Two Germans have had published a ‘dire straits’ cookbook called Hartz IV – A Cookbook for Hard Times. It is named after Peter Hartz, the German businessman behind Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s unpopular economic reforms, which are widely blamed for pushing unemployment figures to their highest level since the 1930s, when rampant unemployment in Germany was the spur that brought Adolf Hitler to power. The Cookbook for Hard Times uses recipes devised as part of World War II austerity measures, and other suggestions which smack of desperation. After all, the austerity measures of the war were due not so much to lack of money as to the unavailability of most ordinary foodstuffs, forcing housewives to make do with the little they could get on the black market.
In financial hard times, it’s a different matter. The food is there – you just have to be more careful with your money, and the money supplied by the German dole system is pretty generous by our standards. This curious cookbook doesn’t spell out the tricks all good homemakers of the past learned, to spin out the meagre wages of the household breadwinner – like making your own pastry and basing meals on cheap but nutritious foods like eggs. Instead, it’s packed with very interesting but rather inedible suggestions. The stipulated aim is to feed a family of four for less than five euros per meal, and this has made the Cookbook for Hard Times so popular among Germany’s 4.8 million unemployed that it sold out after hitting the bookshops.
Of course, it may be just the curiosity factor. Among the basic recipes is one for pesto sauce made from wild rocket, which grows “in the verges of many dole office car parks”. This wild rocket is something that I always recommend to people after a tip from Matty Cremona, who saw me ripping out the ‘weeds’ that grow riotously in the garden. I had eaten the wild rocket at a good restaurant only a little while previously, but had failed to make the connection between what I had raved about then and what I was accustomed to cursing as a nuisance.
If you have a garden, you’ll find wild rocket growing as a ‘weed’, and the countryside is full of it. It actually tastes better than the domesticated variety. So that’s one wise suggestion made by the ‘hard times’ German cookbook, though it’s hardly going to sustain a family of four.
Other ideas are somewhat perplexing, like dousing a loaf of stale bread with oil and then grating it, as ‘poor man’s Parmesan’. Just do without the Parmesan, I say – and anyway, oil costs money. Another suggestion – and to do this, I think you have to be on the verge of starvation – is to soak wild daisy buds (taken from unkempt pavements, verges and traffic islands) in salt water and vinegar for two months, and to then use them as a substitute for capers. Again, do without the capers, I say. At a pinch, why not stay up all night catching the cockroaches in your damp basement flat, and then fry them in batter?
If unemployed Germans, on their generous social security payments, want ideas on how to feed a family of four at a cost of five euros (about Lm2.30) a meal, they should ask an old-fashioned Maltese mara tad-dar to write the book. Malta is full of women who do this as a matter of course, and very often they have families of five or six, and their meagre budget needs to cover clothes, shoes, cleaning things and all the myriad requirements of a family.
At Lm2.30 a meal for two meals a day, this gives a budget of around Lm32 for a week, or Lm128 for a month. In Malta, the standard family food budget for those who are reasonably well off is Lm200 – just Lm70 more than the ‘starvation rations’ of the German cookbook. For the vast majority of Maltese families, where the sole earner brings home Lm200 to Lm300 a month, Lm128 to spend on food alone is a veritable luxury.
If you shop only at supermarkets in better areas, you won’t be aware of just how many people scrape by, with the contents of their trolleys being more than ample evidence of this. Slices of ham are still bought by number rather than weight, presumably to be rationed out at home. Tinned meat is used instead of fresh meat for pasta sauces. Packets of cereal are a wanton luxury for children, who might get an economy pack of ‘no brand’ cornflakes at most. Refrigerators and pantries are not kept stocked up; instead, meals are planned and measured out, and there is always no more than just enough food for the next few days.
If the Germans are complaining about life on their dole money, perhaps they should try eking out a living on a full-time wage here in Malta. As the saying goes, they don’t know they’re born.
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One politician who appears able to handle annoying situations with ease and good manners is the prime minister. The temptation to be rude, when a Chiara fanatic called him at home and woke him at 1.15am, to demand that he send a special flight to collect his idol from Kiev after her performance, must have been great indeed. No doubt, the Chiara fanatic is now telling his friends that he won’t vote in the next election, because ‘Lawrence’ didn’t send a plane for the superstar, even though ‘l-Air Malta taghna’.
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This kind of thing gives me an insight into the world view of some of my compatriots. It’s a bit like that famous 1970s cover of The New Yorker magazine, which is now commercialised on postcards sold to tourists in New York City. It’s called View of the World from Ninth Avenue, and it shows a couple of rows of disproportionately large skyscrapers and beyond them, a small strip of blank and bleak terrain marked randomly with place-names, and after that, a piece of sea marked ‘Pacific Ocean’. At least, having a world view no larger than New York City is having a world view no larger than the global capital and the most happening place on earth.
Having a world view no larger than a Maltese town, on the other hand, is a little bit confining to the imagination – and what’s to say about having a world view no larger than two Maltese streets (your own, and the one where your mother lives?). That makes for the kind of person who calls the prime minister in the small hours to demand that he commandeer a craft from the national airline to pick up from Kiev a singer who placed second in the Eurovision Song Contest.