Well! we live and work on the fourth floor of a narrow slip of a house in Johannis Strasse. Herr Sorgenpfennig, our “principal,” occupies the suite of four rooms, and devotes a central one (to which no light can possibly come save at second hand through the door), to his “gesellen.” We are three; a quiet Dane, full of sage precepts, and practical illustrations of economy; a roystering Bavarian from Nuremberg, who never fails to grieve over the thin beer of Hamburg, and who, as member of a choral union near Das Johanneum, delights in vigorous and unexpected bursts of song; and myself.
Workmen in Hamburg are still in a state of villanage; beneath the roof of the “Herr” do they find at once a workshop, a dormitory, and a home. We endeavour so far to conform to the rules of propriety as to escape the imprisonment and other penalties that await the “unruly journeyman.” The table of Herr Sorgenpfennig is our own, and a very liberal one it is esteemed to be. Let me sketch you a few of its items: delicious coffee, “white bread and brown,” or rather black, and unlimited butter, make up our breakfast. Dinner always commences with a soup, usually made from meat, sometimes from herbs, lemon, sweet fruit, or other ingredients utterly indescribable. Meat, to be fit for a German table, must be carefully pared of every vestige of fat; if boiled it is underdone, unless expressly devoted to the soup, when the juiceless shreds that remain are served up with plums or prepared vegetables; if it be baked (roasting is almost unknown) it is dry and tasteless. Bacon and sausages, with their inevitable accompaniment, sourkraut, is a favourite dish; but not so unvaryingly so as some choose to imagine. Acids generally are much admired in German cookery. In nothing, perhaps, are the Hamburgers more to be envied, in a gastronomic view, than in their vegetables. Singularly small as are these products of the kitchen garden, they are sweeter and more delicately flavoured than any I ever tasted elsewhere. As _entremets_, and as accompaniments to meat, they are largely consumed. The Hamburgers laugh at the English cooks who boil green peas and potatoes in plain water, for here boiled potatoes are scarcely known—that nutritious vegetable being cut into slices and fried; while green peas are slowly stewed in butter or cream, and sweetened with fine sugar. But we “gesellen” have plebeian appetites, and whatever dish may be set before us, as surely vanishes to its latest shred. The little patches of puff-paste, smeared with preserve, sent to us as Sunday treat, or the curious production in imitation of our English pie, and filled with maccaroni, are immolated at once without misgiving or remorse. If we sup at all, it is upon pasty, German cheese, full of holes, as if it had been made in water, or a hot liver sausage, as an extraordinary indulgence.