In Friedrich's Northern Germany, the day revolved around a single hot meal, the Mittagessen taken at noon (soup, meat or fish, root vegetables), framed by breakfast and above all the evening Abendbrot: a cold meal of black rye bread, butter, herring and quark, placed without ceremony on the table. Sunday and calendar holidays (St. Martin's, Christmas) broke this sobriety with a roast. Between Baltic Greifswald and Saxon Dresden, this frugal rhythm accompanied the artist's whole life.

On this Pomeranian coast where Friedrich was born, herring caught in shoals and smoked over alder wood, placed on a slice of sourdough rye bread, was the staple food. Salty, fermented, iodized, it links each recipe to the painter's sea.