The following article is from our May 2005 issue.

Leaving the Ugly-Duckling Image Behind. German cuisine is shedding its negative image. By Nadia Hassani

Cookbook writer Nadia Hassani rediscovered her love of German regional cuisine when she was farthest from it - after immigrating to the United States.

Last November, I was somewhere in the high 160s when a profile of the German celebrity chef, Wolfram Siebeck, appeared in The New York Times, entitled "Taking the Oxymoron out of 'German Cuisine.' "

To clarify, I am not referring to my weight at the time. I was in the home stretch for my German regional cookbook, testing the last of 170 recipes, and very pleased to see a leading American newspaper address the alleged incompatibility between gourmet food and German cooking.

Inspired, I plunged across the finish line on my own cookbook, "Spoonfuls of Germany."

For the longest time, German cuisine had a very negative image, as much within Germany as in the rest of the world. While the French and Italians adore their cuisine and uninhibitedly rave about it, the majority of Germans turn their noses up at their own cooking.

The reason for this is not so much that German food fits its stereotype of being heavy, fatty and lacking refinement. The disdain runs deeper than the stomach.

The explanation lies in the first half of the 20th century, especially in the 12 dark years when Germany set out to dominate the world. While the country has now recovered from the Third Reich and World War II on many levels, the damage to the cultural identity of the German people has yet to be fully repaired.

After the war, patriotism was so inextricably linked to the extreme nationalism of the Nazis that being proud of one's German heritage was looked down upon. Celebrating culinary traditions ran counter to the national psyche.

In the postwar years, Germans opened their kitchens and their mouths to the cuisines of other countries. This explains why almost every German hobby cook has a wok, but hardly any owns a press for the south German noodles "Spätzle."

A common misperception places the Germans within the "PBS" triangle: potatoes, beer and sausage, one of the most tenacious stereotypes being that Germans eat mainly potatoes.

Let's set things straight.

Germany is, indeed, the largest potato producer in the European Union. However, it's the Irish who have the highest annual average per capita consumption.

One of the reasons why potatoes are thought to have such a dominant role in German cuisine may be the tremendous number and variety of potato dishes in every region.

This variety of dishes surprised me when I started exploring the regional foods of Germany.

When I emigrated from Germany seven years ago, it would have never occurred to me that I would write about German cooking. My upbringing certainly had its share in my indifference toward German foods. I grew up in Germany with a Tunisian father and a German mother. My "otherness" did not always make it easy to refer to German culture and civilization as my own, much less the food.

A few years after I moved to the United States, my attitude toward German cuisine changed dramatically. I started missing the foods of my childhood. Throwing a "Rote Grütze" (red berry pudding) into a menu or digging out my Westphalian grandmother's recipe for "Kastenpickert" (potato loaf with raisins) became a way of asserting my own culinary references in my new surroundings.

I am not the only one rediscovering German cuisine. In Germany, celebrity chefs such as Alfons Schuhbeck and Eckart Witzigmann, the cooking TV host Alfred Biolek and others are writing books that celebrate German culinary traditions.

If there is one German food I miss most living in America, it's quark - that very smooth, wonderfully creamy dairy product that is a staple of German and Austrian cuisine. In Germany, there is hardly any meal of the day with which quark cannot be served.

Why quark is not made in the United States, especially with its abundance of dairy farms and other dairy products, is a mystery to me. Occasionally, I have seen French-style quark in specialty food stores, but it is pricey. Therefore, people who live in the boonies like me are either doomed to a quark-less existence or need to make their own.

I was thrilled to find out that making five pounds of quark at home requires nothing more than milk, rennet (an enzyme), a few big pots, kitchen towels and 24 hours of patience.

On our first trip together to Berlin, I enjoyed watching my American husband help himself every morning to several servings of herbed quark from the breakfast buffet. He spread it with great relish on freshly baked multigrain rolls.

"Aha, another quark convert," I thought.

