Nineteenth-century German bourgeois cuisine, transplanted to London exile, revolves around two meals. The midday *Mittagessen* is the only hot meal (a soup, potatoes, sometimes meat). In the evening, *Abendbrot* is cold: rye bread, quark, pickled herring, all washed down with beer or, on good days, a glass of Moselle wine. In the Marx household, burdened by debt, this structure often contracted around the potato alone — the bread of the poor — elevated on Sundays by Engels' generosity.

Humble, nourishing, cheap and inexhaustible, the potato is the cornerstone of the Marx table in the misery of Dean Street. Alongside it, the Riesling from his native Moselle connects the philosopher to his childhood land and to his first journalistic battle for the oppressed winegrowers.