Germany
Serious bread, a thousand sausages and a beer culture with actual rules — heartier and more regional than its reputation.
Find a beer garden under the chestnut trees, order a litre you’ll probably regret, and watch the food arrive built for the long afternoon: a knuckle of pork with crackling you can hear across the table, a soft pretzel the size of your head, a smear of sweet mustard. Germans take their beer seriously enough to have written a purity law in 1516 and kept to it ever since.
The country runs on bread — hundreds of dark, seeded, chewy loaves no other nation bothers to bake — and on the sausage, which shifts with every region: a Currywurst under curry ketchup at a Berlin kerb, a Weisswurst eaten before noon with wheat beer in Munich, delicate Maultaschen parcels in Swabia. It’s honest, seasonal cooking; when the white asparagus arrives in spring the whole country loses its head over it for six short weeks, and come December it turns to mulled wine and gingerbread in the market squares.
- Schweinshaxe (roast pork knuckle)
- Currywurst
- Bratwurst & sauerkraut
- Maultaschen (Swabian filled pasta)
- pretzels
- Black Forest gâteau