbish there, and you can find a corner reserved for original work, done by two or three artists whose names are well known in Germany. For instance, Wertheim exhibits the very clever curious "applications" done by Frau Katy Münchhausen, groups of monkeys, storks, cocks and hens, and other animals, drawn with immense spirit and life on cloth, cut out and then machined on a background of another colour. The machining has a bad sound, I admit, but for all that the "applications" are enchanting. Wertheim, too, shows some good furniture; he sells theatre tickets, books, fruit, groceries, Liberty cushions, embroideries, soaps, perfumes, toys, ironmongery, china, glass, as well as everything that can be called drapery. He has a tea-room as well as a large general refreshment-room, where you can get ices, iced coffee, beer, all kinds of sandwiches, and the various Torten Germans make so very much better than other people. In this room no money is wasted on waiters or waitresses, and no one expects to be tipped. You fetch what you want from a long bar running along two sides of the room, and divided into short stretches, each selling its own stuff; you pay at the counter, and you carry your ice or your cake to any little marble-topped table you choose. The advantage of the plan is that you do not have to wait till you catch the eye of a waitress determined not to look your way: the disadvantage is that you have to perform the difficult feat of carrying a full cup or a full glass through a crowd. Whatever you buy at the counter is sure to be good, but if all you could get was a Mugby Junction bun you would have to eat it after the exhausting process of buying a yard of ribbon or a few picture postcards at Wertheim's.

To begin with, there are no chairs. You cannot sit down. On a hot summer morning, when you have perhaps been to the market already, you go to the Leipziger Strasse for theatre tickets, a pair of gloves, and two or three small odds and ends. On the ground floor you see gloves, innumerable boxes of them besieged by a pushing, determined crowd of women. The shop ladies in any coloured blouses look hot and weary, but try to serve six customers at once. When you have chosen what you want, and know exactly how sharp the elbows to left and right of you are, you see your lady walk off with your most pushful neighbour and the pair of three-penny gloves she has after much argument agreed to buy; for at Wertheim's you cannot depart with so much as a halfpenny postcard till it has passed through three pairs of hands besides your own. First the shop lady must deposit it with a bill at the cashier's desk. Then, when the cashier can attend to you, you pay for it. Then you may wait any time until the third person concerned will do it up in paper and string. This last proceeding is often so interminably delayed that if you were not in Germany you would snatch at what you have paid for and make off. But the Polizei alone knows what would happen if you ran your head against the established pedantry of things in the city of the Spree. You would probably find yourself in prison for Beamtenbeleidigung or lèse majesté. "The Emperor is a fool," said some disloyal subject in a public place. "To prison with him," screamed every horror-struck official. "Off with his head!" "But I meant the Emperor of China," protested the sinner. "That's impossible," said the officials in chorus. "Anyone who says the Emperor is a fool means our Emperor." And an official spirit seems to encroach on the business one, and drill its very customers while it anxiously serves them. For instance, the arrangements for sending what you buy are most tiresome and difficult to understand at Wertheim's. His carts patrol the streets, and your German friends assure you that he sends anything. You find that if you shop with a country card the things entered on it will arrive; but if you buy a bulky toy or some heavy books and pay for them in their departments, you meet with fuss and refusal when you ask as a matter of course to have them sent. It can be done if your goods have cost enough, but not if you have only spent two or three shillings. It is the fashion in England just now for every man who writes about Germans to say that they are immensely ahead of us in business matters. I cannot judge of them in their factories and warehouses, but I am sure they are behind us in their shops. A woman cannot live three hundred miles from Berlin and get everything she wants from Wertheim delivered by return and carriage free. Nor will he supply her with an immense illustrated catalogue and a book of order forms addressed to his firm, so that the trouble of shopping from a distance is reduced to a minimum. In England you can do your London shopping as easily, promptly, and cheaply from a Scotch or a Cornish village as you can from a Surrey suburb.

