M. E. W. Sherwood

"I wonder if Charlemagne ever drank

A tankard of Assmanschausen. Nay!

If he had, his empire never would rank

As it does with the royalist realms to-day;

For the goddess that laughs within the cup

Had wiled and won him from blood and war,

And shown, as he drained her long draughts up,

There was something better worth living for

Than kingcraft keeping his gruff brow sad.

I wish from my very soul she had."

The deep, dark, swiftly flowing Rhine, its legends, its forests of silver firs and pines, its mountains crowned with castles, and its hillsides blushing with the bending vine, the convent's ancient walls, the glistening spire, the maidens with their plaited hair, and "hands that offer early flowers," all the bright, beautiful, romantic landscape, the dancing waves which wash its historic shores, its donjon keeps and haunted Tenter Rock, its

"Beetling walls with ivy grown,

Frowning heights of mossy stone,"—

all this beauty is placed in the land of the sauer-kraut, the herring salad, the sweet stewed fruit with pork, pig and prune sauce, carp stewed in beer, raw goose-flesh or GÖttingen sausages, potato sweetened, and cabbage soured,—in a land, in short, whose kitchen is an abomination to all other nations.

Not that one does not get an excellent dinner at a German hotel in a great city. But all the cooks are French. The powerful young emperor has, however, given his orders that all menus shall hereafter be written in German; the language of Ude, Soyer, Valet, and Francatelli, Brillat, Savarin, and BÉchamel, is to be replaced by German.

But if the viands are not good, the wines are highly praised by the gourmet; and as these wines are often exported, it is said that one gets a better German wine in New York than at a second-class hotel at Bonn or Cologne or DÜsseldorf,—on the same principle that fish at Newport is less fresh than at New York, for it is all bought, sent to New York, and then sent back to Newport. In other words, the exporters are careful to keep up the reputation of their exported wines.

Assmanschausen is a red Rhine wine of high degree; some gourmets call it the Burgundy of the Rhine. This poetic beverage is found within the gorge of the Rhine.

The bend which the noble river assumes at the Rheingau is said to have the effect of concentrating the sun's rays, reflected from the surface of the water as from a mirror, upon the vine-clad slopes; and it is to this circumstance, combined with the favourable nature of the soil, and to the vineyards being completely sheltered from the north winds by the Taunus range, that the marked superiority of the wines of the Rheingau is ordinarily attributed.

And Longfellow says:—

We know but little of the superior red wines of Walporzheimer, Ahrweiler, and Bodendorfer, which come from the valley of the Ahr. The Ahr falls into the Rhine near Sinzig, midway between Coblenz and Bonn. The wines from its beautiful vineyards are a fine deep red. The taste is astringent, somewhat like port. There is an agreeable red wine called Kreutzburger which comes from the neighbourhood of Ehrenbreitstein. Linz on the Rhine sends us a good red wine known as Dattenberger. These are all pure wines which know no doctoring.

The Liebfrauenmilch is a Riesling wine with a fine bouquet. It owes its celebrity rather to its name than its merits. It comes from the vineyards adjoining the Liebfrauen Kirche near Worms, and was named by some pious churchman.

No wines have as many poetical tributes as the Rhine wines. One of the English poets sings:—

The Steinbergers, the Hochheimers, Marcobrunners, and RÜdesheimers, sound like so many noble families. Indeed an American senator, hearing these fine names, remarked: "I have no doubt, sir, they are all very nice girls."

There is a famous Hochheimer, no less than a hundred and sixty-seven years old, the vintage of that year when the Duke of Marlborough gained the Battle of Ramillies. Let us hope that he and Prince Eugene moistened their clay and labours with some of this famous wine. These wines do not last, however. The best age is ten years, and those which have been stored in the antique vaulted cellar of the Bernardine Abbey of Eberbach, world-renowned as the Grand-ducal Cabinet wine of the ruler of Nassau, are now completely run out. Even Rudesheimer of 1872 is no longer good.

