Food

The next few entries will be about food. About Mutti and food when she was little, about food after the war in Germany, and about food in our little caravan when I was a child.

Let's start with an account of Mutti's and my relationship to food. This is a dialogue between Mutti and me when she visited me in the States a few years back.

 I’m in the kitchen, preparing a late breakfast. I’m frying bacon and eggs.

“Oh God, no,” Mutti says. “I can’t believe you are eating that for breakfast. You have to watch your figure. You’re not skinny anymore.”

“It’s common in America. When you eat breakfast late, you make bacon and eggs and skip lunch,” I explain.

Mutti sighs. For her, breakfast consists of bread or cereal and coffee. “Sure you’ll skip lunch,” she says. “Please, none of that for me.”

Mutti wasn’t raised in the Jewish faith. She doesn’t disapprove on religious grounds. Many times, when I was small and we could find and afford it, we had pork chops for lunch.

I smile and assure her she won’t have to eat eggs and bacon.

An hour later, after we finished eating (Mutti had Müsli and coffee, while Ken and I enjoyed our bacon and eggs), my 17-year-old gets up. She comes from her room and rummages in the refrigerator. “What’s there to eat?”

“We already ate, just a little while ago,” I answer. “Eat whatever you can find.”

After some more rummaging, Liesel settles on a peanut butter sandwich. She gulps it down with some milk, then grabs her purse from the table and kisses me on the cheek. “I’m going now, Mom. I’ve got to be at work in ten minutes."

I hug her. Her hair tickles my cheek.

“Bye, Mom, bye Oma,” she says and is off.

“I didn’t have time for hugs and kisses when you were small,” Mutti says. “But I did cook you a hot lunch every day.”

I rinse the egg off a plate and think back. I can’t remember going hungry as a little child. But I still remember Mutti pushing me away when I tried to hug her and she was at the kitchen stove, or feeding the new baby.

“Once, at the end of the winter, we ran out of money. We only had bread and jam left to eat,” Mutti reminisces. “I think that was in Weilburg, in 1954, the year your little sister, Eva, was born.”

I was seven then and remember it well. Toward the end of that winter, before we went out again to run the carnival circuit, we eventually had bread to eat every breakfast and supper, and often also for lunch. Mutti bought the cheapest rye bread and spread it with margarine and Vierfrucht, a jam made from four different types of fruit.

We ate margarine and Vierfrucht sandwiches seemingly forever. I still remember the taste. Or we had rye bread with lard and salt, or rye bread with margarine and sugar. I never got tired of rye bread, but I did miss a hot meal at times. I never went truly hungry, though.