2023-11-03 19:30:11
What is really important? What touches us today – and won’t go away tomorrow? They are the things that have moved us since humans existed: happiness, love, family, relationships, time, stress, loneliness, farewell, sadness.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen*, coming from a German-Jewish family, sought answers to humanity’s eternal questions from poets, thinkers and researchers. And found a few answers that are astonishingly simple – and yet can enrich our lives.
★★★
More than two million people watch a TV show every day in which unknown people do nothing but cook. You can’t taste anything in front of the TV, you can’t smell anything and still – people love it. And I confess: I am one of them.
If I can, I watch “Kitchen Battle.” My heroes are Björn Freitag, Johann Lafer, Karl-Heinz Hauser and Thomas Martin. They are Germany’s most famous television chefs – and I hang on their every word.
The cooking show phenomenon: What drives us to look into strangers’ cooking pots? Are millions of us secret amateur cooks who want to know what you can do with the spice turmeric or which mustard is best used for beef roulades?
BILD columnist Louis Hagen
Photo: Wolf Lux
I can only speak for myself: I don’t care how much caraway, marjoram or garlic goes into a dish. I watch cooking shows because they calm me down. It’s so wonderful to watch other people grate radishes or peel onions.
Witnessing whether “cooking points” are correct or why vegetables need to be placed in ice water after blanching (so that they don’t lose their color). Of course “for the love of the product”.
I think the post-war history is also the history of our television chefs. It started with Clemens Wilmenrod (the inventor of “Toast Hawaii” in the mid-1950s) to Alfred Biolek (“Alfredissimo” in the late 1970s) to “Lafer, Lichter Lecker”.
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Millions of people cook every day – even if only passively in front of the television. I believe this passion is also connected to world events: the more threatening and unpleasant our everyday life appears, the more we look for a quiet retreat, a kind of balm for our soul.
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But the greatest cooking joy for me doesn’t come from television. It is a narrow red book that my late mother left me. Nobody could make a better bolognese than her. She wrote down how to do it. My friends love the dish.
And when I cook “Bolognese á la Mama”, it’s as if she was sitting at the table.
* Louis Hagen (76) was a member of the BILD editorial team for 13 years and is now a consultant at the communications agency WMP. His texts have also been published as a book and are available at koehler-mittler-shop.de.
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