What I'd asked for, actually, was a few bites. But Staib doesn't do bites of this stuff; he does trenchers. By the time I arrived he'd gotten Marcus Rieker, the German butcher in Fox Chase, to make him an advance batch of his exquisite seasonal sausages and smoked pork chops, bribing him with fresh-baked chocolate mousse cake: He did not go to all this trouble to offer up a mere taste.
He'd even procured extras of the giant yellow tins of the imported Mildessa-brand sauerkraut he dresses up with the traditional apple, onion and bacon. Why is it so much better than American-style? It's from a special cone-shaped cabbage, he said, its core less prominent, its leaves far finer, from near Stuttgart. Then it's shredded more thinly, and soaked in sour-mitigating white wine.
It has always been a mystery to me that in a city so rich in German heritage, Philadelphia has so little of it in evidence. Pennsylvania Dutch (for Deutsch) farmers do their cameos at the Reading Terminal Market. But Germantown, the nation's first permanent German settlement (of 13 families of German Quakers and Mennonites in 1683), lost its accent long ago. And I'll venture that few passersby know that the hulking gray hall at Sixth and Spring Garden is the German Society, founded in the 1700s to aid poor German immigrants who were obliged - as my own forebears were - to work off their passage to America as indentured laborers.
