Over there at Dialog International, a story is told about an ongoing legal battle regarding the rights to former symbols of the German Democratic Republic. Since Dialog International posts most of his stuff in english, and this is going to be a trackback response thing, this post here is going to be in english as well. Not that it should matter to the net junkie of the 21st century.
So at the end of that post, David (the man who runs this political blog) talks about some food synonyms used in Eastgermany, especially Ketwurst and Puff-Mais. Because before the denkpass became the denkpass he was also a teenager in the most western part of the Ostblock, we´re going to chip in with some thoughts:
• Puff-Mais is not directly comparable to Popcorn. Whereas you get your popcorn as a mass of loose corns in a bag, Puff-Mais comes your way in a pressed form - more like a candy bar, but most of the time it comes in a circular form.
• The same goes for Ketwurst (in that it was not directly comparable to hot dog). The bread of the Ketwurst gets warm by putting on a hot metal rod. After that, you simply put the wurst in the hole left by the rod (and not on top of the bread like hot dogs). With Ketwurst, there is also no onions and other stuff, just bread, wurst and ketchup. And who knows what they had put in the ketchup back then.
• What was comparable was the eastern counterpart of hamburgers. In Berlin you had grillettas. Those were comparable to hamburgers except in their smell and taste. We did buy them in bunches, anyway.
And today? You still get Puff-Mais in the supermarkt - at least in the eastern parts of germany. You still get Ketwurst at the christmas market. What you won´t be able to get is grilleta. Because it was so much like a hamburger, it didn´t get past McDonalds or Burger King.
chiefpedro in Berlinerlei | TrackBack(0)