I don’t often think about my German heritage and so last week when I took my mother to a German dinner - sponsored by the Ostfriesen Heritage Society of Grundy Center, Iowa – I was surprised at how nostalgic I became for a way of life that I actually know very little about.
My mother grew up in a rural part of Iowa that had been settled by immigrants from Ostfriesen, Germany. It’s located in the northwest corner of Germany on the North Sea Coast....
... and when my mother’s grandmother left it behind to come to this country along with scores of others from the same area, she brought with her a rich store of traditions and customs. She also brought along a distinctive language, Plattdeutsch, otherwise known as Low German. Over the years, the language, as well as the special customs and the traditions of the area, have been gradually disappearing. And I suspect that my mother’s generation is probably the last to have vivid memories of what it was like to grow up surrounded by people who spoke Low German and did things the way their ancestors had done them.
Mother told me that when she was a little girl, Low German was still the primary language in many homes. But there was a move on to change all that. In fact mother tells the story about how hard the pastor of their small country church worked to switch his Sunday services from Low German into English since so many in the congregation wanted it that way. But some of the older members were dead set against it and so the poor pastor, trying hard to please everyone, compromised by conducting the service in Low German one week and English the next. As the older members passed away, so did the Sunday services in Low German!
Mother belonged to the first generation that did not hold on to the language. When she married and moved away to a different part of the state she left behind the language and customs of her ancestors. The only time my siblings and I heard Low German spoken was during our brief summer vacations with our beloved grandparents. We couldn’t understand it, let alone speak it, but we grew up loving to listen to Grandma and Grandpa when they started talking in Low German (usually when there was something they didn’t want us to know about.)
So one of the best things about the German dinner, in addition to the Schweinebraten Lende (roasted pork loin), the Stompt Toffels mit Stip (mashed potatoes with gravy) Gruner Bohnen & Rot Kohl (green beans and red cabbage), was the chance I had to listen to the familiar sing-song cadence of Low German which sounded exactly the way I remembered it sounding all those years ago. Here’s an example.
That was a commercial for a popular brand of Ostfriesen tea, and to my great delight my name was drawn for one of the door prizes that was given away the at the German dinner - a bag of Bunting tea! It couldn’t have been a more appropriate prize for me since the one Ostfriesen custom I’m familiar with is tea time thanks to those summer vacations with grandma and grandpa.
Without fail, we always had tea in the afternoon and again before bedtime. And whenever friends came by – no matter what time of the day – Grandma always put the tea kettle on, got out her pretty tea cups and saucers, and set about in the kitchen to put together a tray of freshly baked cakes and cookies that were always ready to be served whenever company came.
My mother has told me that tea-time used to involve a fairly elaborate set of social rules. For one thing it was unthinkable for a hostess to be caught without something that had been freshly baked and ready to be passed around on one of her prettiest serving platters. The tea itself had to be prepared correctly. Here is how mother remembers doing it:
Fill the teakettle with water and heat it until it is just about ready to boil. Meanwhile fill the tea pot with tea leaves – one teaspoon per cup and one for the pot. Pour the hot (but not boiling) water into the pot to cover the leaves and allow them to steep for 3 to six minutes. Then fill the pot with the rest of the hot water. Now the tea is ready to serve using a strainer to prevent loose tea leaves from ending up in the tea cups. But wait….it has to be done correctly, because it’s customary to serve tea with cream and sugar. And not just ordinary grain sugar or (horrors) powdered coffee creamer. No, it’s got to be heavy cream and kluntjes.
Kluntjes are lumps of rock candy that are placed in the tea cup before the tea is poured. Then comes the cream and this is the tricky part: you fill a spoon with cream (preferably using a Rohmlepel – a spoon with a round deep bowl intended just for this purpose) and very gingerly dribble it across the surface of the tea making sure that the spoon doesn’t actually come in contact with the liquid.
If you perform this little procedure correctly the cream will sink briefly into the tea and then rise back to the surface in the form of flowery cloud. I am determined to try this for myself sometime just to see if I can do it and I’ve even found a youtube video that illustrates how it’s done.
Ostfriesen tea time usually involves more than just one cup of tea. Mother says that a good hostess kept a watchful eye on the tea cups. If they were empty it meant “more please.” On the other hand if a tea cup had been turned upside down on the saucer it meant “no more, thank you.”
My generation is probably the first to have grown up with such scanty knowledge about the language and customs that were such an important part of our Oestfriesen ancestors’ way of life. But at least I have a tiny little bit to hang on to and possibly even hand along to my children. Perhaps I should invite them to come for teatime one of these days…..
