Vanillesoße is the little black dress of sauces. Honestly, it just goes with every dessert or Nachtisch… it softens the tartness of Rote Gruetze, gives an added dimension to Apfelstrudel, and it magically transforms boring chocolate pudding to a fancy dessert. My Oma always kept packets of instant Vanillesoße in her “packet drawer” (you know the one… it had packets…
Author: karenanne
Sorbian Easter Eggs- How are they made, and who are the Sorbs?
Sorbian Easter Eggs are some of the most beautifully decorated Easter Eggs I’ve ever seen. My mother introduced us to them when we were children, and she remembered them from her childhood. My Opa, her father, is from Weißwasser, a town in eastern Saxony, Germany, that once belonged to Upper Lusatia or Upper Sorbia. While my family isn’t “Sorbian,” the…
What is Bock Beer? And Do Germans Really Call it Liquid Bread?
I regularly see memes and articles about how German beer is considered “flüssiges Brot,” or liquid bread. But where does this idea come from? Most likely, this started with a group of monks and Bock Bier. During Lent, members of the Paulaner order abstained from eating solid food. Bock beer, with its extra load of carbohydrates and nutrients, satisfied some…
Karl May- Old Shatterhand and Winnetou
Karl May might be the best-selling German novelist that most Americans never heard of. May’s stories of the American West have made frontiersmen and Native Americans come alive in Germany since 1893. For Germans of a certain age, Old Shatterhand, and Winnetou are as familiar as Harry Potter, Ron, and Hermione are to my kids. The number of books sold…
Frau Holle- Grimm Fairy Tale, Legend, and Goddess
, Frau Holle Cover Image- Nickge4, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons When it snows in Hessen, people say Frau Holle shakes out her feather beds. Thanks to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, we all have a mental image of an old woman airing her bedding out the window. But the story of Frau Holle goes further back in German history; she…
Chocolate and Pear Cake Recipe aka. Schoko-Birnen Kuchen
One of the things I love about German baking is how they mix fruit and cake so easily. (Maybe it’s to lessen the ‘guilt’ of eating cake? You can honestly say you are getting your daily allotment of fruits too.) The first time I saw this Chocolate and Pear cake I thought… hmmm, it looks like a version of a…
The Gäubodenmuseum- 7000 years of History in Straubing, Germany
The Gäubodenmuseum is an absolute treasure trove of early German, Celtic, Roman, and Bavarian artifacts. You’ll find the museum in a rebuilt patricians house on Frauenhoferstraße, off the main pedestrian zone in Straubing. The museum was recommended to me by our tour bus driver, Bene. (And here’s a travel tip- when the bus driver recommends something, GO!). Now, I’ve always…
The Katzenjammer Kids- A German-American Comic for over 100 Years
On Dec.12, 1897, a comic strip featuring a German-American family with a distinctly Denglish accent appeared in a Sunday Supplement of the New York Journal. The Katzenjammer Kids featured twins Hans and Fritz, two boys who were always up to mischief and pranks. The word Katzenjammer basically means “Cat Wailing” or caterwauling, and that loud yowling is a perfect name…
The Candy Bomber – The Berlin Airlift & Operation Little Vittles
Cover Image-C-54 dropping candy during Berlin Airlift c1949 – Public Domain In a 2021 newsletter, I mentioned that I would be writing about the Candy Bomber who dropped handkerchief parachutes with chocolate payloads for the children of Berlin during the Airlift. One of my readers, Dorothea Thunig Smith, reached out to me with a lovely memory. “I lived in Berlin…