It must be remembered, however, that these wines are never fortified. To put extraneous alcohol into their beloved Rhine wine would rouse Rudolph of Hapsburg and Conrad of Hotstettin from the sleep of centuries.

The Steinberger Cabinet of 1862 is the most superb. Of Rhine wines for bouquet, refined flavour, combined richness and delicacy. We do not except Schloss Johannisberger, because that is not in the market. A Marcobrunner and a RÜdesheimer are not to be despised.

Prince Metternich sent to Jules Janin for his autograph, and the witty poet editor sent a receipt for twelve bottles of Imperial Schloss Johannisberger. The Prince took the hint and had a dozen of the very best cabinet wine forwarded, every bottle being sealed and every cork duly branded with the Prince's crest! The Johannisberger wine is excessively sweet, singularly soft, and gives forth a delicious perfume, a rich, limpid, amber-coloured wine, with a faint bitter flavour; it is as beautiful to look at as it is luscious to the taste, and it possesses a bouquet which the Empress EugÉnie compared to that of heliotrope, violets, and geranium leaves combined.

The refined pungent flavour of a good Hock, its slight racy sharpness, with an after almond flavour, make it an admirable appetizer. The staircase vineyards, in which the grapes grow on the Rhine, seem to catch all the revivifying influences of sunshine. Their splendid golden colour is caught from those first beams of the sun as he greets his bride, the Earth, after he has been separated from her for twelve dark hours.

Some very good wine comes from the Rochusberg, immediately opposite RÜdesheim. Goethe heard a sermon here once in which the preacher glorified God in proportion to the number of bottles of good wine it was daily vouchsafed to him to stow away under his waistband.

It was here that the rascal lived who drank wine out of a boot, immortalized by Longfellow. We can hardly, however, abuse the man, for he had an incurable thirst, and no crystal goblet would have held enough for him,—not indeed the biggest German beer mug.

Longfellow, in the "Golden Legend," has a chapter devoted to wine. In this poem the old cellarer muses, as he goes to draw the fine wine for the fathers, who sit above the salt, and he utters this truth of those brothers who sit below the salt:—

The superior wines of the Rhine, Walporzheimer, Ahrweiler and Bodendorfer, all deserve notice.

The kind of wine to be served with a dinner must depend on the means of the host. It is to be feared that, ignorantly or otherwise, many wines with high-sounding names which are not good are offered to guests.

Mr. Evarts made a witty remark on this subject. Some one said to him, "I hear that as a great diner-out you find yourself the worse for drinking so many different sorts of wine." "Oh no," said Mr. Evarts, "I do not object to the different wines, it is the indifferent wines which hurt me!"

Savarin says, sententiously, "Nothing can exceed the treachery of asking people to dinner under the guise of friendship, and then giving them to eat or drink of that which may be injurious to health." We should think so. That was the pleasant hospitality of the Borgias. In the neighbourhood of Neuwied, the dealers are accused of much doctoring of wine. During the vintage, at night, when the moon has gone down, boats glide over the Rhine freighted with a soapy substance manufactured from potatoes, and called by its owners sugar. This stuff is thrown into the vats containing the must, water is introduced from pumps and wells, chemical ferments and artificial heat are applied. This noble fluid is sent everywhere by land and water, and labelled as first-class wine. It is not bad to the taste, but does not bear transportation. This adulteration chiefly affects the wines sold at German hotels.

Heinrich Heine has left us this picture of a German dinner: "I dined at the Crown at Clausthal. My repast consisted of spring greens, parsley soup, violet blue cabbage, a pile of roast veal, which resembled Chimborazo in miniature, and a sort of smoked herring called buckings, from their inventor William Buckings, who died in 1447, and who on account of that invention was so greatly honoured by Charles V. that the great monarch in 1556 made a journey from Middelburg to Bierlied, in Zealand, for the express purpose of visiting the grave of the great fish-dryer. How exquisitely such dishes taste when we are familiar with their historical associations."

