Food and Footage

There’s a certain amount of anxiety I have about drinking wine with people who drink wine professionally. It’s easy for them to say that what you like is what is good and no value judgments apply but there’s always the odd chance that you’ll fawn all over some bottle, waxing on about the hint of Meyer lemon and the touch of geranium only to find out that you’ve just had a glass from the cooking wine. It hasn’t happened to me yet, although I’m sure what passes for cooking wine in some circles is tantamount to a special occasion bottle for me and my boyfriend.

Last night, at a Christmas dinner given by some wine friends of ours, everything I tasted I liked. There was a well chosen Sekt to start things off served along side an appetizer of grated radish with soy-sauce and topped with big Salmon roe eggs. We moved from there to a very peachy 1997 Riesling accompanied by a simple plate of sliced smoked salmon and a piece of real New York bialy—the elegant cousin of the bagel. I tried to make conversation about German wine labeling, hypothetically mentioning that it was a theoretical possibility that a coarse American wine drinker would be tempted to view the German wines as less sophisticated than say, French wines, because the labeling looks as though there are only four categories of wine in Germany—dry, half dry, sweet and very sweet. This line of conversation did not go over well and hypothetically made me look like I was rhetorically out of my league. Luckily, I was able to calm myself with a big gulp of decanted red wine from an enormous face swallowing glass.

About this red wine—it tasted like a composite of every bottle I’d ever had with my Dad in California. It was the first time a wine conjured up a person for me rather than merely a set of flavors. Not that there weren’t amazing notes of bitter chocolate and a bouquet I like to refer to as “fancy French whore” a.k.a rose perfume with underlying musky body odor notes. When a California Cabernet is especially mineral in its qualities, when it has that pond scum decomposition to it, I like to refer to those bottles as “dead French whores.” You get the point. But this bottle was like the consummate California Cabernet and I felt brave enough to say so. I felt truly vindicated by this assessment when I found out that I was drinking a Harlan—easily the most sought after Napa Valley wine in the world, with a price tag to match. If you get to taste a Harlan once, consider yourself lucky. It’s not that its character is so singular compared to the Rubicon wines or even the smaller boutique Napa producers. It’s more a matter of composition. It’s absolutely perfect in its structure. It makes you think of very sound architecture or a man at the height of his physical power charging up a mountain. It’s “strong like bull” as my Dad has often said about powerful red’s we’ve drunk in the past.

When I called him after dinner to tell him about my first Harlan experience, his tone was one of pride, much like the few times I was able to call him from college to say that I had a straight A’s report card. He recalled his first Harlan at the Bris (Jewish weenie snipping ritual) of a friend’s son. The friend, a building contractor, would not allow his son to numb himself before the big operation with Manishchevitz, as is customary, and opened a bottle of Harlan for the little fellow, which he and my Dad finished. Ever ready with his arsenal of superlatives, my Dad exclaimed Harlan to be the greatest, smoothest, sexiest red he’s ever had. Secondarily, he mentioned the price was ridiculous, shameful, and pompous. But, we both agreed, when someone else if footing the bill, there’s nothing you’d rather drink.

When I die I want to come back as the two Neuland merguez sausages I had for lunch at Hackescher Markt (that is, if I’m allowed to come back as two things rather than one). My first Neuland wurst was an exceptional eating experience for a variety of reasons:

1. I was totally famished from my walk all the way from Neukoeln and probably would have reached similar levels of gastronomic ecstasy over cold frankfurters.

 2. I hardly ever buy food that I myself don’t have to prepare, due to severe financial restraints. The taste of something not made by me has the same effect on my mood as a steamy affair—exhilaration followed by guilt.

3. The young man who sold them to me was cute and he let me taste the sausage before I bought it. Then he stuffed the wurst with a bite taken out of it into the brotchen. A bit tawdry, don’t you think?

4. The merguez links themselves were perfect. Oily, spicy, crunchy and doused in sweet ketchup.

Later, when I was still hungry I bought a half order of couscous and turkey stew from a French man, and it was absolute heaven to conduct an entire transaction in a language other than English and have both parties understand what was being said.

It seems the market season is upon us here in Berlin, but these markets are not all created equal. For example, the zoo that is the Alexanderplatz Christmas market has about as much quaint charm as a New Jersey turnpike food-court. I know these Christmas markets are supposed to be lovely and traditional and everything but all they seem to be full of are tacky slippers, karaoke enthusiasts and ridiculously expensive gluhwine served in thimbles. The Hackescher Markt has that “less is more” Christmas feel to it, which I appreciate. A little holly, some pine wreaths and an ornament or two is about all the Christmas jollity I can take. Though with full disclosure I must admit that I was also a child who waited in absurdly long lines at various shopping malls in Los Angeles just so I could sit on Santa’s lap and tell him I was Jewish. “So am I,” he once replied, “but you’ve got to make a living somehow.”

