Sehr lecker

We have friends visiting from the U.S.: Michelle and her daughter Zoe. We picked them up at the Hauptbahnhof this afternoon, brought them back to our apartment, and immediately took them to the Lienhart bakery on the corner.

"We have guests from the U.S.," I told the proprietor, "and we are here for their first Cultural Experience. What do you have today?"

"Oh, of course!," she replied. There followed a loving description of all of today's best and freshest cakes and cookies, including the "Badisch Christmas specialty, Linzer Torte."

"Linzer Torte is Badisch?" I said, attempting to sound like an inquisitive foreigner who didn't have a blog entry riding on the answer. "Please tell me about this. I thought Linzer Torte came from Austria--from Linz."

The proprietor's hackles were a wee bit raised. "No, Linzer Torte is a particularly Badisch specialty," she said. Then she paused and conceded, "yes, it is possible that the Ur-recipe came from the city called Linz, in Austria, but for at least 150 years, bakers in Baden have been making the real Linzer Torte."

After we chose five different pieces of cake, she added a gift to our order: a small spiced chocolate covered Gugelhupf cake, also a regional seasonal specialty, sehr lecker.

Lecker, by the way, is one of my favorite German words. It means "yummy," which is probably a good enough reason to like it, but what I most enjoy is the inflection people use when saying the word in advertisements on radio or TV. The accent goes on the first syllable, which is quickly and deftly flicked off the tongue in order to move on to the leisurely, drawn out, unstressed second syllable: 'LECK-aaaaaahr. The English equivalent would be something like pronouncing "yummy" as 'YM-eeeee." Of course, people who aren't advertising anything on the air usually simply say 'leck-er, but it isn't anywhere near as entertaining.