In most German towns you still find the shops classified on the old lines. You go to one for drapery, and to another for linen, and to another for small wares, and to yet another for ribbons. There are sausage shops and chocolate shops, and in Berlin there are shops for the celebrated Berlin Baumkuchen. There are a great many cellar shops all over Germany, and these are mostly restaurants, laundries, and greengrocers. The drinking scene in Faust when Mephisto made wine flow from the table takes place in Auerbach's Keller, a cellar restaurant still in existence in Leipzig. The lower class of cellar takes the place in Germany of our slums, and the worst of them are regular thieves' kitchens known to the police. There is an admirable description of life in a cellar shop in Klara Viebig's Das Tägliche Brot. The woman who keeps it has a greengrocery business and a registry office for servants, and as such people go is respectable; but I recommend the book to my countrymen who go to Berlin as officials or journalists for ten days, are taken over various highly polished public institutions, and come back to tell us that the Germans are every man jack of them clean, prosperous, well mannered, and healthy. It is true that German municipal government is striving rather splendidly to bring this state of things about, but they have plenty of work before them still. These cellar shops, for instance, are more fit for mushroom growing than for human nurseries, and yet the picture in the novel of the family struggling with darkness and disease there can still be verified in most of the old streets of Germany.

When our English journalists write column after column about the dangerous explosive energy and restlessness of modern Germany, I feel sure that they must be right, and yet I wish they could have come shopping with me a year or two ago in a small Black Forest town. One of us wanted a watch key and the other a piece of tape, and we set off light-heartedly to buy them, for we knew that there was a draper and a watchmaker in the main street. We knew, too, that in South Germany everyone is first dining and then asleep between twelve and two, so we waited till after two and then went to the watchmaker's. There was no shop window, and when, after ringing two or three times, we were let in we found there was no shop. We sat down in a big cool sitting-room, beautifully clean and tidy. The watchmaker's wife appeared in due course, looked at us with friendly interest, asked us where we came from, and how long we meant to stay, wondered if we knew her cousin Johannes Müller, a hairdresser in Islington, discussed the relative merits of emigration to England and America, offered us some cherries from a basketful on the table, and at last admitted unwillingly that her husband was not at home, and that she herself knew not whether he had watch keys. So we set off to buy our tape, and again found a private room, an amiable family, but no one who felt able to sell anything. It seemed an odd way of doing business we said to our landlord, but he saw nothing odd in it. Most people were busy with their hay, he explained. Towards the end of a week we caught our watchmaker, and obtained a key, but he would not let us pay for it. He said it was one of an old collection, and of no use to him. The etiquette of shopping in Germany seems to us rather topsy-turvy at first. In a small shop the proprietor is as likely as not to conduct business with a cigar in his mouth, even if you are a lady, but if you are a man he will think you a boor if you omit to remove your hat as you cross his threshold. Whether you are a man, woman, or child, you will wish him good-morning or good-evening before you ask for what you want, and he will answer you before he asks what your commands are. If you are a woman, about as ignorant as most women, and with a humble mind, you will probably have no fixed opinion about the question of free or fair trade. You may even, if you are very humble, recognise that it is not quite the simple question Dick, Tom, and Harry think it is. But you will know for certain that when you want ribbons for a hat you had better buy them in Kensington and not in Frankfurt, and that though there are plenty of cheap materials in Germany, the same quality would be cheaper still in London. Everything to do with women's clothing is dearer there than here. So is stationery, so are groceries, so are the better class of fancy goods. But the Germans, say the Fair Traders, are a prosperous nation, and it is because their manufactures are protected. This may be so. I can only look at various quite small unimportant trifles, such as ribbons, for instance, or pewter vases or blotting-paper or peppermint drops. I know that a German woman either wears a common ribbon on her hat, or pays twice as much as I do for a good one; she is content with one pewter vase where your English suburban drawing-room packs twenty into one corner, with twenty silver frames and vases near them. A few years ago the one thing German blotting-paper refused to do was to absorb ink, and it was so dear that in all small country inns and in old-fashioned offices you were expected to use sand instead. The sand was kept beside the ink in a vessel that had a top like a pepper pot; and it was more amusing than blotting-paper, but not as efficacious. As for the peppermint drops, they used to be a regular export from families living in London to families living in Germany. They were probably needed after having goose and chestnuts for dinner, and ours were twice as large as the German ones and about six times as strong, so no doubt they were like our blotting-paper, and performed what they engaged to perform more thoroughly.

