Bratwurst vs Bangers

I have come to the somewhat embarrassing realisation that grocery stores are my happy place. There are no sophisticated Holly Golightly pretensions here, I’m afraid. When I need a pick me up I don’t go to Tiffany’s, I go to Tesco’s. And so it has been in Munich too. On a tough day I get out at a different subway entrance to the usual and make my way to the bigger Rewe supermarket near my flat. There I will quite happily spend upwards of an half hour simply staring at the aisles of foreign produce, carefully deciding what new and curious type of German cheese to try.

Like many other people, food is a love of mine. There is a certain comfort in knowing that you can go to any city in the UK and providing there is a supermarket there, you can get products that make you feel warm, nourished and have many positive memories attached to them. Every time I buy a tin of Baxter’s Cock-a-Leekie I remember a particularly brutal winter term in University when I survived almost exclusively off the tinned soup. Even now that taste somehow makes me feel sheltered and cared for.

There is no Cock-a-Leekie soup in Munich.

This was an unexpectedly major revelation when I first came here. Of course, logically I knew that moving to Germany would mean encountering German products in the supermarket but I didn’t anticipate the challenge of starting a new Julie Andrews catalogue of favourite things. Suddenly a trip to the supermarket required more careful consideration of what I should buy. There was no second-nature selection of items that had been tried and tested - I had to start anew.

It proved to be both a pleasure and a pain. Many goods are the same wherever you go, for instance, they may vary in size and colouring but an egg is an egg no matter what country you’re in. However, when it comes to certain products, preserves or cheeses for example, the varieties can differ grossly from those of home.

Firstly, there is the question of language. Doing the grocery shop in another country means being exposed to a wide and unusual variety of new vocab. When I first moved here I would have never have thought it essential to know and watch out for the German word, Pferdemetzgerei, which means horse meat butcher. In my efforts to select what I want, I often find myself resorting to kindergarten-level decryptions i.e. I look at the pictures on the jars of jam and then select the one that most resembles a raspberry.

There is then the act of compromise. I have resigned myself to the fact that I am unlikely to find a tea that will ever match a good mug of builder’s brew from back home. Haunting the back of my kitchen cupboards there are boxes full of abandoned German tea, which I have bought in the unfulfilled hope that they can emulate a cup of Tetley. Loathe as I am to waste things, the day is fast approaching when Philippe will stage an intervention and throw either the tea or myself out of the flat.

The offshoot of all this is discovery. Despite the failures when it comes to tea my ventures into German cuisine have revealed real gems, foodstuffs that I would never have encountered in the UK. Forays in the cereal aisle have unearthed a delicious brand of crispy muesli, which I spend unhealthy amounts of time thinking about and I have adopted the habit of sprinkling Aromat, a salty, surely-not-good-for-you seasoning, on to every vegetable I eat.

And then there is Bavarian cuisine itself. I have had to transition from the beautifully fried fish and chips of Brighton to the heavy, meaty fare of Munich. This is no hardship particularly as winter draws in and buttery roast chicken or a melting pork joint seems to be the ultimate go-to in cold weather.

Although I miss the creature comforts stacked on the shelves of supermarkets back home, as a result of this move to Munich, what I have now is all the more richer. I have two culinary traditions to enjoy, two (food)banks of associations and two types of sausage to choose from on a November night. There is no competition between them, only a feast.