my five-year quest to understand German taste

Soon after my friend Andreas moved to Berlin, he sent me a picture of some pine nuts on a supermarket shelf. What made them photoworthy? The descriptor milde in big letters on the label.

People have eaten pine nuts since the Paleolithic Age, with evidence of their consumption found in ancient cave dwellings. And I really, really struggled with the thought that, from 10,000BC to any single time since, anyone anywhere would have flinched at their overbearing zest. Surely, if ever there was a naturally mild food, this was it.

As Andreas continued his new life in Germany, a steady drip of other “mild” foodstuffs arrived in my inbox. First, there were carrots, labelled as crunchy and mild. Then came mild orange juice, mild wine, mild olive oil. Mild chickpeas, mild tofu, mild maple syrup, mild yoghurt, mild bread. As a recent transplant, Andreas had no idea what this was all about. “I have BEGGED Germans to explain to me how carrots are not already a ‘mild’ flavour,” he wrote. But they couldn’t, and so began a shared mystery that would sustain our friendship for more than five years.

No search engines helped in my quest for answers. I scoured online supermarket shelves, surfacing and cataloguing new mild foods like a deranged archivist. The subsequent, often-contradictory explanations I received turned this mystery into a mild mind-prison.

It is said there is a German word for everything. Really, this is a quirk of the scaffolding of the language, where nouns are tied together to create new meanings. There’s Sitzpinkler, a man who sits down to urinate. There’s Hackenporsche, or “heel Porsche”, the wheeled shopping trolleys beloved of elderly people everywhere. There’s Hasenbrot, literally “rabbit bread”, meaning a mouldy old sandwich destined for the “rabbit hutch”. And there’s Mordshunger, or “murderous hunger”.

But mild, said Stefan Oloffs, a UK-based German-language tutor, was a rare blind spot. It could refer to taste or the effect on digestion or it could mean bland, benign, gentle or light. This was a word that could mean many, many things.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the explanations that started to trickle in differed so wildly. German food historian Ursula Heinzelmann accused me of “projecting an American or British perspective on to a situation based on Slavic food cultures”. The mild-to-spicy scale we are used to in the UK, which is based on the burn of Scoville units, differs from Germany, she said, because “chillies were a late-20th-century introduction”.

The German palate, according to Heinzelmann, was originally shaped by “lactic fermentation using salt on the one hand and pickling using vinegar on the other”, because the eastern part of Germany was Slavic before the Franks and others from the west colonised it, a process that lasted until the 13th century. Historically, “mild refers to low levels of both salt and acidity”, she said.

That did explain the pine nuts, a bit. The inoffensive seeds are not generally thought of as salty or acidic. But it was surprising that on the spectrum of pine nuts, there was a differentiation at all.

We noticed an intriguing pattern. It seemed to be in the more upmarket stores that mild items were more common

And had Germany really collectively decided to reject strong flavours? Surely not. The existence of horseradish and currywurst, and the fact that a strong schnapps feels like a kick in the neck, all suggest otherwise. Mettigel, a party snack consisting of uncooked pork mince formed into the shape of a hedgehog with equally raw onions for spines, may not be a contender for international culinary stardom, but its pungent flavour profile is not in question.

One obvious explanation was that these “mild” products were a mere mistranslation. Maybe mild referred to natural, low-fat or organic foods. But a flurry of emails to mild-foodstuff manufacturers confirmed these were not mere low-fat alternatives.

When quizzed about its mild olive spread, for example, a Bertolli spokesperson said the company designs its products with “the specific preferences, tastes and cooking practices” of different markets in mind. “The mild olive flavour in this spread was to ensure consumers understood the product did not have too strong an olive oil flavour, just a hint,” they explained.

A spokesperson for the Seeberger nut farming company said its “mild” pine nuts — pinus koraiensis, imported from Asia — were “very low” in “resinous taste”. This nutty Pinienkernen taxonomy catered for those who “do not like the taste of the Mediterranean”, they added, and was popular “more or less all over Europe”.

Four years after that original pine-nut message, I decided to go to Germany. During this fact-finding mission, I talked to the head of a butler school in Munich (“Indian restaurants here are all mild!”), the owner of Europe’s largest ukulele shop (mild bread equals “strange” but mild olive oil “makes perfect sense”), a gang of self-described drug dealers on the end of a 72-hour bender (“good question”) and scores of bartenders (“good question”, “good question”, “good question”). The owner of a Mexican restaurant in Kreuzberg, Chaparro Cocina Mexicana, which served truly authentic tacos, said that in his experience, Germans were interested in the spiciest stuff he had, not any bland, mild derivatives. Yet more questions.

The next day, on a sunny afternoon in Schöneberg, near the Rathaus where Kennedy declared “Ich bin ein Berliner”, Andreas and I weaved through supermarket aisles searching for mild food and stronger answers. Obviously, the hunt merely confirmed what we already knew: the existence of mild pine nuts. Andreas pointed to some mild yoghurt. “This is awful,” he said. “It tastes like sour water.”

