EA man with a five-day beard, rubber boots and baggy army trousers scurries across the fields of garlic country at dawn, cuts off a few heads of lettuce here, pulls a handful of kohlrabi out of the ground there, then lets go of three or four fennel bulbs, stows his booty in a van and then secretly disappears from the hallway.
Most would think they were catching a cheeky vegetable thief in the act, but the man is righteous to the bone and also on an honorable mission: It is Andree Köthe, patron of the two-star Nuremberg restaurant “Essigbrätlein”, who every morning leaves for the garlic country for the early harvest shortly before six because on the one hand he is a freshness fanatic and on the other hand he knows that he will not find better vegetables anywhere than in this paradise on his doorstep.
We need a culinary map of Germany
Vegetable cultivation has been guaranteed since the fifteenth century in the garlic country, which owes its name not to garlic but to leeks such as onions and leeks. And for centuries it lived in a symbiotic relationship with Nuremberg, which could only rise to become the richest of all imperial cities because it was so reliably supplied with fresh food.
In return, the people of Nuremberg fertilized the sandy soil of the garlic country with the contents of their septic tanks, which remained what it was and still is today when the imperial city went downhill: the best vegetable growing area in Bavaria, managed by 130 mostly smallholders, one Treasure trove of crops between Nuremberg, Erlangen and Fürth, which hardly anyone outside of Franconia takes notice of – another blind spot on the culinary map of Germany that urgently needs to be drawn.
No mouth robber, but a highly serious chef: Andree Köthe at his early morning harvest in Knoblauchsland.
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Image: Tobias Schmitt
It is amazing how stubbornly and self-confidently the Knoblauchsland withstands the settlement pressure from all sides. In the east, Nuremberg is close at hand, in the north it ends right at the airport, in the south and west the other two cities loom large. But the farmers don’t even think about giving up even one square meter of their land. Because it is the land of their great-grandfathers and should also be the land of their great-grandchildren, and the beautiful old farming villages with their fortified churches, manor houses and patrician palaces are certainly not spoiled by new development areas or commercial areas.
Appropriately, agriculture is practiced here on a human scale without industrial monocultures, which can be seen in an extremely decorative way in the division of the fields: Usually only two or three rows are planted with the same type of vegetable, then the next follows, which not only affects the landscape the lively appearance of a geometric patchwork, but also has very practical reasons – many farmers have market stalls with a wide range of products and only harvest what they need at the moment, two or three rows are completely sufficient.