Munich, day 2

On Thursday, we spent a lovely half day in Munich seeing sights old and new. Our first stop was the Hauptbahnhof, where we stored our luggage so we could walk around unencumbered. Imagine living in a country where hundreds of people can store un-X-rayed luggage for days on end in a building essential to public transportation. (Come to think of it, imagine living in a country where public transportation is considered essential.)

Our intended destination was the Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst. As we headed there from the Hauptbahnhof, Stefan pointed out the sights to E. "See that building over there? That was my Gymnasium [high school]. See the park across the street? We used to throw paper airplanes out the school windows and try to get them to land in the park." So of course, when we walked past the Städtisches Luisengymnasium, E and I nudged Stefan to ring the bell to ask if we could take a quick look around. One of the school's directors gave us a tour. A lot has changed since 1983, but a lot has also stayed the same.

S, standing in the school's assembly space

Stefan asked me to point out that, in the above photo, the thing on his head that looks like a tribble is actually a glaring corbel sculpture.

Glaring corbel ≠ tribble

Front entrance of the Luisengymnasium

As we continued toward the Egyptian Museum, Stefan observed that we were near "Inge's church"--St. Bonifaz, a Benedictine monastery that was built in 1850. It was bombed in WWII, and a dear friend of Helen's, artist Inge Seifert, made the bronze doors when the church was rebuilt.

Here are one and a half of Inge's doors:

The interior is quite modern now, retaining only few original pillars.

A side chapel contains a beautiful "Black Madonna." Alas, the St. Bonifaz website currently has no information about the church's art, so I have no idea how old this Madonna is.

Ludwig I of Bavaria is entombed at St. Bonifaz, along with his wife, Therese von Sachsen-Hildburghausen.

Front of St. Bonifaz

We continued on toward the Egyptian Museum, passing a fantastic wiggly window wall...

...and the former administrative building of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP)--the Nazi Party--built for Hitler in the 1930s (along with an adjacent Nazi-style building, the Führerbau). Hanging in front, as of eight days ago, are banners that read...

...Wir (alle) sind das Volk. Designed by Hans Haacke, the banners are part of a travelling exhibit created to honor the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. The slogan refers to a chant used during the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig in 1989-90--wir sind das Volk (we are the people)--but clarifies that "we" means "we all."

Across the street from the Nazi buildings was this fine doorknob:

After a very quick detour to glance at some of the neo-classical architecture in Königsplatz,...

...we finally arrived at the Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst. On the lawn outside of the museum is a curious sculpture. E thought it looked like it had a bloody nose; Stefan thought it was vomiting blood. Googling that evening, we learned its name is "Present Continuous" (2011) and its nickname is "Barfi." Barfi's red steel pole extends all the way into the Egyptian Museum, which makes me wonder if the sculpture is penetrating the earth with a red-laser eye.

The museum was built in 2013 and is mostly underground. We felt like we were descending into a tomb just entering; the interior staircase from the foyer down to the collection gives a similar impression. The building alone is beautiful in its stony simplicity.

Present Continuous is contemporary art; this sign inside the Egyptian Museum reminds us that all art has been contemporary at some point.

The museum is one of the most elegant and pleasingly informative museums I've ever seen. A bronze rail set into the stone floor guides visitors through the museum, while interactive digital stations provide accessible supplemental information about many of the exhibited pieces.

Head from a lion-shaped water spout, ca. 1450 BCE

Can you see Barfi's laser beam?

Pottery, pottery, pottery. These black and red pots are ~5,600 years old, and used techniques and materials we still use today--coil built earthenware, burnished terra sigillata, smoke.

The shard here is from a ~3,800-year-old bread baker, but it looks like it could have been carved yesterday.

The earthenware pot below is far more recent--6th-century CE.

Carly enjoyed these two sculptures of Horus as a falcon, one made of silver (6th-c. BCE) and one of granite (3rd c. BCE):

This display illustrated how a sculptor might turn a block of stone into a detailed, carved figure. I took a picture because I thought it might be instructive for next year's Paschal yam.

More ancient pottery--about 5,000 years old--made with techniques that remain contemporary:

The museum emphasized artistic influences between Egypt and other parts of the world. The last room included these humongous 9th-c. BCE Assyrian genies, formerly painted, with cuneiform text across their middles. Ludwig I bought them in 1863 from their English excavator.

The room also includes a glorious striding lion from the Ishtar Gate of Babylon (ca. 575 BCE). Most of the gate is in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. (For another Ishtar lion, scroll down to Day 3 of http://wadlstrumpf.blogspot.com/2015/07/berlin-photo-dump-days-2-4.html. Where does this cultural treasure belong?)

After visiting the museum, we headed back to the Hauptbahnhof, collected our luggage, and hopped on the S8 to Woerthsee...