Still, one gets caught up in the season’s offerings. I must admit that I’ve never had venison on Christmas day, and I am curious to taste my first Stöllen. As far as warm alcoholic beverages go, I much prefer a Hot Toddy to Glühwein, which tastes exactly like licking a Christmas candle to me. Hot Toddy’s are more like grog and very simple to make:

Put a fair amount of good whiskey, honey, and lemon juice in a mug. Top off with boiling water and stir until honey is dissolved. If that doesn’t fill you with christmas cheer, just keep adding whiskey till you feel it.

It’s The Milk: All my life we had been a skim milk family. LA being the land of skim milk and artificial sweetener, it was practically illegal to keep the fat in your dairy. Non-fat frozen yogurt, artificial butter spray, and wedges of gelatinous fat free Laughing Cow cheese were the stuff of my childhood and adolescence. I remember wondering as we strolled through the dairy section of our posh local supermarket, why they bothered keeping whole milk on the shelves at all.

One of the inherent prejudices I had growing up in a Jewish family was against milk with dinner. We weren’t Kosher, so milk with meat was not a rule we intentionally followed. We ate ample cheeseburgers and meat lasagnas, but somehow a glass of milk, unadulterated, unprocessed into some other dairy product, was a taboo that none of us dared to break. Plenty of children of all social classes and backgrounds grow up having a glass of milk with their dinner but for Jews this practice reeks of bad taste. We would much rather drink Hawaiian Punch or Crystal Light iced tea with our evening meal. Milk carried with it a whiff of Christianity so strong that I could hardly imagine a family sitting down to have their milk and meatloaf for dinner without also imagining the children with cartoon halos above their heads. Milk was Santa Claus and Leave it to Beaver. It was missing children alerts and pre-school construction projects. It wasn’t something we actually drank; and no wonder, because skim milk is disgusting. Besides the chalk white color, skim and whole milk have nothing in common. Watch whole milk pour into a glass—it undulates with the sensuality of a large hipped woman taking an evening stroll. Skim milk has none of this thick creamy confidence. It pours out in a hesitant trickle. A full glass of whole milk looks like an invitation to pure comfort. A full glass of skim milk has about as much flavor and cheer as tepid water.

The intricate balance of cow’s milk is the gastronomic foundation of cheeses as diverse as Morbier and Parmigiano-Reggiano. It accounts for the subtle differences between Irish and Vermont butter. When you taste whole milk, or better yet, raw milk, you can almost taste the sweetness of sugars extruded from grasses, the fresh slightly salty tang of sea air, even—and maybe this is going to far—the soothing creaminess of maternal hormones. And this is coming from a child who was notorious about refusing breast milk. I’m sorry mom I just hadn’t developed my palette yet. I was a late bloomer when it came to lactose but now I relish it with a connoisseurship I can’t quite muster for wine and scotch.

German milk comes in many containers and most of them are nothing like the cardboard cartons or glass bottles I grew up with in LA. The Brodowin frische Bio Vollmilch comes in a standing plastic pouch with an inflated plastic handle and a spout you make by cutting the corner off of it. This design won Brodowin the 2007 Innovations Preis for Handwerk. But packaging aside, the milk is just sensational. 3.7% fat and un-homogenized, it carries with it a soft, clean hay flavor. The color is slightly more golden than the typical pure-white people associate with milk and in fact the slight ochre color is a testament to the company’s refusal to tamper with the character of fresh milk, which is always vibrantly yellow when it comes straight from the cow and has the color processed out of it mostly for purely aesthetic reasons.

I look forward to drinking a glass of this milk the way someone who’s just bought a Porsche looks forward to driving it. Despite my new status as the non-working member of a poor immigrant couple, I refuse to do the sensible thing and buy cheap milk. Cheap beer, I have no problem acquiescing to, and in fact I’ve developed a taste for Sternburg Import that makes me want to high-five the alcoholics who hang around the U-Bahn drinking the stuff all day long. But now that I’ve found the holy grail of life-long milk quests, I can’t simply switch brands because finances do not permit me to indulge in pricier organic dairy products. No, I prefer to drink no milk at all and wait until our fortunes turn. With exactly one coffee cup’s worth of milk left in my prized Brodowin pouch, I measure my days in careful spoonfuls and hope that I land a job before the last drips run out.

Wine is cool, at least I think it is, but wine events are usually not that cool. Some have the tone of hushed reverence, more of a wine church than a place to talk and taste and experience the pleasures of alcohol. Other events are so crowded with people trying to mooch free wine that they seem more like Las Vegas buffets than an actual wine tasting. Standing next to a group of Midwestern women in oversized sweatshirts and baseball caps while they ask for another sample of “the sweet wine,” does not put me in a good mood. I much prefer an underground affair with people that really love wine but also know how to have a good time.

Saturday night, at the Bockbierbrauerei in Kreuzeberg, six floors underground the wine event of my wildest dreams took place. It was organized by Viniculture and the winemakers in attendance were from a loose coalition known as Sudpfalz Connexion. There were 30 different wines to taste, a dj spinning Afro beat and soul music, and crisp flammkuchen to munch on. For 5 euros, you could visit Stuart Pigott in a bunker, marvel at his head to toe patent leather, taste wines from his personal collection and help Berliner Aidshilfe at the same time.

