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Notes -
Maybe it’s just the quality of the food. In my experience, the french are more sparing with their dinner invitations than the germans – understandable, when they feel obliged to offer multiple courses of heavenly delights, while the german casually serves you his dreadful slop, ‘come as you are and eat what is left’.
Our dreadful slop is filling and gives you energy for actual work. Not like the eternal slimming diet the french are on. Their food is art, but art sucks, and ours is meant to get people through a long day of actual work, which it does.
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German cooks are often good when they cook you the food of their people, but they have an awful fondness for the most awful bastardizations of “Asian food” imaginable. The English, meanwhile, are usually either good cooks at multiple cuisines or terrible at all of them, including their own.
Germans just don’t care about food like the french do. Even working class french people spend considerable money and time preparing different kinds of meat, on any given day of the week. Middle class germans eat potato salad with sausage on christmas. If they’re feeling adventurous, they’ll spring for some schweinemedaillons – but whatever happens, it’s all pork all the time. I don’t really mind, I enjoy the lack of fuss. I find the french high maintenance, generally. At work, at school, at dinner, germans are more laid back.
Really? I thought the tradition was fish on Christmas Eve - in the far south they had the (amusingly Jewish to my mind, although of course not really) smoked salmon with latkes (kartoffelpuffer), and then goose on Christmas Day. Pork was reserved for breakfast or the 26th.
Truth is that almost every family has their own traditions here. Ours was grilled chicken.
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