...just in time to see the Zugspitze from the back yard as dusk fell.

A December day in Munich

Before heading to H's, we gifted ourselves with an overnight stay in Munich, in a pension near the Englischen Garten. We set out mid-afternoon, walking through the garden and tempting smart crows with bits of apple. We passed through the Christkindlmarkt at the Chienesischen Turm--where basteln, roasted chestnuts, and Gluehwein were, unsurprisingly, the bulk of the attractions--to the Monopteros built by Leo von Klenze in 1837.

Monopteros

View from Monopteros. Dome on the left is the Residenz;
twin domes in the center are the Frauenkirche.

Carly is traveling with us

We continued on through the garden...

past the Residenz. On our way, we had a brief altercation with the bishop St. Nikolaus and his henchmen, shown huddling here:

S said, to the crony to the bishop's right, "Krampus?" The crony replied, "Nein! Klaus!" and swatted S on the behind with a straw broom. We think, post-googling, that he was supposed to be one of a crotchety host of Pelznickeln--literally, fur-clad Nicks. Krampus is an entirely other harbinger of Christmas terror. German folk legends are not for the faint of heart. 

We continued on into old town Munich and paused for a tasty Vietnamese dinner. (When in the bustling metropolis, do as the bustling metropolisians. We have another two weeks to feast on Kaesespaetzle mit geroesteten Zwiebeln.) Then it was on to Alten Peter; we climbed the 299 steps to the top of the church tower for some great views.

St. Peter's church all decked out for Advent

Look! On the horizon! It's the Zugspitze, Germany's tallest mountain!

The Viktualienmarkt down below

Nifty shadows on the exterior wall, cast by light
shining up through the iron grill work.

View of the Heiliggeistkirche, with the
world's biggest mobile ferris wheel in the background (installed April 2019).

The Frauenkirche (L) and the tower of the Neue Rathaus (R) above Marienplatz

More nifty shadows

This sign was at the top of Alten Peter, and was probably installed to demonstrate that tourists don't read signs. The exterior walkway at the top of the tower is pretty narrow--about a meter wide at its widest--and the boards are a little springy, and the ground is a long way down, so the sign is attempting to direct tourists to walk around the top all in the same direction. But why do that when you could pile up in both directions on the beautiful Marienplatz side of the tower?

This next sign provides some history of Alten Peter, which was originally a three-nave Romanesque basilica in 1050. The sign skips over how it went from basilica to the current gothic church--the interwebs put that between ca. 1181 and 1278--but it does include details about multiple fires and a lightning strike. In 1951, the church was restored to its "old [gothic] form." The bells date from 1382, 1605, and 1720. 

A view from the street to the top of the tower, ~96 meters up.

Afterward, we browsed the Christmas market in Marienplatz with several hundred other tourists. When a choir and brass band began performing from a balcony of the Neue Rathaus, hundreds of cell-phone cameras simultaneously turned north to begin filming. I didn't get a good photo of that phenomenon because the crowd was so big and we were in its midst, but imagine the photo below multiplied 20 times, and you get the idea.

From there, S and E took the U-Bahn to the Christkindlmarkt in Schwabing, near our hotel, while I walked the distance (to see more sights and get more exercise). En route, I passed this window dressing at a Louis Vuitton store...

...as well as the sign below in Schwabing. It looked to me to mean something like "people are required to appear before a judge here" or "people will be compressed into confined spaces here," but S says it means "meeting point."

After three Christmas markets in one day, we expect tomorrow morning will involve a museum or two before we continue on to Steinebach am Woerthsee.

Busted

We were three for three going through RDU airport security today. The culprits that got our carry-ons searched and swiped:

1. E's calculator. "Oops, I forgot to take it out of my backpack," he said. "You don't need to remove calculators," I said. He clarified: "I mean, I don't need a calculator in Germany."

2. Two "coq-au-vin" handmade chicken-rattle topped bottle stoppers. OK, I can see that those might be hard to decipher by X-ray, and each chicken--well, to quote Shakespeare, "though she be but little she is fierce!"

3. An at-the-time unopened 200g bar of Swiss dark chocolate with 30% whole hazelnuts. E has been working on making sure that one doesn't get us stopped again.

Be vigilant!

Passport snafu 2019

A cross-post between blogs.

About that last blog post...

I'm in NC, and S just phoned from Germany to say his mom really liked the idea of that lemon cake we made, so could I give him the recipe; and I told him where to find the recipe and didn't even think to say "WTF dude. PIE. It's called PIE." Sigh.

Coming to terms: Kuchen, Torte, and pie

Big news: after 29 years of loving S and learning about him and Deutsche Kultur, I finally understand the difference between Torte and Kuchen, and why certain Germans insist on calling American pie Kuchen (even though they shouldn't).