The first wine I tasted was a 2006 Scheu Riesling-Sekt. It was full of popcorn, strawberries and tangy little bubbles. Next, I was on to the 2006 Gies-Duppel Riesling Rotliegendes—one of those whites that made me absolutely starving the second I took a sip. So I waited in line and was delighted by the pairing of dry mineral-rich Riesling with the salty, creamy and smoky ham flavors of the flammkuchen.

The enormous wine cellar was lit by plenty of small iridescent lights, casting a rainbow glow on the wide stone columns that led to vaulted ceilings. People sat on wine crates or stood around industrial strength heaters dispersed throughout the room. On the central wall, a video instillation depicted a very baroque table set with lobster, champagne, and tulips. Every ten minutes or so, a giant chandelier would crash onto this video still-life and the room would crackle with the sound of breaking crystal—a fantastic sound to be sure, and the destruction of such a pompous gastronomic table reinforced the feeling that here underground, we were all part of the new wine revolution.

The night raved on and I began to loose track of Spatburgunders and Grauer Burgunders but the music was right and people started to dance, wine swilling in their glasses, cigarettes hanging off their fingers. We were a motley crew of wine revelers and the dance styles displayed everything from 80’s post-punk pogo style, to salsa moves, to ass shaking funk. At four in the morning the party finally died down and I began to get an inkling of what my head would feel like the next day.

On the walk home, I tried to figure out what it is about cellars that make people less inhibited. Why was it that all the best parties I’ve ever been to were underground? At least for the Viniculture party, I think the dark cellar environment was the perfect foil for dissuading the ultra stuffy wine snobs from joining. Let them drink their wine on sunny Tuscan terraces; I’ll take mine where the sun don’t shine.

The yellow behemoth in my kitchen has three identical cupboards each featuring a no-nonsense tulip design, a “moisture controlled” breadbox, and a disintegrating drawer so waxy, ancient house keys are embedded into the bottom of it, like flies in amber. This is my DDR vintage pantry: my prize possession. I removed it from a bona-fide, communist era garden house in Halle and moved it on up to a deluxe apartment in Berlin. The first time I saw “old yeller”, it practically swallowed the one-room house it was stored in. Swarmed with bug’s nests and cobwebs, the garden house looked as though it had been abandoned mid-meal, as if a radio patched in fuzzy information about German unification and everyone in the garden house slapped on their running shoes and made for the border. The pots and pans still had sauce in them. The chipped white pitcher was caked at the bottom with the dregs of summer wine from long ago.

I felt like an archaeologist discovering a new society, and because I was so uninformed about the history of the German Democratic Republic, I looked to these artifacts to convey some sort of picture of what life was like then. As my friend Ursula (who grew up in West Berlin but often visited family who remained in the East) says of life over the wall, “It was very orange, brown and purple.” And this statement bears out well given my particular cache of objet du DDR. The plates are white with orange rings, the casserole has brown flowers with orange centers, the teapot is brown with purple flowers, and the teacups depict orange flowers with dirt brown roots. I love these dishes and find them cheerfully retro. They do not inspire in me the same upchuck reflex they do in people who actually used them growing up. These people have very modern kitchens with very lavish or very minimal dishes. Their walls are red, beige, or gray. They keep the orange, brown and purple relegated to a sweater stripe or dishtowel.

In my apartment, I keep our weekly collection of fruits, vegetables and bread rolls in two deeply scratched white metal basins absconded from the very same garden house I got all the dishes and the pantry from. I picture happy babies being washed in these basins, stacks of dirty dishes soaking out their stains after a hearty lunch, or a basin full of cabbage leaves shocked after a quick blanching in ice-cold water, later to be turned into meat-filled cabbage rolls. When my mangoes go moldy after two days, I imagine it is because some remnant of the communist Oma who once owned these basins, does not approve of my new world tastes. My cosmic proof for this theory is that the beets and potatoes never go bad.

It’s true that the force of the people that used to own these objects has a particularly strong effect on me. At first, I thought everything I cooked from the pantry retained a funny pantry taste. The couscous, chickpea flour, even the peanut butter had a musty, dirty tang that unmistakably originated from the communist cupboard. I began to buy things to appease the pantry gods—honey, gherkins, Backpulver, dried beans—and these things seemed to taste fine. I don’t know if it was the amount of time the pantry had to air out or if certain cupboards have their own terroir and just refuse to submit to new food trends.

Recently, my mother sent me an industrial sized bag of American Halloween candy. The bouquet of artificial cherry and apple mingled with Hershey’s chocolate to create a smell so redolent of my childhood Halloweens, I was tempted to eat the candy in a polyester princess costume just to complete the sensory regression. I made myself sick on peanut butter cups and Twizzlers that night and then stuck the rest of the bag in the commie-cupboard so I wouldn’t be tempted to sugar gorge again. Now when I open the pantry it smells sickeningly sweet, which is not exactly an improvement over the musty cellar perfume it used to have. But, it is telling that with just a small amount of American capitalist candy, the staunch scent of communism has completely died away.