journal culinaire. Kultur und Wissenschaft des Essens

EditorialYesterday she cooked a cucumber soup, my hairdresser says. I sit rather absent-mindedly, without glasses, with a face mask and damp hair in front of the big mirror in her salon and am immediately wide awake. Sylvie came to Germany from Poland three decades ago as a teenager with her mother - also a master hairdresser. Every now and then we tell each other about our culinary experiences. Sylvie and especially her relatives in rural Poland are deeply and firmly rooted in regional or better even local cooking traditions. Their own garden and a butcher in the family seem to be serious guarantors of this. From this Polish perspective, Sylvie looks with proper scepticism at what is produced here by the food industry and tries to avoid it as far as possible. I remember a vivid incident with her - by now very old - grandmother: the frail person arrives on the platform in Münster and heaves suitcases out of the train with proper meat and home-canned or preserved food, the weight of which exceeds her own body weight.Grandma doesn't travel any more. So yesterday, cucumber soup. I spontaneously say what pops into my head: pickled cucumbers. More precisely: lactic fermented cucumbers, not pickles. Now Sylvie hesitates for a fraction of a second, as if to first have to remember that pickled cucumbers exist at all. And then says with a smile: "Of course." Later, an almost dreamy expression even flits across her face in memory of pickled cucumbers that have only been fermented for two days, with their extremely fine, delicate aroma and tingling taste.In the course of the shearing, we no longer talk about soup, but about the pickling or lactic fermentation of vegetables (whereby the unbearable sweetness of German pickles caused real indignation). Obviously, I ask whether cereals have also been fermented. It was. Fermented rye meal was used to bind Zurek, a simple soup of potatoes and sausage gravy. In "Zurek", "sour" still resonates for us too. Sylvie casually mentions, as