The epiphany actually came last July, while we were visiting H in Steinebach. I was too busy hiking to blog then, but we finally had an opportunity to take up the question again this past Sunday, when we hosted Kaffee und Kuchen [und Torte und pie] for the neighbors on our block. Guests arrived at 3:45 p.m. We defined terms at 4:00 p.m., then ate the evidence.

Distinguishing Torte from Kuchen: an introduction

We started baking on Saturday afternoon. I asked S if he had a good recipe for Biskuitteig (no, not biscuit dough--sponge cake). He responded, "What are you making? Kuchenboden oder Tortenboden?"

Kuchenboden is cake base (literally, cake floor); Tortenboden is torte floor. Kuchenboden is often a layer of Murbeteig--shortbread dough--topped with a layer of Biskuitteig--sponge cake batter. In Obstkuchen, that Kuchenboden is topped with delectable fruit, often with pectin or gelatin or melted jam on top of the whole shebang to make it shiny.

Here are two photos of non-shiny Obstkuchen I made last summer in Steinebach. There's a layer of vanilla pudding between the cakes and the fruit, and maybe a thin layer of jam too, but I can't remember. There is not any Murbeteig under either Biskuit, but they're both clearly still Obstkuchen.

Thus our definition of Kuchen begins with Fructhkuchen. You use Kuchenboden for Obstkuchen.

Tortenboden, in contrast, is the Biskuit that you would put at the bottom of a Torte--and in the middle of Torte, as many times as you want, and on the top of Torte, if you want it there too. That is what make Tortenboden fundamentally different from Kuchenboden. (If you are thinking that the big difference is Murbeteig, think again; our Bavarian Kochbuch recommends Murbeteig under both Kuchen and Torten.)

Torte is almost always made with layers of sponge cake, with filling in between and optional stuff on top. Kuchen is just one layer of cake--sponge cake if you want, but any other kind of cake is fine too, including Murbeteig all by itself--with optional stuff on top.

Did you catch that?

Torte: layers of cake with stuff in between and optional stuff on top.
Kuchen: one layer of cake with optional stuff on top. 

In between, Torte. On top, Kuchen.

For Americans, layers of cake with stuff in between is called "layer cake." A layer of cake with stuff on top is also cake. It's all cake. Torte is fancy cake.

So in the context of making Obstkuchen and Torte, the question "Kuchenboden oder Tortenboden" is a weird cultural thing--a sort of cake phoneme--because the cake parts of both Böden are THE SAME THING. Bake a batch of Biskuitteig for Obstkuchen, and voilà (or schau hier): Kuchenboden. Layer those babies, and voilà/schau hier: Tortenboden. Indeed, the recipe we eventually chose for the Kuchen describes the result as Luftigt-leichter Kuchen, perfekt für Torten--"light-as-air cake, perfect for Torte."

I double checked with S. "Did you really say 'Kuchenboden oder Tortenboden'?" "Yes," he said, "because they're different."

Perhaps he was thinking ahead to the Nusstorte (nut torte) I was going to bake. While you probably wouldn't add nuts to Biskuitteig for Obstkuchen, they're certainly fair game in plain ol' non-Obst Kuchen (which remains Kuchen forever and a day unless you layer it--then BAM, Torte).

Here's a photo of a hazelnut-almond Torte I made in Steinebach last summer (and a photo of H helping). The four layers were laced with Kirschwasser and filled with cherry jam, chocolate cream, and sour cherries, then covered with more chocolate cream.

Exceptions to the rules

Rules wouldn't be rules if there weren't exceptions. Here are four:

1. Tiny Obstkuchen are called Obsttörtchen, because why the hell not? The -chen ending is a diminutive suffix--little fruit tortelets--and because adding -chen changes the German o to an ö, let's change the vowel in English too and call them tartlets. This is allowed only because they're cute, and probably necessary because Fructhkuchenchen is too hard to say (but Obstkuchlein isn't, and it's not like being difficult to pronounce stops other German words from existing). Note that chen in Kuchen is not diminutive--it's Kuch-en, not Ku-chen. I'm going to take a stab at a pun by observing that a diminutive cow might be a Kuhchen--but no German would ever pronounce Kuchen (coo-hen) and Kuhchen (coo-hyen) the same way, so no German would ever find that pun remotely funny.


2. Linzertorte, already controversial in its own right, is actually Kuchen, according to the in between / on top rule. It's also Kuchen according to the Torte-is-usually-sponge-cake rule. It made me very happy to discover, browsing through the index of our Bavarian Kochbuch, that the Bible of Bavarian cooking calls it Linzerkuchen.


3. Sometimes Kuchen can have an extra layer of Teig on top--e.g. a layer of Murbeteig on the bottom, with apples on top, and then another layer of Murbeteig on top of that. This is called gedeckter Apfelkuchen--covered apple cake--rather than Apfeltorte, because it lacks the sponge cake that is essential for all Torte (except Linzertorte, which is really a gedeckter Kuchen, and Obsttörtchen, which are diminutive.) I hope you are following the logic here.


