Sophisticated dining – including some wurst

Delicate couscous and feta

If Germany provided plenty of hearty, down-to-earth dining experiences, it also provided two really top-notch fine-dining experiences.

But while the food was excellent, perhaps the most interesting aspect of those meals was that they illustrated that German culinary tradition, far from being something to sniff at, is well worth looking at.

For the first couple of days, adjusting to later starts, larger-than-usual breakfasts and then larger-than-usual lunches meant that we were not in the mood to try either of the hotel’s two restaurants.

Belle Epoque is the flashiest of the two, with Michelin-starred food that, as the name implies, has its roots in what Michel Roux Jr would call “The Classics” – or a certain type of French cuisine and approach – and which is open to non-residents.

There's no escaping Thomas Mann

Downstairs, and also used for breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea, is Holstein, the hotel restaurant for residents. And as that name suggests, it has a rather more local ethos.

During last year’s solo trip to Lübeck, one of the highlights – one of the core things I’d set out to do, indeed – was dinner at Schiffergesellschaft.

The centuries-old seaman’s guild is housed in a 1553 building that still serves as a restaurant.

There, I’d tried the iconic labskaus, a seaman’s dish of pickled or corned beef, the meat mixed with onion and beetroot, and traditionally served with a fried egg on top and a plate of good old matjes herrings on the side.

A superb spargel soup

Schiffergesellschaft gets a mention in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, and I was delighted to find that the Holstein has a large, black and white photograph on the wall of the man himself, taken outside the hotel in 1953.

But then the author considered Travemünde as something close to a paradise.

It too features in Mann’s first great novel, and even if worthy Lübeckers were mightly offended by his 1901 literary debut, there is plenty to suggest that their modern-day descendants appreciate the added value it lends the area – there is even a Buddenbrooks restaurant in a hotel just a couple of hundred metres from where we stayed.

But back to the pickled beef.

The first thing on the Holstein menu that caught my eye – a couple of days before we were first ready to dine there – was a labskaus.

How would an essentially modern and smart restaurant tackle such a dish?

Labskaus, deconstructed

I kept that question in mind until the first evening on which we’d actually left enough space for a three-course meal.

Before we get to that, let’s start by saying that, we waited, we were served with a selection of very nice breads, plus quark (a sort of German yogurt) and a lightly spiced relish, plus butter, and then with a small plate that was less an amuse bouche and more an hors d’oeuvres, involving very delicately prepared couscous and crumbled feta that was, if not very Germanic, then certainly very pleasant.

And of course, since The Other Half doesn't like cheese, I got his feta too.

But as a first course proper, both of us opted for the spargel soup.

The asparagus season enjoys cult status in Germany.

Known by a variety of nicknames, from ‘Königsgemüse’ (king’s vegetable) to ‘Frühlingswonne’ (springtime delight) and ‘Zartes Elfenbein’ (soft ivory), restaurants across the country add special asparagus menus, while little stalls set up on the streets to sell this seasonal glory.

While Germans prefer the white asparagus, the green that we’re more familiar with is not neglected.

Matjes herring on onion

Back in 2009, when we were in Berlin in early June, we ordered spargel soup at the iconic Lutter & Wegner, but were disappointed with the overly salty result, which suggested that it had been hanging around for some time.

This time around, the result was quite simply superb, with a creamy base, slivers of perfectly cooked white asparagus, drops of delightful tarragon oil and a few croutons for added texture.

Next up for me at least was the labskaus – which turned out to be deconstructed.

There’s always a danger with this approach that it can look good but not actually achieve anything much for the palate.

Here, it proved a very enjoyable exercise in appreciating the tastes and textures of a mixed dish – I bet those sailors never thought their dish would assume the level of haute cuisine.

Wonderful blutwurst

The meat, combined with some beetroot, came in quenelles, with the fried egg replaced by a breaded quail’s egg atop onion and herbs, a roasted beet purée, homemade potato crisps, matjes and shredded gherkin.

I opted for the almost inevitable ice cream after – but was too stuffed to make much headway with that.

The Other Half, having opted for a rhubarb crumble after a beef dish, reported himself more than satisfied.

Our final night saw us decamp to Holstein yet again and this time, the hors d’oeuvres was an incredibly delicate matjes herring on top a sweet and gentle onion, very finely chopped, a hint of bitter herbs and a little tomato.

Zander, with beetroot and potatoes

Lovely – and ensured The Other Half didn’t leave the country without at least a taste of herring.

Again, we both opted for the same main course – blutwurst (black pudding).

