Summertime In Fantasyland
One thing Berlin lacks is seasonal cuisine. Seasonal ingredients, yes, we’ve got them: just look at the flood of fruit in the markets, not to mention asparagus-mania earlier in the year. But the idea that warm weather should be met with cold or quickly-cooked dishes is just not a part of the landscape. Just the other day, I saw a florid gentleman sitting outdoors in full sunlight tearing into an Eisbein at a cafe. The temperature was 90F/32.2C. I’ll concede that our neighbors may be made of sterner stuff, but the rest of us would really like some summer vittles.
Help — of a sort — comes from yesterday’s New York Times in an article by Mark Bittman featuring 101 summery ideas that can be made in 10 minutes or less. (Or so he says; your mileage may vary).
It’s worth looking through, but for those of us here in Berlin, it’s also a bit frustrating: “Cut eight sea scallops into four horizontal slices each.” Umm, nope. “Put three pounds of washed mussels in a pot…” Sorry. “Dredge flounder or sole fillets…” Oops. “Put a few dozen washed littlenecks…” Waitress! I’ll have some of what he’s smoking! “Boil a lobster.” Rrrrright. And those are just from the first of the five pages.
If this warm spell holds, I’ll post a couple of my favorite warm-weather recipes. After all, I lived in Texas for 13 years, and it gets sort of hot there.
Meanwhile, there’s always beer. And that’s one thing they do right here.
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Tags: beer, fruit, ingredient, market, recipeRelated posts
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July 19th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
Buying mussels is no problem in Berlin - don’t overdo it!
July 19th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Seen any lately? This is supposed to be summer food.
July 20th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
I just substituted Scholle for flounder in my recipes. Worked fine. I’d get it at the Karstadt in Wedding (don’t know what it may be called now or if it still sells fish though). Haven’t been able to eat fish since I get preggers, hopefully this goes away once the little guy is out and about.
July 21st, 2007 at 5:14 pm
You can get sole frozen from supermarkets here. And did you try any of the fish stalls on Kollwitz Platz market?
If every post is about how shit Berlin and Germans are and how this isn’t a world city and you can’t get every last ingredient here, then I’m gonna have to stick to Mr J Ward’s posts.
July 21st, 2007 at 5:43 pm
Not our intention at all. I reserve that for my other blog. Nor is this issue about exotica; it’s about the narrow compass of what’s available. And, as you’ll see in future posts, what you can do about it and what you can do with it.
You should also look through those 101 recipes and notice that there are plenty of ‘em you can do here.
Also worth noting, what language folk call a “false friend”: sole is Seezunge, while Scholle is plaice.
July 22nd, 2007 at 9:14 am
Oh, alright. Not sure that it was me false friending with the sole thing, given that I don’t know the German anyway.
July 22nd, 2007 at 11:24 am
The Berliner Fischmarkt (www.berliner-fischmarkt.de) has a pretty decent selection of seafood, as does, to some degree, Mitte Meer behind the Hamburger Bahnhof. Mitte Meer also has another store on Kantstrasse. Frischeparadies on Morsestrasse in Moabit is not too shabby, either. One thing you forgot to mention is that you can order all kinds of seafood. It’s not that it’s impossible to get lobster in Berlin, you just have to plan ahead a day or two.
July 24th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Well, I checked, and my local branch of Extra, from which I have bought mussels in the past, doesn’t have any at present. But they may do tomorrow… Perhaps they’re just all in Belgium at the moment, home of the European Mussel Mountain. Walking around Bruxelles-Midi last week, the streets were full of people eating them out of metal pots.
July 28th, 2007 at 9:59 am
I had the exact same problem with Bittman here in India, not only missing most ingredients, but also no OVEN. Guess we aren’t the target audience.