kle. The big loaves of light brown rye bread
appear at this meal instead of the little white rolls eaten at
breakfast. Beer or wine is drunk, and very often of late years tea as
well. Sweets are not usually served at supper, unless guests are
present. They are eaten at the midday dinner, and each part of Germany
has its own favourite dishes.

Soups are nearly always good in Germany, and some of the best are not
known in England. The dried green corn so much used for soup in South
Germany can, however, be bought in London from the German provision
merchants, so at the end of this greedy chapter I will give a recipe
for making it. _Nudelsuppe_ of strong chicken stock and home-made
_Nudeln_ used to be what the Berliner called his roast goose--"_eine
jute Jabe Jottes_," but the degenerate Germans of to-day buy tasteless
manufactured _Nudeln_ instead of rolling out their own. _Nudeln_ are
the German form of macaroni, but when properly made they are better
than any macaroni can be. If you have been brought up in an
old-fashioned German menage, and, as a child likes to do, peeped into
the kitchen sometimes, you will remember seeing large sheets of
something as thin and yellow as chamois leather hung on a clothes
horse to dry. Then you knew that there would be _Nudeln_ for your
dinner, either narrow ones in soup, or wider ones boiled in water and
sprinkled with others cut as fine as vermicelli and fried brown in
butter. The paste is troublesome to make. It begins with a deceptive
simplicity. Take four whole eggs and four tablespoonsful of milk if
you want enough for ten people, says the cookery book, and make a
light dough of it with a knife in a basin. Anyone can do that, you
find. But then you must put your dough on the pastry board, and work
in more flour as you knead it with your hands. "The longer you knead
and the stiffer the dough is the better your _Nudeln_ will be,"
continues the cookery book. But the next operation is to cut the dough
into four, and roll out each portion _as thin as paper_, and no one
who has not seen German _Nudeln_ before they are cooked can believe
that this is actually done. It is no use to give the rest of the
recipe for drying them, rolling each piece loosely and cutting it into
strips and boiling them with salt in water. If you told your English
cook to make you _Nudeln_ she would despise it for a foreign mess, and
bring you something as thick as a pancake. If you want them you had
better get