Radio Digest (June 1932-Mar 1933)

30 S^ERM AN Y. The frankfurter of \J" Frankfort-on-the-Main in Germany is the pride of the hot-dog kennels. Its coat-of-arms is golden mustard on a roll, azure, and its pedigree goes further back into history than the Spanish Armada. Coney Island, Revere Beach and the White City may boast of their hot beagles, but they cannot bark in the same dog show with the original Frankfort. Of course there are items other than frankfurters and the culinary masterpiece of frankfurters and sauerkraut to be obtained in Frankfort-on-the-Main. You have your choice of Gefulter Schweinskopf, Westfalischer Schinken, Gefultes Spanferkel, Netzroulade Galantine and Sulzpastete Schinkenroulade. But when your exhausted nose catches the aroma of Frankfurter Wurstchen mit Sauerkraut und Kartoffelbrei, you take a new lease on life. I remember some years ago The American Hotel Association made Frankfort a stop-over during their convention. In this city a dinner was given them. It was the most successful banquet of the tour, and Director Schmoll, of the Frankfurter Hof, was amazed at his guests' capacity for boiled hay and canines. One lady, name withheld because of her social position, ate four pairs of hot dogs, which is a bigenough team to draw a sledge from Nome to Sitka. The Frankfort frankfurter always arrives in pairs, like two dogs in one collar. It is a beautiful ornament of the sausage maker's architecture, and has a bulging forehead and most intelligent expression. I do not blame the lady for scoffing four sets of frankfurters, for Goethe was born in this town and achieved his greatness on the same food. * * * Germany abounds in Bads. Now don't misunderstand me, I am merely telling you that Germany has its share of the nearly a million mineral and mud baths which feature Europe. Germany's Bad Nauheim is one of the most famous of these baths, any one of which is guaranteed to remove paint, tar and pitch from the clothing, and moles, blemishes and warts from your constitution. The blemish doesn't have to be on your face. It can be in a radius of thirty miles and these wonderful Bads will make it worse. You see all kinds of Europeans headed for some mysterious Bads in the Ural or Persian Mountains, and very often you spot rich Americans looking in Europe for the health they lost in America. You cannot recover anything when you look for it in the wrong place, but the Bads spring up every week. Somebody hears of a new one in some inaccessible region and the procession of hypo-invalids marches off toward it in a body. They are expensive, as the Bad hotels 'It's an art," says George, ATATORIA BY Cjreorge Ivector GEORGE RECTOR broadcasts on the OUR DAILY FOOD program which may be heard over the dual NBC networks, each weekday morning with Colonel Goodbody and Judge Gordon, 8:45 A.M. EST, WEAF; WEEI; WTIC; WJAR; WTAG; WCSH; WFI; WGY; WBEN; WCAE; WRC; WTAM; WW J; WLS; WOC; WHO; WOW; WDAF; and 9:30 A.M. EST on WJZ; WBZ; WBZA; KDKA; WBAL; WHAM; WJR; WRVA; WPTF; WJAX; WFLA; WIOD; WMAQ; KWK; KSTP; WIBA; WTMJ; WSM; WMC; WSB; WAPI; WSMB; KVOO; WKY; WBAP; KPRC; WOAI; WBT. are very good, if you know what I mean. I have always gotten a laugh from some of the typical advertisements of these health resorts. Some of them actually read like this: "Remarkably pure atmosphere and perpetually mild climate. Fine for liver complaints, horseback riding, nervous troubles, dandruff, stomach trouble and golf" — which in my estimation just about covers all the ills the flesh inherits. Continental society makes these Bads the rendezvous for the European Who's Who, and I have a notion that the most popular liquids which come out of the earth in the vicinity of the curative Bads are the juices siphoned out of the wine cellars of the Rhineland. As a citizen of a dry republic I had the posthumous pleasure of looking at the big tun in Heidelberg Castle. This vat contains 221,726 quarts of wine. I aimed my camera at it and it obligingly sat for a portrait, but I assure you I could not secure its autograph. If you aren't a habitue of the roadside hot dog stand, or if the thought of a tenderly toasted frankfurter doesn't tickle your palate, how about Gerfultes Spanferkel im Backofen gebraten? Which, when spelled out in alphabetical soup, means suckling pig baked brown in the oven. Pork is the food mainstay of the Fatherland. Take the porcine pet away and you have deprived them of the stuff of life. It is served in a thousand different ways, and the Germans should be thankful to the careless Chinaman who burned down his house many centuries ago and accidentally roasted a pig. In dragging the pig from the involuntary funeral pyre, the Chink managed to burn his fingers on the piggie's smok L ing hide, and. when he licked W those digits in an effort to * assuage the pain, his palate vibrated with a new gastronomical melody. He had discovered roast pig. He burned down seventeen more houses before they discovered him, and there was a pig tied in each house. Instead of being punished, he was rewarded by being made Pig Scorcher for all Mongolia, for he packed the jury by staking them to their first dish of roast porker. * * * Nowhere in Europe does prosperity shine as in Berlin. The town has gone through the mangle of circumstance, the wringer of panic, and has been under the hot iron of civil warfare. The result is that Berlin has emerged freshly starched and laundered and is today the one bright spot in Europe. Paris, Vienna, Rome and Leningrad have all been through the same hazing, but only Berlin shows no ill effects. This statement is no press agentry, even though Berlin hopes to snare its portion of the 500,000 American tourists who will flock over here for the summer Americans are not the only suckers: tourists of all nations get the hook.