Your House Is On Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel - Plot & Excerpts
In the afternoon, after beer stuck to every surface, the villagers spilled into the square to take part in the yearly cooking contest. “For the first one death, for the second starvation, for the third one bread”—that old proverb described the colonization of the Devil’s Moor, but our bread remained as hard and gray and sour as our soil. To enter the cooking contest was costly, because the rules stated that each dish had to feed at least four dozen people. Hemmersmoor had three categories: best stew, best roast, and best Butterkuchen, the buttery, sugar-sprinkled sheet cake our baker, Meier, was famous for and that he sold for funerals and weddings alike. Meier always won the contest, uncontested that is, because who would dare go up against him? The stew contest was, for the imaginary outsider—there were never any real outsiders present during the cooking contest—an unappetizing affair. You need to have lived in the North to appreciate Labskaus, an old sailor dish, or Pears, Beans, and Bacon, another favorite.
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