David Gordon Smith finds squash wildly improbable.

One of the things that I like about Germany, as I believe I have mentioned before, is that people eat food in season.

This is something of a radical concept to Brits like me, who no longer associate food with agriculture and are accustomed to every kind of fruit and vegetable being available in supermarkets all year round ("Why wouldn't we have strawberries in December? Doesn't the strawberry factory operate then?").

As those of you who live here know, the German calendar is divided up into discrete vegetative chunks. You have the (to my mind) mysteriously popular Spargelzeit ("asparagus time") in spring, followed by (if I have the chronology right) a strawberry season, then later in the year a Federweißer frenzy.

And then, around this time, things turn psychedelic in the vegetable realm. Because now is the time of ... squash.

Coming from the north of Scotland, whose unforgiving latitude means the climate supports little but oats and potatoes (the stories I could tell you about how my parents were raised on porridge and more porridge! And no, I'm not making this up), I had never seen anything like German squash before. Is it just me, or are squash not the weirdest vegetables you've ever seen?

I don't mean pumpkins, I can get my head around those. I mean the other squash which you see at every German market and which, with their weird shapes, strange protuberances and DayGlo colours, look like something out of the Tin Tin adventure "The Shooting Star" where a meteorite lands on Earth and begins to sprout strange organic growths.

Still, I like the fact that such unlikely vegetables exist. Even if it doesn't quite make me believe in an intelligent creator behind the universe (I'm more of a Blind Squashmaker kind of guy myself), it at least persuades me that when it comes to inventing crazy stuff, Nature still has the upper hand over humankind (fluorescent mice have nothing on those critters!).

There are two other reasons I like squash. One is that I (for obvious reasons) associate them with Hallowe'en, which, as I am constantly telling those Germans who think it was imported from the US, was of course originally a European tradition. It was always my favourite festival when I was a kid. We used to make lanterns out of turnips in Scotland and I was amazed to find, when I made a lantern last year, that pumpkins are incredibly easy to hollow out (ever tried removing the innards of a turnip with a spoon when you're eight years old? It's not easy, I can tell you).

The second reason is that you can, of course, eat pumpkins, and very tasty things they are too. S, my wife, has discovered an incredibly easy and healthy pumpkin soup recipe, so I have her delicious soup to look forward to for the rest of the season. (Inspired by the lecture I saw the other day by free culture advocate Lawrence Lessig, where he talked about the importance of 'sharing culture', I am happy to pass on the recipe to anyone who wants it.)

This brings me on to another thing I like about Germany, which are the farmers markets. Yes, yes, I know this is not limited to Germany and that every urban population centre with affulent left-leaning foodies in the Western world has got great farmers markets now. It's all connected to living in the new Middle Ages, to quote the great semiotician Umberto Eco (who once told me I was too young to write a novel and that I should wait until I was fifty to do so -- which is of course the sole reason why you have yet to see my name on the bestseller lists). But it's still one of the nice things about Germany.

S and I frequent the Saturday farmers market at Kollwitzplatz here in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, which I can heartily recommend. In fact, should you be there and spot a petite American lady looking at everything Very Carefully, accompanied by a Scottish chap carrying bags full of bottles of organic apple juice, it may very well be us, so say hello.

I have a confession to make, which is that S is ever so slightly more into the farmers market than I am. However years of striving to be a sensitive New Man (as they used to put it) mean that I am very happy to accompany her and take an interest, even if I do occasionally find myself yearning for Saint George's, the excellent English language bookshop on nearby Woerther Strasse. A visit there is my post-market reward for being so patient and carrying the shopping.

Mind you, at this time of year, I have the strange vegetables to look at. As my Scottish grandmother might have put it, should she have ever experienced anything apart from oats, you're never bored with a squash.

 

23 October 2006

David Gordon Smith
Editor-in-chief
Expatica Germany
www.expatica.com/germany
david.gordon.smith@expatica.com

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