But shops of any kind are dull compared with an open market held in one of the many ancient market places of Germany. Photographs of Freiburg give a bird's-eye view of the town with the minster rising from the midst of its red roofs; but there is just a peep at the market which is being held at the foot of the minster. On the side hidden by the towering cathedral there are some of the oldest houses in Freiburg. It is a large crowded market on certain days of the week, and full of colour and movement. The peasants who come to it from the neighbouring valleys wear bright-coloured skirts and headgear, and in that part of Germany fruit is plentiful, so that all through the summer and autumn the market carts and barrows are heaped with cherries, wild strawberries, plums, apricots, peaches, and grapes in their season. The market place itself, and even the steps of the minster and of the surrounding houses, are crowded with the peasants and their produce, and with the leisurely servants and housewives bargaining for the day's supplies. From a view of the market place at Cottbus in Brandenburg you may get a better idea of the people at a German market; the servants with their umbrellas, their big baskets, their baggy blouses and no hats, the middle class housewife with a hat or a bonnet, and a huge basket on her arm, a nursemaid in peasant costume stooping over her perambulator, other peasants in costume at the stalls, and two of the farm carts that are in some districts yoked oftener with oxen than with horses. There is naturally great variety in the size and character of markets, according to the needs they supply. In Hamburg the old names show you that there were separate markets for separate trades, so that you went to the Schweinemarkt when you wanted pigs, and to some other part of the city when you wanted flowers and fruit. In Berlin there are twelve covered markets besides the open ones, and they are all as admirably clean, tidy, and unpoetical as everything else is in that spick and span, swept and garnished Philistine city. The green gooseberries there are marked "unripe fruit" by order of the police, so that no one should think they were ripe and eat them uncooked; and you can buy rhubarb nowadays, a vegetable the modern Berliner eats without shuddering. But in a Berlin market you buy what you need as quickly as you can and come away. There is nothing to tempt you, nothing picturesque, nothing German, if German brings to your mind a queer mixture of poetry and music, gabled, tumbledown houses, storks' nests, toys, marvellous cakes and sweets and the kindliest of people. If you are so modern that German means nothing to you but drill and hustle, the roar of factories and the pride of monster municipal ventures, then you may see the markets of Berlin and rest content with them. They will show you what you already know of this day's Germany. But my household treasures gathered here and there in German markets did not have one added to their number in Berlin.

"That!" said a German friend when I showed her a yellow pitcher dabbed with colour, and having a spout, a handle, and a lid,—"that! I would not have it in my kitchen."

It certainly only cost the third of a penny, but it lived with honour in my drawing-room till it shared the fate of all clay, and came in two in somebody's hands. The blue and grey bellied bottle, one of those in which the Thuringian peasants carry beer to the field, cost three halfpence, but the butter-dish with a lid of the same ware only cost a halfpenny. There is always an immense heap of this rough grey and blue pottery in a South German market, and it is much prettier than the more ornate Coblenz ware we import and sell at high prices. So is the deep red earthenware glazed inside and rough outside and splashed with colours. You find plenty of it at the Leipziger Messe, that historical fair that used to be as important to Western Europe as Nijni Novgorod is to Russia and the East. To judge from modern German trade circulars, it is still of considerable importance, and the buildings in which merchants of all countries display their wares have recently been renovated and enlarged. Out of doors the various market-places are covered with little stalls selling cheap clothing, cheap toys, jewellery, sweets, and gingerbread; all the heterogeneous rubbish you have seen a thousand times at German fairs, and never tire of seeing if a fair delights you.

But better than the Leipziger Messe, better even than a summer market at Freiburg or at Heidelburg, is a Christmas market in any one of the old German cities in the hill country, when the streets and the open places are covered with crisp clean snow, and the mountains are white with it, and the moon shines on the ancient houses, and the tinkle of sledge bells reaches you when you escape from the din of the market, and look down at the bustle of it from some silent place, a high window perhaps, or the high empty steps leading into the cathedral. The air is cold and still, and heavy with the scent of the Christmas trees brought from the forest for the pleasure of the children. Day by day you see the rows of them growing thinner, and if you go to the market on Christmas Eve itself you will find only a few trees left out in the cold. The market is empty, the peasants are harnessing their horses or their oxen, the women are packing up their unsold goods. In every home in the city one of the trees that scented the open air a week ago is shining now with lights and little gilded nuts and apples, and is helping to make that Christmas smell, all compact of the pine forest, wax candles, cakes, and painted toys, you must associate so long as you live with Christmas in Germany.