zwischen Himmel und Erde

I took a day trip to Bremen yesterday, a Saturday and one of the few remaining free days before this year’s summer program ends and my students go home. CJ suggested Bremen as a destination, in the north, beautiful and historic, and full of Fachwerkhäuser, half-timbered houses from the Middle Ages. I travel ultra-light, with just my small backpack with a change of clothes, my toothbrush, and raingear.

The trip from Düsseldorf to Bremen takes about three hours by IC and runs you north through Duisberg, Essen, Bochum, Dortmund, Münster, and Osnabrück. I find an empty 2nd class compartment, albeit one for smokers, and settle in by the window. The weather is, as the Germans say, “wechselnd”, changing or varying but mostly overcast with a bit of rain and coolish. Rolling through the Ruhrgebeit I am reminded of how ugly it seems, industrialized, polluted, grey, and poor, although this perception is amplified by the weather and by the area in the immediate environs of the railroad tracks. I also note the massive amounts of graffiti on the railroad track retaining walls and buildings fronting the tracks. Some is quite artistic but much is just hideous. I don’t remember as much of this in Germany in 1991 and 1992, but, of course, I had a car then and traveled less by train. The graffiti-levels here now seem comparable to those I remember from the 1970s-1980s in New York City, until the city government, and particularly Giuliani, cracked down on graffiti artists, street performers, hookers and bums, rounding them up and sending them God knows where, but making the streets of midtown safe again for the good burghers of New York.

I get to Bremen about noon, grab a snack in the market square and proceed to sightsee, but what I really want to describe here is dinner. In all my time living in Germany I have eaten many unusual things. I have always been a fairly adventurous eater and can fairly be described as someone who loves food and appreciates it for more than just its ability to sustain life. And I love wurst, all different kinds and Germany is the land of wurst, it is where wurstloving people go when they die, if they’ve been good!

But there is one wurst that I have never had the nerve to order and then to actually eat, and that wurst is Blutwurst. Just the name, Blutwurst, blood sausage, is enough to make you sick. The Germans are not alone in enjoying this, well let’s say, food item. The Brits have a version as well. But, of course, the English are famous for having the worst cuisine in the known Universe. Its like the famous joke that heaven is where the lovers are French, the engineers German, the police British, the cooks Italian and the administrators, Swiss; and hell is where the cooks are British, the engineers Italian, the police German, the lovers Swiss, and the administrators French.

As I spend more time here, especially in the company of my students, I’m feeling increasingly compelled to submerge myself in a study of German Kultur, both serious and popular. To know and understand the Kultur, is, in many ways, to know and understand the people. So I sit myself down in the restaurant on the Böttcherstrasse in Bremen and order the national dish of the Rhineland (das Rheinlandisches Nationalgericht), “Himmel und Erde” (“Heaven and Earth”). I had learned of this item years ago but never dared to try it until now.

Himmel und Erde (Erde by the way was spelled very strangely in the menu, I believe it was the Plattdeutsch, Ääd) is grilled blood sausage on a bed of mashed potatoes, covered with a layer of fried onion rings (very lightly breaded it seemed to me, not like our robustly coated American onion rings) with apple compote on the side. Mine also had a few sautéed apple rings in the mix and a piece of tomato and sprig of flat-leaf parsley as garnish. I had already downed a Kölsch by the time this masterpiece arrived in front of me (a new brand for me, Sion Kölsch) and had a fresh one brought as I prepared to tuck into the Nationalgericht of the Rhineland.

Blood sausage, it turns out, has a softish consistency, so that when you cut into it, it kind of mushes out into a meat pudding (my Langenscheidts Wörterbuch by the way defines Blutwurst as “black pudding”). It is dark and the color of, you guessed it, blood, and not bright arterial blood either, but deoxygenated, central venous looking blood. I was reminded of one of our Aggie expressions, “My blood runs maroon.” And so did these Blutwurst. Along with the Aggie maroon carrot, Blutwurst could, in theory, be quite popular back home in College Station, and in fact they are pretty tasty. They do taste good and not at all what you might expect form their name, ingredients, and appearance. The onions were very nice and the mashed potatoes excellent. I found that I enjoyed the Wurst best with some of the apple compote and it got harder to continue to eat the sausages when the apple sauce ran out. As is also fairly common here and back home in Texas, they gave me enough Himmel und Erde for the hosts of Heaven and Earth. I was obliged to stop about two-thirds of the way through and had to explain to the waitress that dinner was “sehr lecker” but “genug für zwei” prompting her to ask me if I wanted what was left wrapped up “zum mitnehmen”. I politely declined.

I concluded that it is the consistency of Blutwurst, not the taste that presents an obstacle for me and that while this meal was worthwhile and a noble experiment, I believe that one plate of Himmel und Erde will suffice for one lifetime. Next on the list of exotic north German dishes that I need to check out, stomach willing, grün Aalsupppe, green eel soup.