My experience with food was like most young American kids growing up in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Coming from a military family that did not have much money we had a weekly schedule when it came to what we ate, meat loaf and chicken casserole where a staple as was breakfast for dinner. We did go out almost once a week to the officers club normally for Sunday brunch.
Things changed for the better the summer of 1984. My father had his choice of duty assignments, Washington D.C., Hawaii, and Germany. He and my mom chose Germany and were lucky enough to get his first choice. So, after spending the summer on the beach… we headed out to our new home in a little village in Germany!
The day after landing is when I began to fall in love with food. I remember this like it was yesterday. My dad packed us in the car and drove us the 30 some miles from our new home in Ramstein to Kaiserslaurtern. He wanted to take us all to lunch. We went to a restaurant that he had gone to a few weeks earlier. My mom wanted to order for me… I refused and what came to the table was a revelation!
Sulze! Sulze is pickled headcheese that is famous in Germany. When the plate arrived the waiter smiled right at me… and kind of laughed when he saw the look on my mom’s face. I did not complain and dug right in. It was incredible. Mind you at the age of 7 I was kind of freaked out because I know I was eating something really strange. But all that was secondary. For the first time ever I was actually tasting food.
Everything on the plate had flavor! The thinly sliced marinated carrots the salad dressed in something I could not see and the Sulze… I don’t know what the flavors where but oh where they there.
About a year after arriving in Europe one of my parents long time friends moved to Germany. He was and still is one of the finest cooks I know. Almost all my memories surrounding him involve food. The most important one though is the first time I got to help… I was 8 years old. We arrived mid morning at the home he was renting, a 15th century monastery. It was beautiful and mammoth… at least to some one who is 8. We walked through the door and I ran to the kitchen.
In the past I always just watched. This day would be different, much different. I sat up on a high bar stole at the kitchen counter watching him trim down a full rack of lamb he had just gotten from the butcher that morning. Then something exciting happened, He put the chops in front of me with a small paring knife and told me to poke about 5 small slits into each chop. This was the first time I ever helped cook anything! Once I got the slits done in all the chops he handed me little spikes of fresh garlic and some sprigs of fresh rosemary just cut from his garden. I was to put the garlic and rosemary in all the slits. The whole time I was doing this I remember the smells, they were wonderful!
The garlic was very pungent and the cut pieces were sticky. The rosemary was smelled like a garden and was kind off sweet. But the smell that I remember the most was the lamb. The lamb smelled like nothing I had ever experienced. I remember saying at the time that it smelled like a farm. That was great at eight years old but a few years later looking back I could actually expand that description. The most pungent of the smells was of grass… the lamb had been pastured not grain fed. I remember thinking that it also smelled of butter and a bit like the fruit trees in our back yard in the fall when the fruit starts to fall from the trees. All of this was a huge step for me on my way to becoming a cook myself. It also was the beginning of me costing my parents lots of money on eating out and food in general.
