Buttermilk Graffiti

by Edward Lee

  All the sausages are good, but the Landjäger makes my taste buds sing. The small sticks of beef, pork, and lard are mixed with red wine and spices, then smoked and left to overferment so the sourness comes through prominently. Landjäger were traditionally eaten by hunters who would take these snacks with them on long trips because they don’t require refrigeration. What I love the most about German food is the aggressive sour notes that come from intricate methods of fermentation, not from acid. The flavor is sour, tempered with umami. It is hard to describe it other than to say that it’s the flavor of deliciousness. It makes my mouth water. I give Dianne a bite of my Landjäger. It is as though generations of dormant DNA just woke up. She hits me in the arm. That is her way of showing me she really likes it. Even our daughter says that these gummy bears are better than the usual ones we get.

  This is the art of sausage making at its best. I dare anyone who thinks German food is clunky to taste an array of German cured meats and not detect the subtle differences in fat, sour notes, salt, and spices. The slight adjustments in proportions create wildly different textures and flavors. If the German food at some restaurants is clumsy, it is because of the cook, not the cuisine. The raw materials I find at Bavaria Sausage are nothing short of perfection, as fine-tuned as a professional race car. I leave the store content, with a warm pretzel, a smoked sausage, and a spoonful of mustard.

  reason 2: German food needs an ambassador to bridge the narrative to an American public.

  We have an early reservation at Karl Ratzsch in Milwaukee, the second-oldest German restaurant in the city. It opened in 1904, but lately, the food has slipped, and by all accounts, the restaurant is surviving on an aging but loyal clientele who dine there mostly out of nostalgia. Like many old-world German restaurants, Karl Ratzsch was destined for closure. Recently, though, one of Milwaukee’s most accomplished young chefs, Thomas Hauck, bought the place and revamped the menu to give the historic restaurant fresh new vigor. Chef Hauck grew up in Milwaukee, and had fond memories of the restaurant. It pained him to see it crumbling away into disgrace. He got rid of the lederhosen and created a menu that bridged the old and the new.

  The restaurant is breathtaking, but in the way a museum or a historic home can be breathtaking. The dark oak wood is brooding and waxed to a bowling alley shine. The hard edges of the wood are softened by faded murals of lonely country landscapes painted over the mantels. An intricately carved grandfather clock dominates the center of the dining room like a scene from an E. T. A. Hoffmann fairy tale. My wife loves it. Her tastes range from earthy to church-like. Her ideal home interior would look like a well-made coffin.

  The restaurant is empty except for a few tables in front and a birthday party for a man in his eighties. The waiters are dressed elegantly in gingham button-down shirts. The hostess is a mature woman who moves through the restaurant like a matron. She is not the owner, but has worked here a long time. She won’t tell me exactly how long, but she assures me she has seen it all. She tells me she doesn’t see many young people here anymore. They want things that are trendy, she proclaims with disgust. They have turned their backs on the traditional food of Germany.

  The menu here is not traditional, at least not the part of it I order from. Chef Hauck is doing something remarkable: bridging the gap between the traditional and the new. We start with a warm pretzel, which may sound cliché, but it is the best pretzel I have ever had. A feathery-thin crust yields to the slightest touch to reveal a fine-bubbled yeast dough that smells like toasted hay and butterscotch. The pretzel is the size of my child’s head. It is brushed with clarified butter and opaque crumbs of white salt. My fingertips glisten with so much salt and butter that I seriously ponder taking a bite of my own hand. The accompanying condiment is not sharp mustard but pickled brown mustard seeds suspended in a sour cream concoction. It seems heretical. It is surprising and delicious.

  Next is the sauerkraut. It is like nothing I have ever had. A half-fermented sauerkraut, it is crunchy and fresh, light, and speckled with caraway seeds. It harmonizes seamlessly with the pork schnitzel. The sauerkraut contains gentle juniper and flowery notes that inexplicably make the pork taste light. It is a brilliant redefining of what sauerkraut can be. I order a second helping.

