After disgracefully abandoning this blog before we were quite home last June, we have now decided to take it up again. We are currently exploring northern Germany for a few days, subsisting on a diet of herring and expressionist brick buildings, and we thought our (culinary) exploits in Bremen and Hamburg—and potentially further afield—might be of interest.
Hansetour Day 1 (24 April 2023)
After a very long train journey with very many changes and delays (shouldn't have got the cheap tickets), we arrived in rainy, windy Bremen. Even after the short walk to our Airbnb, the inside of our suitcase was wet and we were in dire need of a hot plate of Labskaus. The flat had suitably questionable nautical flair, and we didn’t stick around.
We took a walk along the riverside, which was rapidly becoming part of the river. With all the flatness, cycle paths, and near-flooding, Bremen immediately gave a rather Dutch impression. However, we were heading for its canal-less old core.
In the teeny old town known as Schnoor, we came across a mercifully open Vienna-style café—clearly the ideal first stop in Bremen (c. 600 miles from Vienna via Czechia). The wonderfully 1970s decor included a hexagonal column made of fake purple marble, a surfeit of beige, and waitresses in doily aprons. We ordered a little rococo pot of hot chocolate. We also procured an hilariously elaborate poppyseed cake: marzipan piping on top of thick sweet-salty poppyseed filling on top of sponge on top of a layer of red jam on top of biscuit. It was just what we wanted.
After exploring the remainder of the old area, including the 1930s avant-garde fever dream in brick that is the famous Böttcherstraße, we settled on a Kneipe for dinner. It was rather promisingly named after the Prussian Kaiser Friedrich and, although it was in the famous old bit, its dishes were reasonably priced and it came with good reviews.
We both went for dishes in their ‘Bratkartoffeln mit…’ section. It seems that everywhere here serves pretty much everything with these oniony, bacony, lovely fried potatoes. We also each ordered a small beer, with Alfie choosing ‘Alsterwasser’ off the menu before there was time to look up what this was. It turns out it’s an orange-flavoured mix of beer and soda which is popular in these parts (the Alster is a lake in Hamburg). Yes, we did feel silly for all the speculative tasting notes we came up with before we found this out.
Alfie also ordered Brathering, which is a dish of pure, perverse genius. At some point in time, someone screwed up the order of events which is supposed to happen with marination. See, Brathering is marinated after being breaded and fried. This would surely make the batter redundant and soggy. Yes. Somehow the resulting dish is still excellent—sour and fishy, perfect for cutting through the also-Brat potatoes. As said in Spinal Tap, “there’s a fine line between clever and stupid.”
That said, Bea’s ‘Knipp mit Gurke’ (also mit Bratkartoffeln) was even better. Knipp is one of those amazing dishes that have resulted out of poorer people trying to embellish the bits of meat that no one else wanted after the slaughtering was done. One of many northern German Grützwürste (‘groats-sausages’), it’s akin to the stretchings of meat products with grain that are known as ‘puddings’ in Britain. Knipp is mostly pork fat and oats, although it also contains bits of various pig organs as well as hefty amount of salt, pepper, and allspice. They fry you up a huge slice of it, so it’s crispy on the outside and melty on the inside. No, it did not come with a big green salad.