Christmas Eve, a happy day, but seemed like an anticlimax what with all the activity leading up to it, which I suppose you have to enjoy in its own right.  The bottom line is we suffered from some level of wurst lameness due to not ordering early enough.  The Christmas ordering deadlines for two of the German meat processors we usually order from were a few days earlier than usual, which meant we had to rely on Karl Ehmer for most of our pork products.  Karl Ehmer is very good, but they tend to use a little too much cure for my taste and so I like to round out the evening with other products that have less of that characteristic.  Karl Ehmer has free shipping for orders over $60, which is excellent, but they raised their prices to such an extent that they may not be the best deal anymore for a number of items, gratis shipping notwithstanding.  Next year I’ll have to get on the stick.  We were particularly unhappy with the lack of variety with liverwurst, which is a nonstarter for a German on Christmas Eve.  We supplemented the cold cuts with Cacio Stagionato al Tartufo, a cheese on the soft side of hard made from both sheep’s and cow’s milk with shaved white truffles.  It’s good but I would not buy it again, mainly because truffles in any kind of quantity seem to have an nauseating effect on me.  I have the same reaction to truffle oil drizzled on something – it’s powerful to me in the same way too many roasted garlic cloves are.  After awhile – bleh!  I don’t seem to have the same problem with Délice de Bourgogne, a marriage of cow’s milk and cream, which I served this evening at its peak of ripeness, which, for me, means running out of the package at the very center and then cream-cheesy toward the rind.  I seem to be able to eat quite a bit of that.  This triple cream indecency was dreamed up by 18th century food übermensch Brillat-Savarin.  If you want to go decadent, this is your cheese.  Once again my attempt to find langostinos, small crustaceans related to crabs, for a lobster-like salad, was foiled.  Simply not to be found, which is a shame, because these guys really taste like lobster and are less expensive and hassle-free in terms of prep.  I went with a basic shrimp salad instead.  The real indulgence this year was the $60 pound of prime filet mignon we had ground into tartare.  Shortly before the evening meal we mixed in some sea salt, fresh pepper and, further tempting a dance with food poisoning, a raw, organic, egg yolk.  We figured we employed due diligence in buying the best and the rest would be fate.

Sorry for the delay in posting, but I have been away for quite a while spending time with my father, who passed away last month. I am backlogged in my posting and will take care of that in the next couple of weeks. We did manage to have another one of our traditional German Christmas Eve feasts this evening, and I have the photos to prove it. I can’t help but feature Topfsuelze here, though, as befits its place in my Christmas Eve meat product hierarchy. Honestly, if I had to choose one thing to eat at this meal it would be Topfsuelze, which is more or less head cheese, but not the kind that would come to mind to an Amerikaner. This is not at all fatty and has a very bright, clean flavor. There are various versions of this pork-in-sour-aspic delight, but the best contains many little chunks of tongue. It is produced in loaf form with a thick layer of aspic on top into which sliced eggs, pickles and carrots are molded. I order

a boatload of it and then hide it in the back of the fridge where no one else in my household would ever look — near actual ingredients for cooking. I urge you to try this, even if the idea turns you off. It is so damned good! Allow me to mention a few of the other goodies on the table: Teewurst, a cured, ground pork spread with a bit of a twang that comes either finely or coarsely ground; Blutwurst with tongue, which is mainly, well, blood with chunks of tongue (sorry, but nothing goes to waste when it comes to sausage-making in the old country); several types of Cervelat, which is salami; Leberkäse, spiced pork paste baked in a loaf pan, sliced and eaten warm, and, last but never, ever, least, Leberwurst, both smooth and chunky. If we were in Germany, we would have had herring salad on the table, too, but it is difficult to find salted herring in the U.S. from which to prepare it. Next year I’ll go into more detail about the various Würste, as I hope to have more time.