Do you still remember typical East German recipes, the taste of Jägerschnitzel and Quarkkeulchen? Green Thuringian dumplings and Klitscher with applesauce or goulash? Buchteln, Senfeier, Tote Oma or Goldbroiler?
Admit it, your mouth is already watering.
If you want to cook like in the GDR, you’ll find the right recipes here. And you don’t have to stand in line for hours before cooking or put on your Kittelschürze, the wraparound smock apron.
Some of our recipes were known even to the class enemy, as the GDR called the West, such as Dresdner Eierschecke, Prasselkuchen or Soljanka. Others may surprise you, because you didn’t know the GDR tasted like this.
Subsidized staples, creativity and the Intershop
Staple foods in the GDR were subsidized and cheap, but often not available. If you saw a line somewhere, you joined it – there was bound to be something! Anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to shop with hard currency at the Intershop, the state-run chain selling imported goods for foreign money, or couldn’t afford the Delikat and Exquisit shops, state-run stores with upscale goods at high prices, had to bring a lot of creativity to their recipes.
Cooking in the GDR was seasonal: you tended your Datsche (weekend garden plot) and preserved the harvest on your coal stove. In the morning you spread your own jam on your 5-Pfennig roll (a Pfennig was a hundredth of a Mark) and drank thin Muckefuck, a coffee substitute made from roasted grain, or instant Im-Nu, because the Ho-Mo-Sechs (Honecker Mocca for six Mark) had probably wrecked the coffee machine at the VEB, the state-owned company, yet again.
No, we don’t miss everything about the GDR. But cooking the way we used to, we’re sometimes in the mood for that.