Any country has its specialties and these German Meme things are certainly good, but in general German cuisine is not very sophisticated. In Europe by far it is Spanish and in general Mediterranean cuisine. I am from Spain and here the food is worldclass, apart there are also not only the best wines, but also the beer can compete with the German one. The worst cuisine is in Nordic countries and England, this is already off the scale, luckily there are good Chinese and Indian restaurants there that guarantee survival outside of fish and chips.
A huge chunk of traditional Nordic food is either dirt-poor peasant food, or food that keeps for months on end so the brutal winter doesn’t kill you regardless of whether you’re a dirt-poor peasant or a hoity-toity lord (and this is what lutefisk is: usually low-quality dried fish cured in lye to soften it.)
Unfortunately this also means that many recipes are more or less lost, or really only written down in eg. family recipe books. And at least here in Finland we’ve also stopped using a majority of the local herbs we historically used, in large part because they’re not seen as “fancy” (being herbs that dirt-poor peasants gathered from the woods) – not that we were ever that into spices, life being honestly pretty miserable for the majority of the population especially when serfdom was a thing. People had, well, other priorities
To be fair, when people in the US think of a “pretzel”, those are the ones they think of. You can buy big bags of those in any supermarket. If you want to get a big, bready pretzel, you have to go to a restaurant.
Bavaria is probably the most "German" german region. That's where all the lederhosen stereotypes come from.
Basically it's the Texas of Germany. Old school, religious, and conservative.
Edit: in the very rural parts, they even have their own dialect that to some Germans is almost completely unintelligible. I realized this when I took German language classes in high school in the USA and what they were having me learn was very much NOT the way my Bavarian mother spoke to me. It felt kind of irritating when they told me I was pronouncing things wrong and my grammar was wrong when I fuckin' lived there as a child and spoke it fluently.
Well it’s the part where after the second world war Americans temporarily governed and American soldiers and their families where stationed. So all they ever saw of Germany was Bavaria. They took their experience back home and so the image spread.
Northern Germany is nothing like southern Germany. Yes they like their beer, but Bratwurst and pretzels? More fish and bread.
I was with you in the first half. But northern Germany still loves their beer and brats. We had bbqs almost every weekend and if you didn’t have beer and brats, you might as well not have a party.
Although there almost always way just a full fish on the grill at some point only in northern Germany so I will give you that.
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