Any country has its specialties and these German Meme things are certainly good, but in general German cuisine is not very sophisticated.
In Europe by far it is Spanish and in general Mediterranean cuisine.
I am from Spain and here the food is worldclass, apart there are also not only the best wines, but also the beer can compete with the German one.
The worst cuisine is in Nordic countries and England, this is already off the scale, luckily there are good Chinese and Indian restaurants there that guarantee survival outside of fish and chips.
A huge chunk of traditional Nordic food is either dirt-poor peasant food, or food that keeps for months on end so the brutal winter doesn’t kill you regardless of whether you’re a dirt-poor peasant or a hoity-toity lord (and this is what lutefisk is: usually low-quality dried fish cured in lye to soften it.)
Unfortunately this also means that many recipes are more or less lost, or really only written down in eg. family recipe books. And at least here in Finland we’ve also stopped using a majority of the local herbs we historically used, in large part because they’re not seen as “fancy” (being herbs that dirt-poor peasants gathered from the woods) – not that we were ever that into spices, life being honestly pretty miserable for the majority of the population especially when serfdom was a thing. People had, well, other priorities
The moment I hear someone claim a culture’s food isn’t sophisticated unironically is the moment im going to shut my brain off. It’s such a ridiculous claim no matter who it’s directed at.
You like whatever food you like. It’s not more complicated than that.
Any country has its specialties and these German Meme things are certainly good, but in general German cuisine is not very sophisticated. In Europe by far it is Spanish and in general Mediterranean cuisine. I am from Spain and here the food is worldclass, apart there are also not only the best wines, but also the beer can compete with the German one. The worst cuisine is in Nordic countries and England, this is already off the scale, luckily there are good Chinese and Indian restaurants there that guarantee survival outside of fish and chips.
A huge chunk of traditional Nordic food is either dirt-poor peasant food, or food that keeps for months on end so the brutal winter doesn’t kill you regardless of whether you’re a dirt-poor peasant or a hoity-toity lord (and this is what lutefisk is: usually low-quality dried fish cured in lye to soften it.)
Unfortunately this also means that many recipes are more or less lost, or really only written down in eg. family recipe books. And at least here in Finland we’ve also stopped using a majority of the local herbs we historically used, in large part because they’re not seen as “fancy” (being herbs that dirt-poor peasants gathered from the woods) – not that we were ever that into spices, life being honestly pretty miserable for the majority of the population especially when serfdom was a thing. People had, well, other priorities
The moment I hear someone claim a culture’s food isn’t sophisticated unironically is the moment im going to shut my brain off. It’s such a ridiculous claim no matter who it’s directed at.
You like whatever food you like. It’s not more complicated than that.