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Germany

Flammkuchen
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That flammkuchen recipe

by Diane Duane

Via Peter’s Tumblr: he kindly translated the original from the Betty Bossi Swiss baking cookbook for me.

Alsatian tarte flambée

This delicious speciality from Alsace is also ideal for an aperitif. Thinly rolled bread dough with sour cream, onions and bacon cubes!

  • 350g flour (12½ oz)
  • 1.25 tsp salt
  • 2 dl water (6.7 US fl oz / .42 US pt)
  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 200 g crème fraîche / sour cream (7 oz)
  • 2 onions (we had less, so used less…) 1
  • 20 g farmer’s (thick, well-smoked) bacon in slices (4¼ oz)
  • a small grind of pepper

And this is how it’s done:

Mix flour and salt in a bowl. Pour in water and oil, mix and knead into a soft, smooth dough. Form the dough into a ball, cover and let it rest at room temperature for about 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 240 degrees (464 F). Halve the dough and roll it out into an oval shape about 3 mm thick (1/10 inch) on a lightly floured surface. Place the dough on two baking sheets lined with baking paper.

Spread the crème fraîche / sour cream over the dough, leaving a border of approx. 1 cm (½ inch) free all around. Peel the onions, cut them into fine rings, cut the bacon into strips, spread both over the crème fraîche / sour cream and season.

Baking per tray: approx. 12 minutes each on the bottom shelf of the oven.

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Lufthansa flight LH-434 makes a low flyby over runway at Köln / Cologne-Bonn Airport (CGN) on September 15, 2021, for visual inspection of its landing gear
Current eventsEuropeGermanyTravel

Angles and dangles

by Diane Duane

The slang term “Angles and dangles” is probably best known from its usage among submariners. Among them, it describes the deep-dive and steep-ascent maneuvers performed by a sub at the start of a mission, to discover whether anything’s going to fall down when you do that. Items that fall down on these mini-dry runs are then made secure, so they don’t do the same thing some time out in the deep water when a submarine needs to be quiet. (Or so they just won’t fall down, which is understandably a nuisance.)

However, pilots use this slang too, with a different meaning. Among certain segments of the flying fraternity (particularly RAF-based ones)(like the one whose office is upstairs…), “angles and dangles” usually means flying repeated landing-and-takeoff practice runs in an aircraft. (Terminology also used: “touch and go,” “circuits and bumps.”) You land—just barely, sometimes just touching wheels to tarmac for a second or two—then take right off again. Climb and turn right, then right, then right, then right again onto approach, and land again. Then rinse and repeat, over and over—with your gear hanging down all the time—until your instructor (or whoever’s checking you out on the routine) is pretty sure you’ve got the hang of it.

Most of the time, these days, this process happens in the flight simulator… but eventually you have to go do it for real. I’ve seen it—Peter and I wound up one time sitting at the end of the active runway at Prestwick Airport in Scotland on the way to or from some other errand, watching someone do these in a 747—and the first few times, it looked like fun. I imagine it got old pretty fast for the pilot after that.

Anyway, normally the Angles and the Dangles are one smooth process. It isn’t often you get to see them so far separated from one another. But that happened last night, and we watched it unfold live (and with a certain amount of tension) via the wonders of the internet.

At some point during the evening, this popped up on my Twitter timeline from the Airport Webcams feed:

 


That got my attention immediately. Both the German airports involved (as one besides Munich gets caught up in the story as it unfolds) are ones Peter and I know well, because they’re two of our preferred (continental-)European gateways: Köln/Cologne-Bonn (CGN) because of its direct access from Dublin via Eurowings (and extremely simple access to the German national rail system, as the train station’s right in the airport), and Munich/Franz Josef Strauss (MUC) because it’s close to a city where we do business and have good friends (and is also home to possibly the best airport restaurant in the world, because, go ahead, name me another airport that has its own beer hall and microbrewery with outdoor beer garden). And Lufthansa is an airline we both like a lot. And most to the point, that plane, headed for Chicago, was almost certainly pretty full of my people.

So we settled in to keep an eye on things. Early on in the process, it was hard to tell what was going on. The aircraft had gotten as far as Scotland… and then turned around and headed back toward Germany.