4. Finally, S says there is Bodenlose Kaesekuchen--bottomless cheesecake--which, as you might guess, has no base layer of cake and is entirely made of the optional stuff on top. To confirm, we looked it up in the Kochbuch, where it is called Quarktorte ohne Boden--cheese TORTE without bottom. S says "this is a dumb cookbook."

Why certain Germans insist on calling pie "Kuchen"

Pie has its very own word in English, because unlike Torte and Kuchen, pie is NOT cake. Even assuming all pies had double crusts--which they don't--pie is NOT gedeckter Kuchen, because pie crust is neither cake nor shortbread.

Pie does consist of a base layer of non-sponge flour-based dough, with stuff on top, so it is more akin to Kuchen than to Torte--but that does not make pie "cake" any more than saying humans are "birds" because humans are more akin to birds than to boulders. If German can borrow words like Spaghetti, Toast, and Computer from other languages, it can borrow Pei.

One more rule

Our Bavarian neighbor F arrived on Sunday eager to talk definitions. He suggested that Torte filling almost always involves cream. This would explain why gedeckte Apfelkuchen can never be Torte, even though it's layered. It might squeak past the "usually sponge cake" rule, but the lack of cream keeps it out of the realm of Torte. This might also explain why bottomless cheesecake might be considered Torte, given the creamy dairy content.

Well, you might think that. But if you Google gedeckte Apfe..., oh dear: the search brings up both Apfelkuchen and Apfeltorte, and the photos look identical. To that, we say, "perhaps it's a regional difference" (which is our way of saying "uncle! We give up!").

Test your understanding

After lengthy discussion and Q&A with our neighbors, we gave them a quiz. Can you tell what's what? Answers and recipes are below.

A (left); B (right)

C

D

E

Answers:
A: Pie. This is pie. It is not cake. It is pie.
B:Obstkuchen.
C: Pie. Why is this so difficult for you?
D: Obstkuchen.
E: Trick question. There's visible cream and there's presumably cake underneath that, but you can't tell if it's Torte or Kuchen without cutting it open. But by process of elimination in this particular context, you know it has to be Torte. (If this question were on the ACT/SAT, the test-writers would call Torte the "best answer," which would annoy teens who understand nuance and complexity.)

The sacrifices we make for the sake of cultural understanding

Another view of the sacrifices we make

Aha! Layers! Torte!

Appendix: Recipes

We had a gluten-intolerant guest, so we made everything gluten-free. We used gluten-free flour for pie A and Obstkuchen; we purchased gluten-free pie crusts for the pies; and we used ground hazelnuts and no flour in the Nusstorte.

A. The recipe for this lemon custard pie is here. Until last year, it was the only lemon custard pie I had ever made (and I had only made it once.) It's silky-creamy and lemony-tart, with a nice lightness.

B and D: Here's the Biskuitteig recipe I used for the Obstkuchen. This recipe is enough for two Obstkuchen: bake all of the batter in one springform pan and then slice it in half to make two discs. The recipe calls for Speisestärke (starch). In Germany, that would be potato starch. We used cornstarch, but next time I'd probably just add a little more flour. We thought the cake was too sweet, so next time we'll reduce the sugar. S and E were in charge of the topping: a thin layer of jam, a layer of vanilla pudding, artfully arranged fruit, and a pectin glaze on top.

C. Oh my. Oh oh my. This is "Shaker Lemon Pie." Images kept popping up when I was trying to locate the recipe for pie A. Shaker Lemon Pie is stunningly beautiful, startlingly delicious, and super tart--but beware the sugar high. I found assorted recipes online and combined them into this: 5 unpeeled organic lemons (recipes ranged from 2 large to 6 small; some specified Meyer lemons, but we used Eurekas), sliced very thinly with a mandoline, and seeds picked out; toss gently with 1.75 c. sugar, and macerate until sugar dissolves (this takes only a few hours--recipes all said 24-hours or overnight). Stir in four beaten eggs and pour into an unbaked pie crust. (A few recipes said pre-baked. We tried pre-baking the gluten-free crust and it cracked, so that the filling oozed under the crust and glued parts of the crust to the pan. We didn't pre-bake the crust for A and it tasted fine, so next time we'll skip the pre-baking.) Bake at 325^oF for 50-60 minutes. (Recipes said 450^oF for 15 minutes and then 375^oF for 20 minutes, but we had another pie to bake at the same time that required gentler heat. Slow baking worked beautifully.)

D. See B.

E. Here's my version of Nusstorte, adapted and honed over several years from a base recipe by H. Despite all the steps, it's easy to make if you have an electric beater.