Germans Like Fake Meat
"He goes on about the ersatz food in Germany. He describes 'meat made of pressed rice boiled in mutton fat (and finished off with a fake bone made of wood); tobacco made of dried roots and dried potato peel; shoes soled with wood.' There are, he notes, '837 registered meat substitutes permissible in the production of sausages, 511 registered coffee substitutes.'”
—From Dwight Garner's review of Peter Englund's The Beauty and the Sorrow comes an answer as to why the McRib sandwich stays on the menu all year 'round at McDonald's restaurants in Germany: Germans got used to fake bone shapes in their food during the first world war. The book sounds absolutely terrific, by the way, and its title has gotten me thinking about something that I was thinking about recently after reading a book by Lorrie Moore.
Which is better, The Smithereens' "Beauty & Sadness"…
or the Replacements' "Sadly Beautiful"?
Listening to them here now, I think the Replacements. And it's not really a contest. I loved the Smithereens in high school. (And they're still going strong! They're playing York, Pennsylvania on Sunday.) They're from New Jersey, so I suppose I might be biased. But their Especially For You album, from 1986, is just front-to-back excellent. "Beauty & Sadness" is maybe too much of a copy Beatles bite, though. And as much guff as all the songs on All Shook Down get, "Sadly Beautiful" is one the best ballads Westerberg ever wrote.
Dave Bry : The Awl :: Adam Gopnik : The New Yorker ?
You know, I can read this!
Here is a true story about Germans and meat: a friend of mine who is a vegetarian and who speaks passable German went on a tour of a brewery in Berlin and at the end there was a little table of bread and various spreads to nosh on while sampling the beer. There was a bowl of this whitish stuff with tiny pink flecks in that he didn't know what it was, so he asked a brewery worker (in German) "Hey, I don't eat meat, can you tell me what this is?" and the guy said "Oh, it's speck! It's ok, you can eat it." And my friend said, "Hmm, I don't know what speck is, can you tell me?" and the guy said "It's pig fat! But it's not *meat*."
@jfruh Some part of my brain that craves all forms of fat must be missing. I can't even drink whole milk. And eating pig fat sounds like a punishment from a german folk tale.
@deepomega Whereas my reaction when he told me this story was "Can you score me some?"
@jfruh Speck is the butter of Bacons, and it is a lovely thing. And, yeah, Europeans tend not to classify all animal products as "meat." Fish is also not meat, particularly in Catholic countries. You pretty much need to ask if something is vegetarian or not.
@jfruh I once had a German phrasebook that contained, "What part of the animal is this from? Please point to it on your own body."
@oudemia Considering the well-known German tendency towards cannibalism, that is the greatest thing I have heard all day.
@oudemia Oh God I can just imagine both sides of that conversation, starring a terrified Tourist and a bewlidered German butcher, involving, like, duck meat or something.
Also, I live in Germany, and I have to say that they have both phenomenally amazing junk food (the other day I ate a soft pretzel stick with a hot dog in it, which had been covered in cheese), and are scarily obsessed with food purity.
One of my favorite little passages from Marx's Capital:
"Englishmen, always well up in the Bible, knew well enough that man, unless by elective grace a capitalist, or landlord, or sinecurist, is commanded to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, but they did not know that he had to eat daily in his bread a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead black-beetles, and putrid German yeast, without counting alum, sand, and other agreeable mineral ingredients."
Yum!