For 4 people
Broth: 1 bunch greens, 4-5 medium potatoes, 2 medium onions, 2 tbsp butter, 1 tsp salt; nutmeg, chives.
Brawn spaetzle: 300g flour, 1 tsp salt, 3 eggs, 1/8 l milk, 1 pair smoked coarse sausages.
Sauté the washed, cleaned and chopped greens well in a tablespoon of hot butter, add water and 2 teaspoons of salt, simmer for half an hour until not too soft, strain and set the clear broth aside.
Peel the onions and cut them into fine rings. Heat the remaining butter in a soup pot and fry the onion rings in it until dark brown without burning. Deglaze with the prepared stock, bring to the boil, add the peeled, diced potatoes and cook until soft.
Meanwhile, prepare the spaetzle dough: Combine the flour, eggs, salt, and milk and stir vigorously until the dough bubbles; it should be thick. Squeeze the sausage out of its skin, form it into very small balls and put them into the spaetzle dough. Then scrape the dough with a large kitchen knife, which you have previously placed in hot water, from a damp wooden board down into the prepared, lightly simmering broth. Keep moistening the board and knife well in between. When the sausage spaetzle float to the top, season with salt and freshly grated nutmeg, sprinkle with chive rolls and serve with broth and potatoes.
In the "glass sausage kitchen" in Frankfurt am Main
Of the customers whose desk has stood in one of the surrounding offices, some have remained loyal to the butchery even after retirement. This probably has to do with the family touch that the two generations of Arrabins know how to give their business. The butcher's shop has also existed in this part of town since 1937 and has been operating in its own building since 1956.
Originally, however, the family, Huguenots driven out of France, came from the Avignon area and initially settled in Friedrichsdorf.
Perhaps the loving enthusiasm that the Arrabins bring to the food of meat as the basic material of their craft is rooted in the French roots, may be. In any case, they have nothing to hide. Instead, they invite their customers into the "Glass Sausage Kitchen". Of course, they have to get up early on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to produce the "White Goods". This refers to sausages that are produced without pickling salt. These are white sausage, yellow sausage and bratwurst. Here you can watch how the meat of the pigs, which come from a small farming community in the Münsterland region ("Landjuwel), is cut up, trimmed, minced and chopped. Then the sausage meat is flavoured with natural spices mixed by the farmers themselves and filled into casings.
Before the sausages reach the shop counter, the spectators are of course allowed to taste them. Dewy yellow sausage, for example, is more gently seasoned than bologna and not cured with pickling salt. It's juicy but not at all fatty, smells animatingly of fresh nutmeg, and tastes so subtly of lemon that it doesn't make you crave mustard.
"Everything that is scalded sausage, we succeed particularly well", tells junior Jürgen Arrabin, and knows what he is saying, he is nevertheless doubly from the subject: master butcher and food technologist studied in Stuttgart-Hohenheim. He can't imagine a butcher's shop that works in any other way than a craftsman's way, and he even plans to start baking pâtés. He already succeeds in making a delicious duck galantine, which is saying something. After all, the bird has to be boned, stuffed, brought back into shape and then roasted, quite a feat. In all this, the meat sausage is not neglected, which contains only pork and is very popular.
The market leader today is more interested in the smoked bratwursts, which hang in the store in various degrees of hardness. They are animatingly seasoned with their own blend and just right for adding to Kraichgau-style spaetzle dough with their finely shredded sausage meat. The sausage noodles scraped from the board are then married, as it were, with potatoes cooked in broth. And that is what they are called: Verheierte. Once you've eaten them, you'll crave them again.
Butchery
Helmut and Anna, Jürgen and Ingeborg Arrabin
Grüneburgweg 21
60322 Frankfurt am Main
Tel: 069-726607, Fax 7101813
from Waldemar Thomas