The Saddest Part of German Cuisine Lives Behind the Deli Counter

All photos by Dominic Blewett

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Food

The Saddest Part of German Cuisine Lives Behind the Deli Counter

German food is sad, and there is no more depressing place to witness the depth of this despair than at the deli counter. Betwixt the perfectly edible meat and delicious cheeses lies a section of strange processed meats that makes customers cry.

German food is sad, and there is no sadder place to witness the depth of this sadness than at the deli counter in your local supermarket. Betwixt the perfectly edible meat and the perfectly edible cheese lies a section of sad, strange proto-meats that provide a glimpse into (either) a past that will not loosen its grip on the present, or a melancholy future in which everything is processed and twisted into a sculpture of everybody, everywhere, weeping. Wilkommen. Bend your taste glands and mind to mouth brutality, to a minimalist despair.

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Chicken in Aspic

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Splats of bubbled orange and torn strips of what might be pineapple or omelet cuddle up together. Next to these oddities, the chicken looks surprisingly fresh, slightly familiar. Yet despite its sickly appearance, it doesn't smell of vomit—rather airplane food as you unwrap it, or warm Play-Doh rolled in the ash of autumn leaves. Move the slice into your mouth and you will believe you are eating a rubber fruit salad served from the ashes of a bonfire; the fruit, or whatever it is, flows down the throat on a stream of aspic, leaving strips of meat in my molars.

Mortadella Mit Ei

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This sounds like Italian for 'little death', although I can't find any translation that would make it true. Anyway it's not quite as bad as dying, its merely 'not nice'. A planetary egg floats in a cosmic void of pink blancmange. Outer space smells of weak pâté. This mortadella tastes like a poorly-made Scotch egg, one you bite into to discover an empty, egg-shaped space within the casing. Yet even though the egg is missing, you still taste it because you were expecting it. Deliriously holding on to that hallucination of taste.

Mortadella Mit Pistazien

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Little can be said about this slice of sadness, for it is the kind of sadness that makes you wonder why you are sad at all. And in realizing you are sad for no reason, you become sadder from the pointlessness of your sadness. This mottled, marbled, sliced of mortality harbors little bits of pistachio for the added illusion of flavor. It smells of ham and of pinkness, but ends sourly, with a wrinkled nose.

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Pikant Mix Gemüse in Aspik – Reinert

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This is the item I have feared most. Like the other 'things of aspic', it looks like neatly constructed comedy sick; a laminated spray of boiled vegetables—broccoli, cauliflower, carrot, pepper, and corn. Other than the very elderly, the sick, or people who can't be bothered to blend fresh vegetables into a tasty, healthy juice, who eats this? It's clown food. Food for grown men in face paint who try to make kids laugh but end up making them cry. It smells of vinegar, overcooked carrots, and school dinners from the underfunded part of town. Sweet and sour mingle on the tongue; like a drink of gherkin water with lumps—some soft, some crunchy. Eating this is like nodding off at a party and waking up chewing on a puddle of someone else's cold vomit. This was the only thing I had to spit out.

Pfeffer Bierschinken

Pfeffer-Bierschinken

'Pepper beerham' smells of a generic pâté or liver sausage, of childhood sandwiches straining to be high-class. As if to symbolize its failure it resembles a tacky, pink marble that's moulded over with green bits. It tastes very strongly of nothing, then of pâté, then of smoked ham. It's not too bad, actually.

Filetrotwurst

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If an evil mother was to hide veal in the chocolate mousse she made for her children, it would look like this. It smells of blood, and tastes a little like it too. The aftertaste consists of a peppery crescendo followed by a lingering sense of having 'gone a step too far'. It's a bit like biting someone as a joke, only to realize moments later that your teeth have hit an artery. Whoops.

