Provisions in the 50s and 60s

(De): When I grew up, it was important for families with many children and little money to live off the produce from their garden - if you had one. Our garden was not large, but in summer, we had carrots, turnips, beetroots, onions, lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, savoy cabbage, cauliflower, and kohlrabi. We also grew seasonal fruit, such as strawberries, raspberries, currants, gooseberries, apples, pears, apricots, plums, and cherries. There was even room in the garden for a few flowers, but they were just for show.

To secure the provisions in the 50s and 60s, all these edible treasures had to be prepared for storage in readiness for the following winter, and when spring came around, the garden was bare. For these seasons, jam was made, the juice was pressed, and the fruit was preserved. Our mother made pickles from smaller cucumbers. Eggs were placed in lime water in an earthenware barrel, and by doing so, they could be stored for 3-6 months. All this was stored in the cellar where it was cool, not too light and not too humid.

Give us our daily potatoes

When the Covid lockdown was imminent in the spring of 2020, many people were hoarding not only toilet paper but also pasta. Nowadays, pasta is considered a staple food. This was not always the case. For a long time in Germany, this honour went to the potato. When I was a child, pasta was rare, and instead, we had homemade spaetzle. We only knew pasta like macaroni, the long thick tube-like noodles. Later we sometimes had Miracoli, the first semi-prepared dish in a package with spaghetti, tomato paste, a spice mixture and hard cheese, which was introduced in Germany in 1961 and became one of the most popular ready meals of its day. This was something special, but mostly we had only potatoes or bread.

Our potatoes were stored in the pantry in a niche below the cellar stairs. Potatoes were the most important daily staple food in many families at that time. They were cheap, and they came onto the table in all kinds of varieties:

My mother peeling potatoes

Potato dumplings, potato soup, potato salad, fried potatoes, jacket potatoes, potato pancakes, finger noodles, etc.

So, it never got boring to eat potatoes, and it was possible to feed a family with many hungry children.

Therefore many potatoes were needed. So every autumn, we received a delivery of several hundredweight of potatoes from our local farmer to get us through the winter.

After several months, however, the potatoes grew feet, which had to be removed before the potatoes were put into the pot.

I often had to go to the cellar to get ingredients for our mother to cook. I did not like this. I was always afraid of going into the cellar, because in the cellar, especially where the potatoes were stored, were spiders, and I also was disgusted by the potatoes with their whitish feet. Still, I had to go downstairs when the mother needed something. Today it is hardly possible to store the potatoes in the cellar over the winter because the central heating heats the cellars and the potatoes start to sprout after only a few weeks.

Horse apples - not for eating but good for the roses

In our neighbourhood, there was a farmer who had lived there with his family for generations. He grew grains and vegetables and had a few cows in his barn. From him, we bought our potatoes. When we heard him and his horses trotting past, we had to run out with our shovels and buckets to pick up the horse droppings. This was not our favourite task, and often we pretended not to have heard the horses passing by, but our father was very keen on fertilising the garden. Fortunately for us, this stopped when the farmer got his first new tractor.

Then, we did not buy the milk in tetra packs or in the supermarket as they did not yet exist. Instead, we fetched the milk from the farmer. That was the task of us children. With our tin milk cans, we went every day to fetch fresh and still warm milk. Being children, we naturally went to visit the cows, and I was always very impressed with how they ran their long tongues over and into their noses and flicked their tails to chase away the flies.

On the way home, we often practised milk can swinging. This came close to a sporting discipline. Swinging the milk cans with the outstretched arm was easy, but not so easy was to stop. If you were too slow, the milk would pour over your head and then your mother would scold you when you came home without milk. But the game was a lot of fun, and so we took the risk again and again.

Unfortunately, it was soon forbidden to buy milk directly from the farmer. Instead, he took his milk directly to the dairy, where it was pasteurised to kill harmful germs such as bovine tuberculosis. Bovine tuberculosis can also cause tuberculosis in humans, which at that time in Germany killed several thousand people a year and affected children in particular.

The winters were cold, but we did not know any better

At that time, we only had coal heating. Besides the electric cooker in the kitchen, there was an old coal cooker which heated the kitchen, kept warm water in a built-in container ready for use and served as an additional cooker and oven.

My mother and we four children in front of our new house, January 1957

In our newly built house, which we moved into in 1957, there was a sort of central coal heating system. What a luxury! Instead of having to heat an oven in each room, this central stove in the hallway was heated with coal and gave off heat which was distributed to the individual rooms through a chimney and shaft openings. The bedrooms were only slightly warm in winter, and the shafts were often closed as the family usually congregated in the kitchen and dining room, and it was here that we children did our homework.

On very frosty days in winter, we were fascinated by the ice flowers on the windowpanes, despite our double-glazed windows. There was no heating in the toilet. So, you did not linger there for long. In the bathroom, sparse heat came from the heating shaft.

My mother and we four children in front of

our new house January 1957

We did not complain because we did not know any other way. When it was cold, we put another jumper on. Problem solved!

Winters then were colder than today, probably because of global warming. I can remember how I often froze when we went to church on Sundays, which of course was unheated. The church was only a 15-minute walk away from us, but despite gloves, our fingers hurt from the cold and at home, we had to keep them under cold running water to warm them up and to get some feeling back into them.

