Seated with a menu, I see at once that the smoked meats, blood sausage, and cheeses—everything Herr Serr said must be included in a proper Vesper—are at hand. I order homemade cheese and a portion of ham, and Frau Benz sets off, unlocking doors and passing back and forth between the small outbuildings. She brings me a glass of Most, a mildly alcoholic beverage made from apples and pears. I sip the chilled, sour drink—not quite beer, not quite wine—and feel hunger slip over me. Quiet sounds of chopping issue from the kitchen next door. Several minutes pass.
Frau Benz returns with a small work of art. Creamy slices of homemade cheese, two fresh, one air-dried, are arranged on a wooden plate with a thick ribbon of Black Forest ham and a small dish of Bibeleskäs, another fresh cheese (like quark), mixed with herbs and scallions. She directs my attention to a golden slab, “our homemade butter.” The cheeses are wreathed with fresh herbs (parsley, bear’s garlic, and a graceful garland of something she calls Pimpinelle) and translucent laces of red, green, and yellow pepper. Radishes and a sloping chunk of pickle rest alongside thin apple wedges and green and black grapes. I remark how beautiful it is. “I hope you will enjoy it,” she says, placing a basket of sliced farmer’s bread on the table.
The plate is an ensemble performance of sweet and sour, crisp and creamy, sharp and mild, silky and toothsome. When I finish, Frau Benz offers me sips of her fruit liqueurs and schnapps: cherry, pear, and two kinds of plum. Each fills my mouth with fire, fruit, and honey. The Benz Mill has been in her family for over 200 years, she says. She runs it with her son, Arnold. On this rainy afternoon, however, there are just the two of us—two women, not much alike, yet not very different—two women and an old dog.
When my little Renault roars into Freiburg and the southern Black Forest the following day, it is with a sense of urgency. I have little time and much to eat and sip. I meet up with Alf, who lives here, and we begin at the city’s glorious open-air market on the Münsterplatz, by the cathedral. This enormous year-round venue offers small growers and producers a chance to show their wares—fresh flowers and local honey and schnapps, sausages, fresh herbs, handmade cheese, muddy new potatoes, and mountains of white asparagus.
Next, we drive to the highest elevation in the Black Forest, known as Schauinsland (“look into the country”), a route of hairpin turns and increasing elevation, and then we sweep down into the Markgräflerland, one of Baden’s two major wine-producing areas, which lies amid beautiful foothills between the Rhine and the Black Forest. Finally we do what anyone would do in Baden in the spring: We go Spargel essen.
White asparagus, whose consumption is virtually a national pastime in Germany—from mid-April to early June, entire menus are created in its honor—is thought to be at its best in Baden (though residents of Braunschweig might protest this call). The lemon-gold spears are long, fat, and straight—an ideal specimen is about eight inches—and closed at the tips, not pebbly like green asparagus. We eat the silky, sweet spears with panfried schnitzel, new potatoes and hollandaise, and a glass of Gutedel, a white wine produced almost exclusively in Germany in the Markgräflerland. The light, elegant, fragrant wine, with its subtle flavors of pear and apple—considered a perfect accompaniment to white asparagus—is a revelation to me.
On the morning before my departure, unable to bring myself to return to Frankfurt, I turn my Renault farther south and drive back to the Markgräflerland. This gentle, misty landscape, with its combination of pine and green forests that appear stitched on velvet and dusted with fog, has seduced me more than all the mountains in the Black Forest. The soft, rolling vineyards crisscrossed with paths and still dotted with tiny watchtowers (for shooting grape-robbing crows, Alf tells me) tumble down into valleys where, at sunset, the chimneys of small farmhouses curl with wisps of smoke, and fields blaze with wildflowers. I am driving to the village of Sulzburg for lunch. There, I stop at the Hirschen, a long-standing two-star restaurant, and by all accounts the best address for food in the southern Black Forest. I wonder if the fare at this decidedly posh country inn will drift toward anonymity or exemplify the virtues I have come to expect in Baden.
When I arrive, late on Sunday morning, the residents of Sulzburg are trickling through the streets on their way home from Mass. Inside the Hirschen, absolute tranquillity reigns. The dining room is beautiful and immaculate. Claude Steiner, the proprietress and sommelier, French by birth, stands looking over the reservation book. Her husband, chef Hans-Paul Steiner (who left Stuttgart for Baden in 1970 because, he says, the Swabians had no taste for culinary adventure), presides over a kitchen primed and ready for service. Their daughter, Douce, and her husband, Udo, both master chefs, are also in chef’s whites, their three-year-old daughter, Justine, in her father’s arms.
Like the Serrs and Frau Benz, the Steiners are people doing what their families before them have done, doing it well, and finding their reward in the pleasure of the process.
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