Wirklich? Really?: Cubi-Doo

I hope that Hanna-Barbera is getting some royalties on this one.  Lord knows they could use it after they made the mistake of backing an all-ages-inappropriate family movie and marketing it to Buffy fans.


This is not the lone incidence of Scooby-doo in everyday German.  Gimp - that weird plastic crap used to braid ugly keychains -  is also known here in Germany as Scooby-Doo.  Kids still use it.  Trade it.  Give it to their best friends.  And - so say the Europeans - they had the name first.  See Wikipedia for the whole (rather unlikely) story in which "Scoubidou" is a popular French song from the 1950s, scoubidous are some kind of sock hop version of jelly bracelets, and Ethel and Julius Rothenburg are all to blame.  So who stole what, when, and from whom?  Let me just say that, after hearing three 9 year old boys absent-mindedly sing all the words to (I've Had The)Time of My Life while drawing Star Wars fan pictures, I am no longer surprised to find further evidence that Europe has access to a time warp that taps into memes no one else remembers.  

Geschmack: Amerikaner aka The Black and White Cookie

Germans may not get Seinfeld, but they do get the Black and White Cookie, known here as the Amerikaner. If the Black & White Cookie is all about racial harmony, the Germans are making a pretty clear statement with their baked goods.  It is also widely available in the segregated all black or all white version.

Having first discovered that I could get the Black and White Cookie here, around the corner, in Germany, I took the literal, typical, unfamiliar-immigrant approach and called it the "Schwarz und Weiß Keks."   Nobody let me know I had it all wrong, possibly because they wanted to avoid the 30 seconds of uncontrollable mirth that now happens every time I ask for an Amerikaner.  Each time that word comes out of my mouth it's like I have fulfilled for the bakery staff all of the stereotypes about Americans in that one brief moment of ordering a baked good.  Next time I should add one of the terrible, heavy, thick-as-mud doughnuts they call American-style to my order and the staff can die and go to heaven.  Man, can't we all just get along?  Look to the cookie!

Geschmack: Johannisbeere (Currants)

Currants don't exactly sing summer to me.  As someone whose previous experience of the currant family was limited to Ribena concentrate, I was pretty convinced that currants were the grape's ugly cousin complete with multiplied stain-producing side effects.  However, here in Germany escaping currant is not just a matter of skipping out on nasty fruit cakes or passing over the dusty section of juice concentrates at the health food store.  Currants are in everything - stuffed in pastries, baked into cakes like the Linzertorte, boiled down to produce a dead-ringer cranberry-like sauce with meats, and as a fresh garnish with everything from ice cream sundaes to sausage dumplings.  And, of course, they are plentiful throughout the summer at the farmer's market, where they are cheap and somehow the season seems to never end.  

I first ventured into red currant eating as a result of making Rote Grütze, a tart northern German dessert that involves boiling down red fruits including the currant to make a jelly that is then served with vanilla sauce.  Thanks to a high rate of irresistibility, only half of raspberries and strawberries purchased for prepared desserts ever make it through the washing phase to the bowl.  Likewise, faced with a box of corn-pop-sized currants, with tiny thread-like little stems to be plucked from each one, I soon discovered that the more I ate, the fewer I had to stem.  While the first couple result in the sour-faced, knee jerk reaction of "why did I eat that?" and "that was definitely not a raspberry," after thus absent-mindedly munching through half a box of currants, it's safe to say that your taste is fully formed.

Pictured we have white currants, possibly the best possible currant - sweet, fresh and absolutely non-staining, should you be prone to that sort of accident.

Wirklich? Really?: Milka White and Rice

European brands have replaced both their R&D and their marketing departments with the idiomatic English dictionary.

Word Up: das Pfand, das Flaschenpfand

Flaschenpfand n, pl. bottle deposit

   The Pfandflaschen system helps keep waste diversion under control in Germany by enticing Germans to lug their empty bottles back to the grocery store to reclaim their deposit.  Jars, aluminum cans, glass, and plastic bottles are not only recyclable, but most of the glass is returned to the food company to be refilled and resold.  And it’s worth it – the Pfand or deposit on one of these bottles can be up to 25 cents.  The Pfand you pay on food containers is calculated separately on your shopping bill, so it’s easy to see that if you don’t return your bottles, you’re throwing away the value of a few sausages or a pretzel or two.

    Only large stores are required to have a Pfand return station, but there are options as to how to recover Pfand. Some stores have machines where you feed your bottles into a drum that spins the container while  scanning for label, weight and size and then finally burps out a credit slip.  Other grocers have real live human sorters who count up your bottles and fling them into their required bins in much less time than it takes the machine to digest all of the bottle’s measurements.  While the machines are pretty efficient, the sorters are way faster.  While each person visiting the sorter depot brings on average a shopping bag worth of bottles, even a sudden wave of hoarder customers with a Mezzo-Mix addiction can be reduced to zero in a minute or two. As long as no do-gooders try to help sort their own returnables - delicately pulling single bottles out of their plastic bags and then blinking bewilderedly at all the cartons, crates, bags and bins while the sorter tries to wrench the containers out of their hands – it’s an easy and efficient way to ensure food containers end up being recycled or reused as food containers, and not thrown into the plastic melting pot to become something less useful.

    Reusable bottles, or bottles with Mehrwegpfand, have much lower deposit amounts than the Einwegpfand on single-use containers returned for recycling.  Wine, beer, and liquor have the lowest Pfand – something like 8 cents per bottle, a pretty low rate that is not surprisingly set by beer brewers themselves, while Einwegpfand is regulated by the government at a pretty high rate.  Yet, despite the smaller deposit, Mehrwegpfand containers like beer bottles have a much better return rate than Einwegpfand like water and pop bottles. And without that refund, water, the most purchased beverage in Germany, ends up being more expensive than beer.  (Stats courtesy my German textbook -  the same textbook also taught me how to ask where to find Guns N Roses cassettes, so I’d guess that its data is circa 1990.)

Image courtesy femalepeople.wordpress.com