There is some corner of a foreign land that is forever England. Well, perhaps. More pertinently, though, there is some corner of industrial-estate Berlin that is forever Bullmore.
And it’s costing me and my siblings thousands of pounds a month in environmental sanctions, due to the vast amounts of toxic waste that happened to be dumped underneath it in a fit of carelessness by my great uncle, many years before any of us were even born.
It was with heavy heart, then, that I saw the announcement that a new Herman Ze German sausage monger was opening its doors in London. Just another way for them to get in my pockets, I thought. Just as I have no say over the money that is siphoned out of my dwindling trust fund on a monthly basis, so is it that I have no control over my purse strings when I see a good sausage vendor. It’s one of the many reasons, in fact, that I undergo most of my Munich business trips blindfolded, much to the amusement of Gunter and his fat wife (I’m assuming she’s fat: obviously I’ve never actually seen her, what with the blindfold and the fact that I insist we hold every meeting in complete darkness, just in case.)
But Herman will have my custom, and he’ll have it monthly. They serve the lager here not in steins but in plastic cups like those red ones you used to see in American college movies and everyone thought they were awfully clever for having in their house in second year at uni but that you can now buy in any medium to large Tesco. Except Herman Ze German’s cups are orange which is really neat as it sort of matches the hue of a fine currywurst sauce or a spatchcock sausage. I’ve probably made that last thing up but you get the idea. The sausages, spatchcock or otherwise (on reflection, definitely not spatchcock) are lovely and my first bite revealed a sort of crackling like texture around the edge that gave way to wholesome, nurturing sausagemeat, and that rather reminded me of the decent pork crackling that we used to have on mid-week roasts before my family had to cut back on that sort of thing (see above). There is some corner of a foreign sausage, I suppose, that is forever England.
I suspect Herman’s is a good destination for a first or second date, especially if you’re a boy and want to assess how your squeeze struggles with a vaguely phallic foodstuff. The chips are baked as well, which seems to be important to girls so she might think you’re a lot more considerate than you really are, and the sausages are from free range and healthy pigs, pigs unlike any of the animals that might happen to graze on the financial and literal sink hole that is my family legacy.
words Joe Bullmore