  This is the German food I have been looking for: smart, respectful, and innovative without being silly. The bite-size portions of Herbed Lard and Pork Crackling on Pumpernickel are elegant and ethereal while at the same time proudly beating a German drum of flavor. I feel giddy. It is as though I am discovering a new cuisine that the world hasn’t seen yet. Chef Hauck has a sauerkraut fritter stuffed with bacon and Landjäger on the menu. The kohlrabi and horseradish salad is sharp, precise, and witty. It liberates horseradish from its prison of raw oysters and Bloody Marys. A glass of crisp, daffodil-perfumed Riesling makes the dinner perfect. I look around at the empty restaurant. Where are all the Milwaukee diners who are missing out on this treasure?

  The specialty of the house is Knistern Schweinefleisch Schaft, a monstrous pork shank slow-cooked and served with the skin crackling. It is a behemoth plate of food, and we barely make a dent in it. It is the one dish they cannot take off the menu because it is what all the regulars order. It could feed five of them. It is my least favorite dish of the night.

  Three weeks after our wonderful meal, and less than a year after Chef Thomas Hauck renovated the menu, I find out that Karl Ratzsch has closed for good after more than 110 years of business. I reach out to Chef Hauck to talk to him about it. “I guess people weren’t into change,” he tells me. He isn’t in the mood to talk much. I get it. Any restaurant closing is sad, but this one is especially tragic. Many things go through my mind about what could have saved Karl Ratzsch. Maybe the food needed to be in a more contemporary setting. Maybe such an innovative German cuisine needed a new décor. Maybe it needed a PR machine behind it. Maybe it needed a big personality. Maybe it needed lederhosen.

  I have heard more than once that German food needs an ambassador. At one of my favorite German restaurants, there is a sign at the entrance that reads, “Unattended children will be sold.” It is a joke, but not really. Germans are known for many excellent qualities, but being warm and fuzzy is not high on the list. And that kind of humor does not translate well to a wide American audience. I have heard people say that German food needs a Julia Child to reinvent its cold reputation and bring it to the masses. Hauck is a smart, brilliant chef. He is a gentle man, soft-spoken and humble. In a world driven by big media personalities, can a chef like Hauck break through and trumpet a new era of German cuisine?

  Does the merit of a cuisine carry only as far as the personality shouting behind it? I wonder where our love for French food would be without a charismatic ambassador like Julia Child. But I also know that we should credit a generation of French restaurants that transformed the traditional cuisine into something that Americans could understand and adore, from the pristine plates of Le Bernardin to the comfort of neighborhood bistros like Le Zoo, L’Acajou, and Café Noir. I think Chef Hauck proved that you don’t need to stray too far from the core definitions of German food to create a fresh version of that cuisine, too.

  “Germans are not braggadocios,” my wife explains to me. She says it in a way that implies that I am. Everything she says implies something. “We are hardworking and honest. Bragging about it is considered beneath us.” I shrug and watch a YouTube video of myself on my smartphone.

  The outside of Kegel’s Inn, on the outskirts of Milwaukee, is painted with a mural of an angry cherub holding a staff in one hand and a beer stein in the other. It is Friday afternoon during Lent, and the noise is reaching a level I have not heard before in a restaurant. Everyone comes here for the fish fry on Fridays. Everyone here seems to know one another. Somewhere an accordion is playing, but I can’t see the musician. This restaurant has been here since 1924 and looks like your typical German beer hall. Dark wood, heavy murals by Peter Gries depicting pa
storal hunting scenes, and leaded glass combine to make me feel like I am at church—though church was never this raucous. The food is good but nothing to shout about. The lake perch is simply breaded and fried. It comes with coleslaw, tartar sauce, and fresh lemon wedges. A potato pancake and applesauce are served on the side. Still, the feeling in here is good. There is something familial and comforting that has been built up over generations.