Gloriously moist and tasty, it was complimented by a bitter salad and quince two ways – as small triangles of jelly and as a rather larger wedge of mousse.

A real joy, this.

For a main course, the Other Half opted for zander, a German fish that is often translated, rather meaninglessly, as ‘pike-perch’, which are two altogether different fishes.

But then there is no British alternative, although it was introduced to the Fens some time ago and is considered a pest – can I try to get rid of it by culinary methods, then?

While he enjoyed that, I dined on lachs (salmon), with new potatoes and white and green spargel, which was very nice if not earth-shattering.

For dessert, however, I picked apple three ways – a slice of feather-light strudel, a sorbet and calvados-infused brunoise on a crisp, all made with Holstein cox. Absolutely gorgeous.

Apple, three ways

On the matter of wines, we drank a German red with the first meal at Holstein: that was a first, and very nice it was too.

For the second meal, we opted for a white – a Grauburgunder: a 2012 Kabinet, trocken, Weingut Bimmerle from Baden, which was also extremely nice.

We left thinking that that was food we’d be more than happy to eat again.

What Holstein perfectly illustrates is that German cuisine is very far from being sausage and pickled cabbage.

It can be hearty and simple and comforting, but done like this, it can also be as sophisticated as anything that most of us are likely to eat anywhere.

The wurst a foodie can get?

Bratwurst in Lübeck – on a proper plate

Germany remains low on the list of travel destinations for Brits - and to be honest and from a rather selfish perspective, I rather like that.

Back in 2000, my parents visited the country for the first time as part of an organised trip to see the Oberammergau Passion Play.

Performed by the village people every 10 years or so since 1634, the millennium staging coincided with my father’s retirement, so his parishioners had thought it a fitting present.

The thing that worried him most was the very fact of going to Germany – for some, The War has never really ended.

That all-important first beer of the trip

Indeed, as I have been reminded more than once, “we didn’t win the war just so the Jerries could rule us through the EU!” and as I remember clearly when coming home from my first day in the second year at Fairfield High School for Girls: “We didn’t win the war so that you should have to learn German!”

In the event, both parents were charmed. And this seems to be the case for anyone visiting.

But while scenery and beer might be attractions, one thing that is not standardly viewed as a selling point for Germany is cuisine.

After all, it’s really just sausages and pickled cabbage, isn’t it?

As only a slight aside, it should be noted here that sauerkraut is not pickled, but is fermented, with the finely-shredded vegetable layered between salt in barrels.

But back to sausages.

Matjes herring with a jacket potato

One of the tedious little rules that those who complain about ‘red tape’ love to hate came I to force in 2003, when it became law that sausages be labeled so that you know how much actual meat is in them – and not just a figure that could include all sorts of parts of the animal, plus the ‘pink slime’ that has been blasted off otherwise stripped carcasses.

But while the foodie-based revival of the humble British banger has improved things greatly, millions of the smooth, pink slimy ones are still sold, leaving one with a sense of culinary despair. And I must admit, at this point, that it not so long ago that I preferred these – although now I find them fairly repulsive.

But back to Germany and wurst.

Breakfast, with fish and small frikadellen

Our trip to Schleswig-Holstein was always going to produce some wurst opportunities, and it was in Lübeck where I enjoyed a very nice bratwurst with chips and the obligatory mustard.

Germans make some very nice mustards indeed, from the mild, yellow senf that’s just perfect with a bratwurst, to the grainy, sweet type from Bavaria.

But that really was my sole taste of wurst on this trip, although and I was delighted to find a gift box of three tins of Bavarian weißwurst and a small jar of the latter in Hamburg Airport on the way home.

Instead, I made the most of the opportunity to enjoy the fish – whether fresh, smoked or soused, and starting every day with matjes herrings at breakfast.

"A great British tradition"

Indeed, a first meal selection on German soil involved matjes herring, fish that has been ‘ripened’ by soaking in a mild preserving liquid for a few days.

The flesh is firm, boneless, easy to digest and has a delightful, delicate taste. It can be served with a variety of sauces, including a very traditional one of sour cream or yogurt, and dill.

On this occasion it was served in full fillets alongside a jacket potato with sour cream and chives.

Among the other non-fresh delicacies tried came smoked mackerel and sprat, proper gravadlax – or as the Germans call it, gravad lachs – and eel.

Passing a small shop in Travemünde itself gave an opportunityfor a glance into northern German fish culture – an absolute Aladdin’s cave of piscene wonderfulness.

The Swinging Mods set the beat

Eel featured again on the trip – but as a combination of literature and jewellery: I bought a small one in the form of a pendant, based on a Günter Grass sculpture. Readers of The Tin Drum will know the role that eels played in those pages.