It is impossible in translation to give Heine's intense ridicule and scorn. He was a Frenchman out of place in Germany. He revolted at things German, but endeared himself to his people by his wit, universality of talent, and sincerity. The world has thanked him for his "Reisebilder." Heine gives us new ideas of the horrors of German cookery when he talks of GÖttingen sausages, Hamburg smoked beef, Pomeranian goose-breasts, ox-tongues, calf's brains in pastry, gudgeon cakes, and "a wretched pig's-head in a wretcheder sauce, which has neither a Grecian nor a Persian flavour, but which tasted like tea and soft soap."

He cannot leave GÖttingen without this description: "The town of GÖttingen, celebrated for its sausages and its university, belongs to the King of Hanover, and contains nine hundred and ninety-nine dwellings, divers chambers, an observatory, a prison, a library, and a council chamber where the beer is excellent."

German sausages are very good. Even the great Goethe, in dying, remembered to send a sausage to his Æsthetic love of a lifetime, the Frau Von Stein.

Thackeray, who was keenly alive to the horrors of German cookery, says that whatever is not sour is greasy, and whatever is not greasy is sour. The curious bill of fare of a middle-class German table is something like this: They begin with a pudding. They serve sweet preserved fruit with the meat, generally stewed cherries. They go on with dreadful dishes of cabbage and preparations of milk, curdled, soured, and cheesed.

Dr. Lieber, the learned philologist, was eloquent on the subject of the coarseness of the German appetite. He had early corrected his by a visit to Italy, and he remarked, with his usual profundity, that it was "the more incomprehensible as nature had given Germany the finest wines with which to wash down the worst cookery."

A favourite dish is potato pancakes. The raw potatoes are scraped fine, mixed with milk, and then treated like flour cakes, served with apple or plum sauce.

Sauer-kraut is ridiculed, but it is only cabbage cut fine and pickled. There are two delicious dishes in which it plays an important part: one is roast pheasant cut fine and cooked with sauer-kraut and champagne; the other is sauer-kraut cooked in the croÛte of a Strasbourg pÂtÉ de foie gras.

Favourite Austro-Hungarian dishes are bachhendl, baked spring-chicken,—the chicken rolled into a paste of egg flour and then baked. It is rather dry to eat, but just the thing with a bottle of Hungarian wine. Also a beefsteak with plenty of paprika, or Hungarian red pepper, Brinsa cheese, pot cheese, made in the Carpathian mountains and baked in a hot oven.

Brook trout is never fried, but boiled in water, and then served surrounded by parsley in melted butter.

In eastern Russia grows a pea, the gray pea, which is boiled and eaten like peanuts by peeling off the hard skin, or boiled with some sort of sour-sweet sauce, which softens the skin. This pea is such a favourite with the Lithuanians that it is made the subject of poetry.

Venison, and hare soup, are deliciously gamey bouillons, which are made of the soup bone of the roast. The Polish soup barscz is made of bouillon with the juice of red beets, little saucissons, and specially made pastry, with highly spiced forced-meat balls swimming in it.

Lettuce salad is prepared in Germany with sour cream.

A favourite drink is warm beer,—beer heated with the yolk of an egg in it.

Beer is the amber inspiration of the Germans, and plays its daily, hourly part in their science of entertaining.

And the pea which can be skinned, which is such a favourite with the Lithuanians, has also been immortalized by Thackeray:—

But it must not be supposed that rich German citizens of the United States do not know how to give a good dinner. Cosmopolitan in everything else, these, the best colonists whom Europe has sent to us, make good soldiers, good statesmen, and good entertainers. They do not insist that we shall eat pig and prune sauce. No, they give us the most affluent bill of fare which the market affords. They give us a fine dining-room in which to eat it, and they offer as no other men can "a tankard of Assmanschausen."

They give us, as a nation, a valuable present in mineral water. The Apollinaris bubbling up near the Rhine seems sent by Heaven to avert that gout and rheumatism which are the terrible after-dinner penalties of those who like too well the noble Rhine wines.