  The German word Gemütlichkeit means friendliness, good cheer, warmth, and a sense of hospitality. It is what you feel at beer halls; it is a sense of community. There is no word in English that quite captures its meaning. It is said to be something uniquely German, but it is also something we can all relate to. If you’ve ever been in a bar drinking with a roomful of strangers and yet feeling oddly connected to everyone in the room, that is Gemütlichkeit.

  The service is prompt and accommodating. The food is fine. The walls are austere. No one here has gone out of his way to be nice to us, but I don’t want to leave. I want to bask in something I rarely feel in a restaurant: the sense that every one of us is contributing to this feeling of Gemütlichkeit. We are participants, not passive observers who expect the restaurant to bring the joy to us. Here, it is us who bring the energy to the restaurant. No longer can I blame the restaurant for a bad experience. It is up to me to have a good time. This is oddly refreshing, liberating.

  German food will someday make a comeback in the United States. I believe that one glorious day, it will not be so hard to find a well-made schnitzel and sauerbraten with spaetzle. The person who finally accomplishes the feat won’t have to be a celebrity, won’t even have to be German, but he or she must embrace the concept of Gemütlichkeit. I would drive many, many miles for a place like that.

  reason 3: German food never recovered from the negative attitudes caused by two world wars.

  I am walking around the Milwaukee County Historical Society building. Upstairs is an archive of books. Steve is the caretaker of these books. He doesn’t get many visitors. I ask him about German food, and he sits down to talk with me. Steve is a meek and scholarly middle-aged man wearing a nondescript blue shirt with two identical pens in the chest pocket. As I look over his shoulder, I see the city of Milwaukee, built by generations of German immigrants who made this rugged, cold land into a thriving city. Steve brings out old books, and we read through them, looking for passages on what the life of German immigrants was like a century ago. Most of these books crack open like petrified fossils being handled for the first time in ages.

  I remember the hostess at Karl Ratzsch telling me how its menu evolved during World War I to reflect anti-German sentiments. It was changed to read more like an Austrian restaurant. Hungarian goulash made an appearance. Sauerkraut was called “Liberty Cabbage.” In later years, even chicken Parmesan landed on the menu. I mention this to Steve, and he confirms that he has heard these same stories.

  “The immigrants didn’t necessarily hide their German identity but they didn’t flaunt it, either,” Steve explains to me. “To be German was difficult in those days.”

  In 1914, when America’s official stance on World War I was neutral, many Germans living in Milwaukee held rallies for the German victims of the war. In March 1916, a weeklong charity bazaar in Milwaukee drew more than 150,000 people to help with war relief for the people of the Fatherland. But in 1917, when America entered the war, anti-German sentiment flared up and quickly turned into a witch hunt for anyone considered a treasonous German. Bach and Beethoven were no longer played in the music halls. The Deutscher Club became the Wisconsin Club. There was a campaign to erase all German references in Milwaukee, which at that time had been known as the German Athens of America, or the center of German culture in the States. Many families fled west, to the countryside, to escape the hysteria. What resulted was a stifling of the thriving German culture in Milwaukee.

  With the rise of Hitler and the Second World War, the attitudes of many Americans toward all things German were cemented even more in negativity. Yet by then, many of the German immigrants had assimilated and come to identify as fully American. Disassociating oneself from anything too “German” became a prevailing inclination for generations to come.

  One of the coolest places to drink in Milwaukee is Bryant’s Cocktail Lounge, a throwback bar that serves up innovative cock-tails in a space that makes you feel like you’re on a 1970s movie set. If this place were in Manhattan, I’d be surrounded by rude rich people, but here, I’m surrounded by average people just out having a drink. I start a debate with some locals about the best places to eat in Milwaukee. They tell me about a Vietnamese place, a tapas bar, any place by the Bartolotta group. No one mentions any German restaurants, so I ask why not.

  “No one wants to eat that stuff anymore,” a tipsy woman in her late twenties yells in my left ear. “The only people who eat there are old people and tourists like you.”

  I ask her to tell me the one definitive food from Wisconsin that everyone can agree on. She doesn’t hesitate in her response: brats.

  “But isn’t that German?”

  She shrugs and goes back to her foamy cocktail.