Other pleasures included a piece of fried turkey with a lemon hollandaise on Sunday after our long coastal walk, and, of all things, fish and chips on the Saturday.

The latter was served from a van at a May festival that we joined, where a husband and wife team advertised this as a “great British tradition” and were really chuffed when we told them that it was very good, which it was.

Black beer

Washed down with serious black beers, as the Swinging Mods rocked the air with the sort of ’60s sounds that encouraged an amount of unabashed dad dancing on a small wooden dance floor.

On the Sunday night, we hit a restaurant on the water front, where we enjoyed a vast spread of cod, with fresh cucumber salad, buttered potatoes and pickled cucumber and a mustard, cream sauce on the size.

The Other Half, gazing at this as it was laid before us, murmered, of Germans as a whole: “when it comes to portion size, they don’t fuck about!”

We had one below-par meal – but that was more a question of the restaurant being in chaos, only one man being in the kitchen and clearly refusing to try to speed up to keep up with the influx of customers.

Portion size!

We tried cake too – and oh, German cake is a thing of very great pleasure. Forget the cliché of Black Forest Gateaux (although a real one is a real delight) – I enjoyed a local speciality topped with marzipan, because Lübeck is, after all, the marzipan capital of the world, and a deep, dense chocolate torte.

There were other points of note on the culinary agenda too: honey – the hotel restaurant had at least 12 varieties available at breakfast and lovely were the six that I managed to try during our stay.

And breads too – again, the breakfast buffet included several varieties of traditional German breads, most of them organic. I’m not quite a pumpernickel girl, but I do love a good volkornbrot, a traditional whole wheat bread.

Beer everywhere was, of course, clean and a pleasure to enjoy – slowly!

Serious, serious chocolate cake

And one evening, after that poorest meal, we relaxed in the hotel bar, The Other Half with a cocktail and me with a glass of a very light beer and a Fürst Bismarck ‘doppelkorn’ schnapps on the side. It has to be done at least once.

The only disconcerting point was that these drinks were ordered by me in such immaculate manner that the woman serving declared that I spoke German “so sweetly”! I am not sweet!

We had two evening meals in the hotel restaurant – of which much more another time. But all this – the much more ‘humble’ fodder – had more than enough to recommend it and more than enough to make it memorable.

But oh, oh, oh – the herrings!

Into the woods it's time to go

Greener than last year – 'my' little Travemünde wood

The woods, the woods; trees soaring up to meet the sky and undergrowth straining to catch what light permeates the swaying canopy.

On the floor, a blackbird rootles through last year’s crackling debris, while flowers, pale and delicate, offer white, yellow and purple contrast with the blanketing greens.

Last year when I made the short trip from Lübeck to Travemünde, there was three weeks less tree cover – and that after a mercilessly long winter. Purple crocuses showed an almost brazen deep colour by the edges of the footpath.

All around - or to be more accurate, all above - was filled with the sound of crows cawing.

When we stepped off the train at Travemünde in the mid morning of 3 May, it was the first noise to assail the ears. The little wood butts right up to the equally little station and the crows were already out in force.

Delicate apple blossom

But underlying that raucous sound was birdsong, and once in the wood itself, it seems as though there are layers of sound; the smallest birds first, nearest to the ear, then the wood pigeons billing and cooing, a little farther off, and then the crows, high above.

And all with the faint echo that gives it such a haunting quality.

It's only a small wood, but just a few steps inside and you are divorced from the sights and sounds of the modern world, and half expecting to round the next turn and see a gingerbread house before you.

All this is just a few hundred metres from the beach and the shore.

Where the Baltic waters meet the silver sands were lying vast numbers of seaweed and mussels, ripped free of their moorings by the tide and left high and dry.

The crows were having a banquet, strutting along, testing shells with sharp beaks and wolfing any remaining meat.

Along the coast

That little wood – my little wood, or so I find myself thinking of it since I experienced it with some awe a year ago – is far from unique.

On the Sunday morning, we set off along the promenade before taking a footpath up into the mass of trees that rose all the way up to the cliff edge.

The walk to Niendorf is around 7.5km along the coast, taking in more than one small wood. Footpaths are well maintained and leave no need for scrambling – as I remember from the last time I did a UK coastal walk, some years ago, in Yorkshire.

The way was dotted with a series of charming metal sculptures of wildlife – some forming part of seats – by Guillermo Steinbrüggen, which were created and put in place as part of ‘Land-Art-Projekt’ in 2010.