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Bedf Zungenrot Wurst

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One of the stauncher 'meats' at the deli counter, it looks like the throat lining of an easily angered wild animal, a boar perhaps, or a honey badger. It smells of the blood of their fallen, mutilated prey and tastes like an Angel Delight made of hemoglobin and the dried-out cakes from cancelled wedding receptions.

Schinken Champignon in Aspik

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This smells like diluted apple cider vinegar, and looks like a pig fired out of a cannon and shattered on the season's first pond ice. There's negligible mushroom somewhere in there, which is probably for the best, as what little exists looks to be of the canned variety. And what is sadder than canned mushrooms? Very little. It tastes of a heavy pedestrian sorrow, and of a pickled ham that has no business being pickled. Not for the first time during my journey through the deli counter do I wonder: Is this pet food? Am I even supposed to know what this tastes like?

Heidefrühstück

heide-fruhstuck

Without consulting a dictionary, I will translate this as 'Heidi's Breakfast.' But why is it called this? Perhaps because the meat could be her face and the golden fat looks like pigtails. Except that her face would be a face that had been chewed and spat back onto itself, and her hair would be made of wee. But maybe that's not the reason at all. Maybe it's because this is what Heidi eats for breakfast. In which case, how should I eat this, Heidi? Should I remove the fat and eat the meat, or eat it all together? Should I throw it in the bin? I eat its face and hair in one bite. It tastes like lemon curd, then rotten pork, then lemon curd again.

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Pizza Leberkäse

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'Pizza liver cheese' is an unappetizing name for a foodstuff. It brings to mind dairy made from bile, stiffened in the fridge and served as a canapé to adventurous foodies before they sit down to a banquet of exotic dishes made from insects and rare genitals. It doesn't look like pizza, unless it had a dead man, not dough, as its base. It tastes of spam with a whiff of dried herbs de Provence. A strange, gammy smear of butter or fat disguises itself as cheese within, adding extra poignancy to what is already a mouthful quivering with it.

Rotweinsülze

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It smells like weak vinegar and looks like every single shred of ham and bacon you've eaten in your entire life thrown up in a single splash. It tastes quite strongly of despair, with a hint of mulled wine. Like Christmas spent all by yourself during a power outage with cat food as the only food options in your cupboards.

Something Mit Zwiebel

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Owning a sour, hammy and oniony scent, and looking like a textbook diagram of soil horizons, or part of the body under a microscope, this is one of the prettier meat oddities I've come across at the German deli counter. So pretty, in fact, it could be worn by a lady as a brooch. The makers of this product clearly pay attention to detail, as there is a fine dusting of dried herbs across the top of the aspic. It tastes exactly as it smells: hammy and oniony.

Hering in Gelee

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I did not want to eat this, because of the way it looks and because of the way it looks. The egg, like an eye, watches you watching it. Like an underwater Smaug, it is guardian of a treasure trove of fish corpses. Naturally, it smells of fish. It tastes of fish too, but the jelly is dense and claggy, and makes you feel like you're drowning in a thick sea, far away from land.

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Billy Pastete

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The soul of this processed meat--if it can be said to have one--contains a shadowy, never-ending cartoon chase. Unmoving, over a dead skin-colored landscape, Tom chases Jerry towards the horizon, the edge of the meat. They are the color of a new bruise. Tom will never catch Jerry, and neither of them will ever escape the meat.

Billy Pastete smells of sperm sprayed into the spring breeze, but although this might suggest a promise of life, Billy tastes of death. As teeth meet meat with a texture of dead lips, a faint citrus taste hits the tongue and immediately fades, leaving behind visions of embalming; of the morgue. Prolonged chewing evokes nursing homes and a feeling that the end is approaching; a meat apparently made for children encourages a dour reflection on mortality.

Schinken Meerrettisch

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Before tasting this, you might expect it to make you sneeze hard enough to dislodge a monocle. This amount of horseradish should be pretty potent. But some secret method has removed all life from the condiment and this thing, which looks like a flattened, rolled out octopus tentacle, which is very, very bland. Very bland.