Once when we got home, my brother showed me the metal doorknob of our front door that was frozen and covered with ice. He suggested I lick the doorknob to defrost it. I did as told, but suddenly my tongue stuck to the frozen metal knob. Panic! It must have looked quite funny to others but not to me. Only after a while, when the ice on the doorknob had thawed because of my breath, could I loosen my tongue again. That's what I call brother and sister love. Just wait. I'll get you back!

As long as we had cabbage, we never were hungry

The potatoes were mostly served with sauerkraut. Potatoes and cabbage were the staple diet in our region and were served several times a week. People knew then that cabbage was a cheap and abundant food. Today we know that it contains more vitamin C than tropical fruits, and it also aids digestion, so it is very healthy.

The sauerkraut was either cooked on its own or with sausages or bacon, or even a piece of pork belly. We did not eat much meat at that time because it was expensive. If there was meat, then there had to be enough for many people. For example, goulash with lots of sauce. Minced meat was used to make meatballs (today they are called hamburgers). On Sunday, there was a roast, either roast pork or beef. Half a kilo of meat had to be enough for all six family members, with the biggest piece going to the head of the family, my father. My mother often had an empty plate and said it didn't matter as she had already tried some while she was cooking it.

Sometimes we received a large piece of smoked ham from our uncle, who had a butcher's shop in the Bavarian Forest. Smoked ham or bacon, preserved by drying and smoking, could be kept in the pantry for a long time. A small piece could be mixed into many dishes as a flavour enhancer and meat substitute, so to speak. There were lentils with bacon, bacon potatoes, and a piece in cabbage.

As a family with four children, we needed a lot of cabbage. We made our own sauerkraut. It was a lot of work and an evening activity. I remember one such autumn evening. My father had ordered a hundredweight of white cabbage heads from our farmer, which were the size of footballs. Father sliced the cabbage with a huge slicer. Mother spread the cabbage in layers in a large earthenware barrel, adding salt and caraway. We children then had to step into the barrel and stamp the cabbage with our feet until it softened and was ready for the fermentation process. We took our task very seriously. Of course, the feet had to be washed and scrubbed thoroughly beforehand. Only my brother and I, the two youngest, could do this task, as the feet of the older siblings and the adults were too big for the barrel. It was exciting and fun to climb into the barrel and stomp around on the cabbage. With fervour, I quoted a poem that I had to learn for the next day at school: "When Emperor Redbeard came to the Holy Land... " It was about Emperor Barbarossa, who went to war with his crusaders to liberate the Holy Land from the Muslims.

The stomping of the cabbage lasted several hours. Every 15 minutes, my brother and I had to take turns because our feet had become ice-cold. In the end, the cabbage in the barrel was covered with a kitchen towel and two pieces of semi-circular wood. A big stone was placed on top of it to ensure that the cabbage was pressed tightly. Then it had to ferment for several weeks. By Christmas, it was ready, and then we had fresh sauerkraut to last us for the rest of the year.

Doctor Mom

"Mom, I feel sick!", "Mom, I have a sore throat!", "Mom, I have a tummy ache....!" As always, for every ailment, our mother had some tea ready. Camomile or peppermint tea for nausea or flatulence, lime blossom tea to sweat out a cold, sage for sore throats, nettle tea for water retention and much more. Our mother knew a tea for all aches and pains. There were hardly any medicines at home. Knees that had been bruised were treated with iodine tincture, which burned like hell. Insect bites were treated with arnica flowers soaked in alcohol, and sprained ankles were cooled with wet compresses.... Only sometimes, when our mother had a severe headache, she would take half a tablet of aspirin.

People were not squeamish back then. I can remember one afternoon: I was sitting on our terrace with my mother and my cousin. We laughed at a joke our mother had told, and I let myself fall back onto the sofa laughing, but I had forgotten that my knitting was lying there. Promptly the knitting needle with the knitted sock was stuck in my back. Startled, we ran to the doctor. But he just pulled out the knitting needles and put a plaster on it. No panic, no X-ray and – no fuss.

The herb witch

We children often went with our mother into the forest to collect cranberries. There we also found arnica flowers and herbs that we did not have in our garden. Sometimes a neighbour came along, old Mrs Wolf. We children secretly called her the herb witch, not only because she looked like that but also because of her knowledge of medicinal herbs. During our walks, she would then draw our mother's attention to special herbs and whisper: "These are for women… These are for men….”.

We children had no idea what she meant but found her eerie and odd. She was a widow and lived alone in a huge old house a few streets away from us. The house, built on a hillside, had an enormous cellar with several levels carved inside the hillside. During the war, the neighbours took shelter there during the bombings. There, besides the usual things I knew from our cellar, such as preserves and potatoes, were onion and garlic plaits and lots of herbs hanging on the walls to dry. On the shelves were glasses and pots full of obscure contents. Besides large earthen troughs and barrels, there were glass vessels which contained wine and distilled spirits. It was cold and humid, and something smelt indefinable, like something old and rotten. A small wooden staircase led down to a deeper cellar, like a huge vault and below it was an even deeper cellar with a tamped floor. The various cellars were crammed with all kinds of stuff. Today I would find it fascinating; as a 6-year-old, I found the dark cellar scary and frightening, and I imagined spiders, mice and other such creepy-crawlies hiding in the darkness. I could not wait to get back up into the light and fresh air. For my taste, it was much more convenient to go to the shop or get medicinal things from the pharmacy.

What would I give today to descend once more into those cellars to take a peek at those treasures? The supermarket is practical for everyday use, but the accumulated and almost forgotten wealth of knowledge of previous generations on the use of herbs, medicines and preserving food was entombed in this cellar.