Two memorials also stand alongside the path, with neat flowers alongside: one is ‘in memory of the deceased who found their eternal rest in the Bay of Lübeck’, which may mean those who have died at sea in peacetime, but could also include the many who died in the bay during WWII.

Owl sculpture bench

Those included concentration camp inmates who were being transported by the SS aboard the Cap Arcona, which was then bombed by the RAF.

The path runs alongside farm land in places and, in keeping with a country where cigarette machines hang, un-vandalised, on exterior walls – even in cities – there are no barriers between public footpath and private agricultural land.

It is assumed that you will have enough brains and enough general decency that any physical barrier would be superfluous.

But back to all those trees.

As I touched on last year, the forest occupies an important place in the German psyche.

We, having deforested this island centuries ago, don’t find that easy to understand, but step inside such a wood for even just a few minutes and you can feel it working on you.

Historically, one could do worse than start by considering Hermann the German.

Wolf sculpture

A Cherusci chieftain’s son, he was given the Latin name of Arminius and a military training in Rome after being taken hostage on one attempt at subjugating the Germanic peoples and lands.

But in 9AD, in the Teutoburg Forest, he handed out a serious smacking to the Romans, when the various Germanic tribes he’d pulled into a coalition destroyed three Imperial legions under Publius Varus, having lured them there with talk of suppressing a rebellion.

It was one of Rome’s most devastating defeats and intended annexations of western Germany and Bohemia were postponed – and as it turned out, never did happen.

In the first part of his excellent three-part documentary on German art, Andrew Graham Dixon highlighted the place of the forest within that art - seen in a number of ways, but not least through the carvings found throughout the country, including in old churches.

Wolpertinger, after Dürer

Then there are all the folkloric creatures that inhabit those forests.

There’s the elwedritsche, a mythical, flightless bird living in the Palatinate, and the rasselbock in Thuringia, which is essentially a large rabbit with antlers, making it sound rather similar to the Bavarian wolpertinger, a creature made up of bits of various animals and birds, which lives in the Alpine forests.

It’s something that makes me wonder how many similarly mythical captures can one think of from the British Isles.

Personally, I know of the northern boggart and I know of the Cornish piskie, but for anything else, I’d have to start searching. Folklore does not seem to exist much more in the UK.

And such folklore overlaps with German art.

The German renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald (1470-1528) didn’t merely include the woods in his scenes, including St John in the Forest (1515), but the fantastical occurs in his paintings, including his most famous work, the Isenheim Altarpiece.

The Temptation of St Anthony, Matthias Grünewald

It’s easy to think of the creatures that occur in the Temptation of St Anthony section of that masterpiece as Bosch-like, but they also have that sense of the frightening forest and the hybrids of folklore that live among the trees.

As only a slight aside, take away the umlaut from Grünewald’s name and you get ‘green wood’.

And then, of course, there are the fairy tales.

Remove the Disneyfication, and you’re left with dark tales that, in many cases, feature forests – and corvids. Hansel and Gretel is one the most famous, but many others feature getting lost in a forest as a key ingredient.

My reading matter for the trip was The Rat, by Günter Grass – largely because, having remembered seeing the sculptured rat alongside some Smurfs when I’d visited Günter Grass-Haus during last year’s visit to Lübeck and thought to look it up.

The book – how on earth can anything by a novelist such as Grass be out of print – turned out, unexpectedly, to be partly set around the area, which Grass moved to in 1986, the year of publication.

Overlooking Lübeck Bay

Its central theme is the environmental desecration wrought by humankind, and part of Grass’s way of highlighting this is to write of the forests dying and, with them, the fairy tale characters who live within, a theme that he returned to in Totes Holz (1990), which combined art and prose.

Even if the accidental nuclear apocalypse of The Rat may seem a little dated, since it was so much of the Cold War era, the potential for an environmental apocalypse remains very much with us.

Grass’s concerns were far from lacking a foundation in reality: in the 1980s, in Bavaria alone, 2.5 million hectares of woodland showed the signs of pollution damage, while vast numbers of trees in the fabled Black Forest of Baden-Wuerttemburg were under threat.

The Germans have a word for it: ‘Waldsterben,’ or forest death.

Since then, much has changed. Problems remain – not least due to climate change – but there are reasons that Germany has become a global leader in wind and solar energy.

As we sat waiting for the first train of the morning to take us from Travemünde to Lübeck on our way back to London via Hamburg, the crows in the little wood alongside the track were already about their business.

But long after we’d passed beyond the Baltic resort, it was clear that the cawing had imprinted itself on my mind, together with just a hint of the thrill and the mystery of the forest.