Sunday 21/11/2004
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Diary and Notes
If anyone is wondering why the dollar has been slipping over 10% since I arrived in Germany this is why: It's me, supporting the Euro.My Nosh-Blog has now been running for one full month. I hope you've been excited by the range and quality of tasty things I've been eating, I certainly have. I shall aim to go tastier and more exotic as the year progresses (except perhaps during pork chop week). A friend has constantly been demanding I do a beans on toast week, involving beans and bread from around the world (he suggested gabanzos with tortillas and lentils with chapattis) but I refused this one, it just sounded to much like my years in the wilderness with my old friend Yasser.
Last day in Frankfurt and all is cold and windy. We've done the tour and seen the sights and now it's time to eat. We headed for the Disney part of town. There is a square in the centre of Frankfurt where the Christmas market was setting up (wasn't open yet, sadly) which looks like something from the 14th century. There's a giant old church painted pink, hotchpotch buildings with pointy bits and little sculptures, it looks exactly as it was four hundred years ago. It was a little dissapointing to learn that it was in fact only 50 years old. It was completely rebuilt from designs gleamed from old photographs after the British bombed it flat during the war. It's now just a giant tourist trap and we've smelt the honey and been lured in.
So what delights can we get in the theme park centre of Frankfurt? I was rooting for a Frankfurter sausage just to say I had eaten one but when I read the menu in the Little Yë Ölde Germänia theme restaurant I knew there was no choice: boiled ox breast and green sauce, yum.
Now I've heard stories from fellow travellers in England about green sauce and was filled with joy to see it, for the first time, on a menu. It's one of those local delights you just can't turn your nose up at. And boiled ox breast, wow, that just sounds like my kind of food. Of course it was served with boiled potatoes and a giant glass of dark wheat bear. What more could one ask of Germany than that? This was advertised as real Frankfurter cooking and I have no doubt this is true. The boiled ox breast was pretty good, very tender, it was however not served with a rich sauce made from the liquor, as I had hoped, but with the strange 'green sauce' I mentioned earlier. I shall describe the 'sauce' in more detail:
I'm not sure if Colonel Sanders is in competition with the people of Frankfurt but he trumps them on the number of flavourings their respective specialities contain. The green sauce was advertised as having 7 different herbs, whereas the old Colonel has 11 (herbs and spices) so he wins. He also wins for two very important reasons;
(1) Of the seven herbs at least 6 were parsley and the other probably flat leaf parsley or just plain parsley, that being the only herb that you could really taste, but perhaps more importantly,
(2) Colonel Sanders does not make a sauce from mashed up boiled eggs and water.
That, as far as I can tell, is green sauce. Some boiled egg, all mushed up with water and maybe a drop of vinegar and mixed with handfulls of chopped parsley. There are recipe sites on the web that give directions on how to make Green Sauce which sound a little better than the one I had. I suppose it wasn't horrible, it just wasn't very good and certainly wasn't what I'd have served with boiled ox breast. I think it went much better with Fran's smoked salmon and baked potato, but even then, if this is the true taste of Frankfurt, I'll stick with the cakes of Göttingen and the bratkartoffeln of the Schwarzen Bären every time. Plus, the waiter wasn't even very nice, not what I'm used to at all.
Cake Blog
Tiramisu: I probably shouldn't have ticked a 'standard' off the list in a city with as many cakes as bankers, but it just looked so good. Tiramisu is one of mankind's finest inventions and this was a fine example of a fine cake.
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