Mittagessen — the hot midday meal
Jacket Potatoes with Quark (Pellkartoffeln mit Quark)
EverydayReconstruction🧂 🍋facile35 min
Potatoes boiled in their skins, split open while steaming, and topped with quark whipped with chives and salt. A subsistence dish, comforting and nourishing for pennies.
Mittagessen — the hot midday meal
Potatoes boiled in their skins, split open while steaming, and topped with quark whipped with chives and salt. A subsistence dish, comforting and nourishing for pennies.
See this plate of jacket potatoes, steaming, crowned with their dollop of quark: that is the ordinary feast on my table at Dean Street. Capital left us little, and the butcher even less; but a hot potato, a little salt, and one can keep standing to write until dawn. My Jenny used to peel them laughing at our misery, and I claimed that no bourgeois banquet was worth this bread of the poor. Eat, and think of all those who haven't even that.
Ingredients
- •Firm potatoes — a good full pot (nourishing base)
- •Quark (beaten curd cheese) — a large bowl (fresh topping)
- •Chives or spring onion — a handful, chopped (freshness, aroma)
- •Salt — to hand (seasoning)
- •Milk — a splash (to loosen the cheese)
How it was made : Quark (curd cheese) was an everyday food in the Rhineland and throughout 19th-century Germany, cheap and easy to produce. Paired with potatoes boiled in their skins (saving time and peeling), it made a complete, affordable meal for workers and impoverished families. It was often eaten directly from the pot.
Sources : Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Marx zum Gedächtnis (Reminiscences of Marx), 1896 · Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life, 1999