Green sauce and cola

herbs for green sauce

The catmint is for the green sauce. I cut several herbs and mix them together into quark, a kind of white cheese, then eat it with cooked potatoes and eggs. It is called grüne sauce and is a typical dish from Hessen, Kassel or Frankfurt. It was Goethe’s favourite food. You also need to add garlic.  Sometimes I also use borage or comfrey, which you can also eat. Comfrey tastes like cucumber. You can put it on burns and make tea from it and  it helps if you have a cold. Comfrey is not traditionally in green sauce, but I use everything that is green and edible. Occasionally I put radish, but it is a little bitter. In former times people placed radish in their prayer books, they would chew it and the bitterness would keep them awake so as not to fall asleep in church.  Jewish people also use radish for Pesach.

brigitte and giulia

You will be surprised when I tell you that I have a cola plant, its not cola, you don't make cola from it, but it smells like coca cola. I always say to the children, tell your parents, they will not believe it.  It really smells like coca cola. I put it into my tea and its very nice. To be truthful, it is actually artemisia aberbraut, but I don't put it in the green sauce, it is not so good. It is bitter, because artemesia is really very bitter. When these plants here grow up, the children will go to their parents and they tell them they are growing plants of coca cola and fruit gum and the parents say: "No, I don’t believe it, you are crazy, you are dreaming about it". But it is real.

Brigitte (Fatima) Kanacher-Ataya, German, Wuhlegärten

 

artemisia