But we noticed an intriguing pattern. It seemed to be in the more upmarket stores, such as Rewe, that mild items were more common. We wondered if there was a correlation between the upper crust and mild foods, as if a taste for them was indicative of a more refined palate.

Thomas Bühner, who was head chef at the now-closed three-Michelin-starred restaurant La Vie in Osnabrück, confirmed that dampening down flavours is indeed an “expression of luxury” in German cuisine, where even chicory and Brussels sprouts “must not be bitter”.

“Curry sauces must not be hot but sweet,” Bühner added, sadly. “Even lamb must not taste like lamb, but should be neutral in flavour. What’s not sweet is made sweet, which can also be seen in wines. German sparkling wine tends to be sweet rather than brut. It’s a pity, so many special characteristics are lost.”

This aspirational bourgeois nothingness might have deep historical routes via an unlikely culprit: France. According to Yale medievalist Paul Freedman, medieval- and Renaissance-era cuisine tended to be “highly spiced and show-offy”. Contrary to a widely diffused myth, he said, this wasn’t to cover up deteriorated meat or to preserve its flesh, “but a preference for complexity and a piquant array of taste sensations”. But in the 17th century, French cooks ridiculed this medieval enthusiasm for spices. Instead, they “exalted the basic taste of the best ingredients so ‘a cabbage should taste like a cabbage’,” according to one French food reformer of the period.

French travellers to Germany were even “disgusted by what they regarded as the overuse of spices”. It wasn’t that food reformers acted as culinary missionaries, Freedman said, but that their ideas took over French cuisine in the 17th century. As France under Louis XIV was the most prestigious trendsetter of the time, elites in other countries followed Parisian fashions. “The court of Frederick the Great of Prussia or the Russian Empress Catherine in the 18th century spoke French, read the latest books from France and took up French fashions, including food.”

But mild foods are not only the staple of the wealthy. These were not all luxurious items sitting on supermarket shelves. According to the head chef of London’s German Gymnasium, Alex Thiel, who says he debates this point with his mother when he returns to Germany and finds mild options in the fridge or pantry, there are a few more things at play. One reason is that the postwar and post-reunification periods were tough for Germany. An abundance mindset began to flower, and people simply liked to have options that catered for all tastes.

While mild food products might appear strange to those born in the UK, Thiel added, mild was simply not something one questioned, just as Brits don’t question why they can buy pies in tins.

Finally, Thiel said, traditional German food is just not that healthy. “We want to be healthy but we have very starchy food, lots of processed meat, lots of Schweinebraten. We trick ourselves: take some of the flavour out and suddenly it’s good for me, and then I can have lots of sausages for breakfast.” And indeed for those unlucky souls among us for whom acidic food leads to an urgent visit to die Keramikabteilung (the “ceramics department”), there is the idea that die Sprühwurst (“spraying sausage”) can be curtailed by choosing milder options.

In fact, the leichte Vollkost (“easily digestible”) diet was once recommended to those with more sensitive stomachs, such as older people in hospitals. It was low in fat and salt but crucially also low in seasoning. (Although according to a 2002 pamphlet from the Ernährungsforum dietitians’ newsletter, sticking strictly to this diet saw patient-health deteriorate and it is no longer recommended.)

The medley of mild food, then, may also allude to dated misconceptions around health, as Thiel suggests, in the country where homeopathy was developed back in the 18th century by Samuel Hahnemann and where sceptics are still battling the prescription of “natural” remedies today.

According to Inga Reimers, an ethnographer of food at HafenCity university, Hamburg, there may be yet more factors at work. The German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz, for example, developed a theory of the “society of singularities” where middle-class individuals search for signifiers that they are indeed middle class and individuals but in an understated sort of way. “Mild” may just be one of these signifiers, with an association of cleanliness that shoppers could feel pleased about in their pantries.

Above all, the perception of healthiness seems to be what’s most at play. Just as Thiel said that a mild breakfast could permit a sausage-fest for dinner, Reimers adds, “Everybody knows what’s meant when something is mild. It’s lighter or purer, but it’s not so specific that you’re forced to follow regulations. “It’s a sign the food industry can use to target groups with problems in nutrition, or other diets, such as pregnant or breastfeeding mums. You might think, OK this is a mild version. This is better for my baby.”

And so I concluded my quest. The answer to my burning question? A familiar confluence of health and wealth that, interesting though it was, possibly did not need the input of a ukulele shop owner. As I reflected on my five-year journey, I realised there was indeed a German word that summed up my time as a food detective. Hirnwichser, that is to say “brain wanker”, one who overthinks a simple problem.

Tamlin Magee is a writer based in Margate

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