  It is getting late. My wife is asleep with our daughter in our quaint hotel room. I don’t want her to be angry with me in the morning, so I leave the bar with my whiskey cocktail half full. Outside the bar, there is a BMW parked on the curb. As Americans, we don’t have a problem driving German cars or buying German knives or watching German films. But German food has been shunned. I wonder if there was a moment in history that was lost, when the cuisine had a chance to evolve but was quelled at the very moment it could have flourished. Choosing our food is so much more emotional than buying a car or a set of knives. But history is emotion, too. It is memory, and memories are not something that can be reasoned with. They are alive, and they incite fear and anger and hatred, but they can also be tools for reconciliation and joy. As I watch America go through a new cycle of fear and hate, it pains me to see that the lessons of the past have done little to prevent the prejudices of the present. American life has always been defined by the tensions between the old and the new immigrants. Maybe acceptance is a naïve thing to believe in, but isn’t it possible that overcoming food prejudices can lead to wider tolerance?

  reason 4: We’ve already appropriated the best of German food and we call it American food.

  We drive to Madison the next day to meet up with Tory Miller, who is the head chef of L’Etoile. Tory is Korean by birth. He was adopted as a child by German American parents, and grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. He has recently opened a Korean-inspired restaurant, and I am curious to see what’s on the menu. The place is packed. Bowls of bibimbap, rice bowls topped with marinated vegetables, and ramen are flying out of the kitchen. I sit at the counter and eat spicy rice cakes, noodles, and dumplings. After two days of nonstop German food, this spicy fare feels nice in my belly. Tory sits next to me, and we catch up.

  Tory wears his hair in a mini Mohawk, designer glasses, and a sleeve tattoo on his left arm. “Since I look Asian, people think I can cook all this food like it’s in my blood,” he says, “but I didn’t grow up eating this food.” He speaks fast and passionately. He is watching all the cooks on the line while we chat. “The Asians come here and judge me all the time,” he continues. “They tell me it’s not authentic. But that’s not what I am doing. I am doing my version of Korean food.”

  I ask him what he grew up eating. Was it traditional German food?

  “I grew up eating brats and kraut and all that stuff, but we never called it German food. We just called it food.”

  When we eat a hot dog, or drink a beer, or crack into a loaf of multigrain bread, do we think about Germany? German immigrants were one of the first groups to come to the United States, and their contribution to food has been so deeply absorbed that, for the most part, we consider it just American food. Is that the ultimate goal of assimilation? Disappearance? Does the fact t
hat German food has so deeply infiltrated our food identity mean that it succeeded in its goal to assimilate, or in that process, did it fail to carve out its own cultural and historical identity? I wonder if, in a hundred years, Americans will eat bibimbap without knowing where it came from. Isn’t that already happening to foods such as tacos and pizza? Or can we go back and recalibrate these beloved foods every time a new wave of immigrants comes to America?

  I ask Tory what German or Korean food is once we import it into a place such as Madison. It’s about the people, he tells me, and the people now are looking for more diverse flavors.

  The food I’m eating has all the flavors of the Korean pantry but tastes nothing like what my grandmother made for me—and that is okay. To believe that there is just one version of Korean food is ridiculous. Tory brings a distinct identity to this vision of Korean food. There is Wisconsin cheddar in his duk-bok-ki. There is smoked brisket in his fried rice. This food makes me smile. It would piss my grandmother off, but you can’t quell food evolution. In many ways, German food was absorbed into standard American fare or stifled before it had a chance to evolve organically in America. For me, though, that is not the end of the story. German food is not at a dead end in America. It’s just dormant.

  reason 5: There are no new German immigrants bringing a renewed cuisine to America.

  Immigrants bring their foods and traditions. They create and re-create an unending food narrative here in America. But Germany is not Cambodia or Syria; it is not a country in peril. There are no new waves of German immigrants coming to America. The Germans who do immigrate here are educated. They are more likely to choose professions that are lucrative. They are not coming here to set up humble eateries.