Brandenburg has always been a place people moved to. People from all over the GDR were settled here to work in agriculture, in state-owned enterprises, in the National People’s Army or in education. In recent years this trend has been growing again, at least near Berlin. Because of all the “incoming” influences, it is difficult to speak of an original Brandenburg cuisine. Who shaped recipes in Brandenburg? After all, the people from Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg, Saxony and Thuringia had brought their cuisine with them. Before that, settlers from Switzerland, Holland, France and the Palatinate had already come to the land between the Elbe and the Oder. Nevertheless, the natural conditions – forests, agriculture and numerous lakes and rivers – shaped a specific Brandenburg cuisine. Many recipes are characterized by ingredients such as fish, game, certain vegetables and mushrooms.
Down-to-earth recipes with Slavic influences
Brandenburg is traditionally an agricultural region with soils that are partly fertile, partly quite sandy. The population, once rather poor, cultivated a down-to-earth, nourishing cuisine with Slavic influences. The Slavic element is of course especially pronounced in the Spreewald, where the Sorbian minority shaped the entire culture. Brandenburg was also always responsible for supplying Berlin. By royal decree, Frederick the Great saw to it in 1750 that more potatoes were grown here. Grain as well as fruit and vegetable growing were always the cornerstones of Brandenburg agriculture. Recipes with potatoes, pears, turnips and apples fed the ordinary people.
Asparagus, fish, turnips and cucumbers
Brandenburg is considered a classic asparagus-growing region. In the GDR, however, the working population was rarely granted the pleasure of eating this fine vegetable, once introduced by the Huguenots from France. Like everything that could be turned into hard currency, the best asparagus went to the West. It was similar with the fine kinds of fish that were plentiful in Brandenburg’s lakes. Trout and carp were certainly available. An eel or a zander, on the other hand, was considered an extraordinary rarity. The Teltower Rübchen, small turnips from Teltow that are famous again today, were largely forgotten in the GDR. The Spreewaldgurke, the pickled cucumber from the Spreewald, on the other hand, did end up on GDR citizens’ plates. What reached the shops was mostly jars of coarse pickle slices. The delicate little gherkins were probably sitting on the shelf at Aldi.
Good connections and hearty food
Anyone who worked in an LPG, an agricultural cooperative, that raised livestock might get the chance to top up their personal meat allowance. The close-knit collective sometimes unofficially kept an extra cow or pig, which was shared out in brotherly fashion after slaughter. You also had a butcher you knew who took care of the processing. Anyone who was friends with a hunter and so now and then came by a piece of game could also count themselves lucky. Kasseler (cured and smoked pork), a Prussian invention of master butcher Cassel, and Eisbein (pickled pork knuckle) were also extremely popular and widespread in the GDR.
Fruit wine, beer and mushrooms from the forest
Fruit wines and juices from the Havelland were known in the GDR as well and, with luck, available. You could take your own apples to the various Brandenburg cider presses and receive a certain amount of apple juice or apple wine for little money. Brewing also always played a role in Brandenburg. But beer capitals like Bernau in Brandenburg lost importance in GDR times. What was accessible to all GDR citizens were the mushrooms of the forest. Bay boletes, porcini and chanterelles grow in abundance in Brandenburg’s forests and provided highlights on the menu every year in the fall.