Sachsenhausen: Handkäse, Äppler & the Art of Doing Nothing

Cross the river from the old town on a warm evening and you enter a different Frankfurt. The light does something particular here, coming off the Main at a low angle through the gaps between buildings. The pub windows are steamed up. Someone is sitting outside in a jacket that is not quite warm enough for the temperature, with a ribbed glass of something tart in hand, unconcerned about it. The city to the north performs itself for visitors. Sachsenhausen, mostly, does not.

Sachsenhausen was a separate settlement until the 19th century, and the old separateness still shows. It has its own pace, its own relationship to the river, its own entirely disproportionate pride in two things the rest of Germany tends to regard with polite bemusement: the local apple cider and a fermented cheese that announces itself well before it arrives at the table.

Ebbelwoi

The correct approach to Frankfurt's apple cider is patience. It is dry, sharply acidic, slightly fizzy, and nothing like the sweet bottled ciders sold in supermarkets elsewhere in Europe. The first sip usually produces hesitation. The second is already more interesting. By the third something has shifted and the tart, clean flavour starts making sense in a way that is hard to explain but easy to replicate on subsequent evenings.

Ebbelwoi is served in a Bembel, a grey-glazed stoneware jug with the blue salt-glaze pattern that has not changed in two centuries, poured into ribbed glass tumblers called Gerippte. The ribbing serves a function: the diamond facets prevent a wet glass from slipping and warm the cider unevenly as it is held, subtly changing the taste as the evening goes on. A design problem solved a long time ago, satisfactorily, and left alone.

Handkäse mit Musik

The second thing Sachsenhausen is unreasonably proud of requires a word of preparation. Handkäse is a small round fermented sour milk cheese, historically shaped by hand. Its smell occupies a specific region of the olfactory spectrum that is adjacent to very ripe Limburger and not entirely unlike a sports changing room on a warm day. This is not considered a problem by the people who eat it regularly. It is considered the point.

The cheese arrives on a plate with raw onion rings, caraway seeds, vinegar and oil, with dark bread and butter on the side. The dish is called Handkäse mit Musik because of the digestive consequences of the onions, a joke that Frankfurters have been making for at least two centuries without apparent signs of tiring of it. With a cold Gerippte of Ebbelwoi it is one of the more specific eating experiences available in Central Europe and has no ambitions whatsoever to be something other than what it is.

The rest of Sachsenhausen

Walk east from the cider quarter along the Main and the character changes. Fewer tourists, more apartment buildings from the 1920s and 1970s sitting side by side without any particular aesthetic programme, a Turkish greengrocer that has been on the same corner for thirty years, an independent bookshop. The Museumsufer runs along the river here, with the Städel, the architecture museum and the film museum within ten minutes of each other on foot. In August, this stretch hosts the largest open-air museum festival in Germany: both banks closed to traffic, tables in the street, and roughly half of Frankfurt's population apparently deciding to be outside at the same time.

Maya Göpel has written about the difference between places that have been optimised and places that have accumulated through use, and how only the second kind carries the particular texture that makes a neighbourhood feel inhabited rather than installed. Sachsenhausen has been used. The streets still carry the marks of it. That is worth an evening, at least.