Himmel un Äd

Name: Himmel un Äd
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: The Rhine and the German Middle
Ingredients: 1kg floury potatoes; 600g tart apples, Boskoop or Elstar; 400g blood sausage for frying, Flönz; 3 medium onions; to taste salt; as needed fat, for frying

Cologne

Himmel un Äd, mashed potato and apple purée with fried blood sausage and golden onions: a shallow plate of pale potato mash swirled with soft apple purée, two thick slices of dark blood sausage with crisp edges on top and a tangle of golden fried onion rings over everything.

Illustration

Researched: Researched from 1 source in the brief

The autumn and winter plate of the Rhineland: mashed potato and apple purée under fried blood sausage and onions. The sausage is Flönz, Cologne's own blood sausage; the apples are tart, Boskoop or Elstar; the potato is floury. The weights are from one German recipe page, and the dish keeps no clock: each part is done when it is soft, golden or crisp.

by Cologne

Himmel un Äd, heaven and earth, is apples from the sky and potatoes from the ground, with fried blood sausage, which in Cologne's dialect is Flönz and is tied to the city's slaughter trade. The potato reached the Rhineland in the eighteenth century at the earliest, so the dish cannot be older than that, and no source dates it. Halve Hahn, the half chicken, is a half rye roll with butter, a thick slice of medium aged Gouda, gherkin and mustard. The oldest source for the name is a reader's letter in the Kölner Tageblatt of 13 July 1913, in which a 72 year old Wilhelm Vierkötter says that at his birthday on 18 April 1877, in Wilhelm Lölgen's inn at Hohe Pforte 8, he ordered fourteen "half chickens" and had fourteen cheese rolls served; a rival story has a guest who wanted only half a roll, and a third derives the name from poor people's hand cheese. The letter is the oldest written source and it is a man telling his own story 36 years on. The Gouda is Dutch, which is the Rhine's trade with the Low Countries, EU-22, sitting on a Cologne plate.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 4.

Ingredients

1kg floury potatoes
600g tart apples, Boskoop or Elstar
400g blood sausage for frying, Flönz
3 medium onions
to taste salt
as needed fat, for frying

Method

Peel the potatoes, boil them in salted water until soft, drain, and mash them.
Peel, core and cut the apples, cook them with a splash of water to a soft purée, and salt it lightly; some cooks fold the apple through the potato and some keep them side by side.
Slice the onions in rings and fry them in the fat until golden and soft.
Slice the blood sausage for frying thick and fry the slices in the onion pan until the outsides are crisp.
Plate the mash and the apple together, the sausage on top, the onions over everything.

What a modern chef changes

The sausage crisp, the apple sharp, the onion sweet

Rungs 1 and 4

Method

Cook the apple purée with no sugar and a squeeze of lemon, and pass it; it is the acid on the plate and the dish has no other.
Fry the onion slowly in butter to a deep caramel, half an hour, and finish it with a spoon of apple wine.
Chill the blood sausage hard, slice it thick, dust the faces with flour and fry them in a very hot pan so the skin crackles and the middle stays soft; a lukewarm pan turns Flönz to paste.
Black pudding is the British stand in, and it is not the same thing: the oatmeal makes it firmer, so cut it thinner.

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