The quark experience reminds me of the old Egyptian proverb: Those who drink from the Nile will return to it ever after. I am sure that if someone gets the chance to taste quark, snow-white quark clouds will appear in the sky of that person's culinary dreams, as they do in mine.

Exploring German cuisine was not only a way of reviving my identity through the palate, but also a unique lesson in history.

I attended high school in Frankfurt am Main at a time when history as a subject had been eliminated from the curriculum, with the result that everything between Charlemagne and the Weimar Republic was a blank for me.

Collecting and researching recipes for regional dishes became a crash course not only in German but also in European history.

Finding lemon-rice cake in a 19th-century cookbook written by a pastor's wife in Augsburg made me wonder how the lady was able to lavishly use several whole lemons for only one cake. Augsburg, I learned, was part of a major trade route that ran from Italy, the heartland of lemons, to Erfurt and Leipzig.

Many German dishes were invented out of necessity - during wars and other times of depravation.

"Maultaschen," German-style ravioli and one of the most popular dishes from Swabia in southern Germany, probably has roots in the Thirty Years' War.

The monks at the Maulbronn monastery came upon a large choice piece of meat. Unfortunately it was Lent. But the monks' appetite outweighed their religious fervor. They ground the meat and mixed in herbs to disguise it. Believing that God sees everything, the monks took another precautionary measure and wrapped dough around it - the "Maul­taschen" were born.

Deep-fried pastries, ubiquitous during the German carnival in late winter, owe their existence to the frugality of German housewives.

Before the invention of food additives, the beginning of Lent meant that all animal fat had to be used up, or it would go bad. This is how tidbits like "Mutzen" (deep-fried almond pastry from the Rhineland) came about.

German Chocolate Cake, on the other hand, is an urban legend. The cake has as much to do with Germany as French fries have to do with France.

An Englishman named Samuel German developed a sweet chocolate baking bar for Baker's Chocolate Co. in 1852. The chocolate, which was named "German's Sweet Chocolate" in his honor, had been on the market for almost a century before it found fame.

In 1957, a recipe for a rich chocolate cake using German's Sweet Chocolate was published in a Dallas newspaper. Sales of the chocolate bar skyrocketed in Texas, which prompted the manufacturer to send copies of the recipe and photos of the cake to food editors all over the United States.

A smart move, as each time the recipe was published, it triggered an avalanche of reader inquiries about where to buy the chocolate.

Also shrouded in legend are jelly-filled donuts, called Berliner in many parts of Germany.

In his speech at the Berlin Wall in June 1963, President John F. Kennedy uttered his famous sentence "Ich bin ein Berliner" ("I am a Berliner"), which he intended as an expression of solidarity with the people of Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Unbeknownst to him, it could have also been understood to mean "I am a jelly donut."

When looking around for German culinary traditions in the United States, I discovered Americans who have made German-style food and drink their career, often without having any ethnic ties to Germany.

The winery a mile from where I live in Pennsylvania specializes in German-style wines like Riesling and ice wine. The owners - she is a chemist and he is an engineer - fell in love with German wines on a trip to Germany.

In another instance, a former war correspondent today owns a bakery in northwest Michigan, and ships German-style breads to customers all over the United States.

I found these stories so intriguing that I included profiles of the vintners, the baker and others in my book.

After more than a year of roaming through the regional cooking pots of Germany, I find that reducing German cuisine to pork knuckles with sauerkraut is a terrible injustice.

I personally confess a total aversion to "Pfälzer Saumagen" (stuffed pork belly from Palatinate), a dish that came to fame as the favorite food of German ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl. But there are plenty of other delicious regional German dishes to choose from - more than I have time to cook.

Nadia Hassani is a German-American writer who lives in Pennsylvania. Her book "Spoonfuls of Germany: Culinary Delights of the German Regions in 170 Recipes" was published in December by Hippocrene Books. In this article, Nadia Hassani reveals her great passion: quark.