The sentence “The Chinese are poor and cannot get ahead because Mao only gives them a bowl of rice a day” was still considered by the Germans well into the 1970s as an incontestable proof of their knowledge of China and, in a twisted way, often as a justification Not to eat rice yourself because it doesn’t fill you up.
Nobody in this country knew about the diversity of Chinese cuisine or even about the feasts with dozens of different dishes where you leave a bowl of rice at the end to show that you are full. Of course, neither are the rice-based cooking habits of other Asian countries from Persia to Indonesia. It wasn’t even noticed that the northern Italians, whose coasts the Germans began to infest in the late 1950s, not only cooked spaghetti, but also made tasty risotto. It was only when they went on vacation to Spain that they became acquainted with paella.
At the same time, Chinese restaurants were popping up everywhere, where rice was the standard side dish. Nevertheless, when people cooked with rice, households were dominated by rather strange economic miracle creations such as chicken fricassee, peppers stuffed with a minced rice mix (which, by the way, tasted very good) or rice with hash, a kind of spaghetti sauce made only from minced meat and a bit of chopped onion and enriched with a little broth. All quick-to-cook meals that the mother, who worked part-time, could serve to the schoolchild coming home.
In addition, rice was rare. The sushi fashion in the eighties didn’t change that. At best, risotto has appeared on the gourmet menus more often since the 1990s thanks to the Tuscany faction. Maybe it’s because the rice all too often stuck, burned and ruined the enamel pots that were in use at the time, while the Uncle Ben’s bagged rice that was introduced to the market in the 1970s was easy to prepare but exuded such a loveless aura that that no culinary spark comes from it
was beating.
Rice has a fascinating history and offers a complex variety of varieties. Millions of years older than humans, it was first cultivated in Indonesia and Malaysia around 4,500 years ago, from where it conquered all of Asia. He reached Greece and Rome around 400 BC. However, the Romans viewed it as a fancy medicine for centuries. It was only around 1450, after the bubonic plague in northern Italy, that its nutritional value was recognized in Lombardy and Piedmont, export was banned, and the method of cultivation was guarded like a state secret.
Everything was incorporated, except rice
However, that cannot be the reason why the Germans treat rice so neglectfully. In the century before last, German cuisine literally and creatively incorporated almost everything the world had to offer, from potatoes to tomatoes and lemons to nutmeg. Kiwis, seaweed and hummus have recently been added. Only the rice remained exotic and simply didn’t fit into the taste of German dishes.
Not even the fusion specialist Christian Bau, who marries Asian cuisine with European cuisine, offers a rice dish in his cookbook, which includes seven menus with a total of 56 courses. “The cooking legend Harald Wohlfahrt” also only offers a clearly Italian-French kafr lime risotto with a scallop variation.
More texts from Gunter Blank go out to eat
Things don’t look any better in home-style cooking: neither the book “The German Kitchen” (Gräfe and Unzer 1993), which can be viewed as a standard work, nor Tim Mälzer’s emotional-subjective “Heimat” finds any use for it other than the banal veal or chicken fricassee Rice. Or maybe it is: Mälzer mentions rice pudding as one of his favorite childhood memories. For the author of this column, however, it was a sticky dessert substitute that tasted like boiled milk and that he used to run away screaming as a child.