Authentic German Recipes: Beer Soup, a Forgotten Treasure. by peter gau
As many of you surely know, we Germans are very devoted to our beer. Especially in Bavaria, where I come from.
There are hundreds of different types of beer available in Germany, brewed in thousands of different breweries across the country. Some of these breweries well known worldwide, others small and just an extension of a pub or a restaurant.
Especially in Bavaria, literally every little town prides itself with at least one brewery, most of the time even two or three.
Beer is not just some drink for us. It is regarded as food. We actually have made laws in relation to beer, like the German purity law or the even stricter Bavarian purity law, which go back as far as the 15th century and are still in tact to this day.
Up until the 19th century beer actually really was commonly used as food, by using it as the main ingredient for a nutritious soup. The so-called (you guessed it) Beer Soup.
Beer Soup was most common in the rural population, but was also popular with the nobility, especially (and now hold on to the chair you are sitting on) as a breakfast!
Of course it seems strange to us to eat such a thing as Beer Soup for breakfast, but for the people back then it made sense to eat something nutritious and strengthening in the morning before a hard days work on a farm, or in the case of the nobility an exhausting day of playing blind man’s buff with some giggling ladies, or whatever else they did all day.
Only when coffee became more widespread in Germany, people switched to the to us more familiar breakfast customs of eating bread and drinking coffee as they appreciated its vitalizing effect.
Today Beer Soup is rarely ever on any ones menu anymore and I don’t only mean as a breakfast, but generally. I believe that Beer Soup has been more less forgotten about is an awful pity, as it is delicious and I think You and I should change that.
That is why I would like to share this recipe for Beer Soup with you. Try it out, it is not too much work and in my opinion well worth the effort.
An old German recipe book from the 19th century says the following (roughly translated):
“Cut four to six slices of stale bread into small pieces and place them into a saucepan with two bottles of ‘brown beer’ and one teaspoon of caraway seeds. Cover and boil until the bread is soft without stirring too much. Then put a piece of butter into the soup, season with sugar and salt and let boil up one more time.”
I’d say we better go for a more modern version as follows:
Ingredients:
1 1/2 tbs. flour
3 1/2 Tbs. butter
4 cups beer
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup milk
1 small piece of cinnamon
sugar to taste
toasted white bread
Brown the flour in the butter, then add beer.
Add cinnamon and sugar and bring to a boil.
Whisk together the egg yolk and milk and stir into the hot (but no longer boiling) beer.
Strain, and serve with toasted slices of bread.
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