Turning around over Scotland

Okay, that was concerning, and a bit odd. (Not least because the aircraft had not declared an emergency of any kind.) But then the plane passed near CGN, and its flight path produced… this weird little loop.

The weird little loop near CGN

Peter looked at it, and looked at that drop-down and climb (the yellow bit of the track above) and at the plane’s altitude at the low point (2000 ft), and immediately said: “Something’s going on with their landing gear.”

…And it turned out that’s just what was going on. We didn’t know at the time, but when LH-434 took off from Munich, it blew a tire on takeoff (and we know this because MUC airside crew found pieces of it on the runway). MUC then contacted LH-434, and the pilots made the decision to return to Germany. (Though not to MUC, as we now know… because MUC’s second runway is being repaired, and landing a possibly damaged aircraft on it would have required at the very least closing that runway to all other traffic for some time. Not a viable option: even in mid-evening, MUC is pretty busy.)

The next move was to find out just what state the landing gear were in. So the pilots and the ground had a chat, and then chose a less-busy regional airport where they could do a tower flypast and let someone get a look at the gear. They wouldn’t have wanted to take too long over this, as sunset was past and they were already getting into nautical twilight at that point; visibility would be dropping off fast. Finally they chose CGN as the best candidate for this operation.  So here you can see them doing just that: a slow flight past the tower for inspection.

LH-434 flies low through CGN

Someone also caught some video of LH-434 as she passed through. You can see a bit of the flypast here.

“Yep,” Peter said, “there are the dangles…”

What the people in the tower at CGN saw there’s no telling (as yet), but regardless of the state of the gear, the aircraft had a problem. It was carrying enough fuel for a transatlantic flight, and at least some of that had to be disposed of before landing, by flying it off. So LH-434 was then dispatched to one of the holding-pattern areas near MUC, and got to fly around and around and around and AROUND until the passengers were doubtless seriously over it. (And over the delay. And over the perfectly understandable tension of not knowing what was going on with their plane’s landing gear, and how that might affect their landing. I’ve had one or two of these incidents, and they’re not conducive to a stress-free flight.) But anyway: angles. So many angles. LH-434 was in that pattern for the better part of an hour.

The holding pattern

Finally, just before 2200 UTC, the pattern broke and LH-434 headed northwest toward Frankfurt/FRA, Lufthansa’s midlands hub. There was a bit more wiggling around before she turned base leg for final approach and at long last settled safely in, a little before 10:30 PM local time.

The happy landing

…I doubt we were anything like as relieved as the passengers on board were. But we were definitely relieved.

So meanwhile: here’s a translation of a report on the proceedings (thank you, Google) from the story at the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper.

A Lufthansa Airbus made a rather unusual low-level flight over Cologne Airport on Wednesday. Due to technical problems, the machine that was en route from Munich to Chicago had to turn back via Scotland in the direction of Cologne.

 

When the Airbus A350 took off from Franz-Josef-Strauss Airport at 4 p.m., a tire was damaged. As Lufthansa confirmed to this newspaper, parts of the tire casing were found on the runway that could undoubtedly be assigned to the machine.

 

The crew was only informed of the incident via Scotland, two hours after the start in the Bavarian capital. In order to assess the damage, the pilot decided to carry out a so-called visual inspection. A case for the Cologne ground crew.

 

The pilot of the Lufthansa plane (LH434 / DLH2C) headed for the Rhineland, flew low over the runway at Cologne-Bonn airport with the landing gear extended, so that the experts on the ground could get an idea of ​​the damage could do.

 

The machine then turned towards Munich, an immediate landing was not possible there, as only one runway is currently available due to repair work. After the unscheduled landing, the runway would have had to be searched again for remains of the tires and then closed.

 

Therefore, according to Lufthansa, the flight was diverted to Frankfurt Airport, the largest base of the German airline. There the Airbus landed safely with its 190 passengers around 10:20 p.m.

 

The odyssey took the passengers around six hours to fly from Munich to Frankfurt am Main. As a rule, a direct flight from Munich to Chicago takes a good nine hours.

…So there you have it: a happy ending to a somewhat unnerving story. What a relief.

I don’t know how long FlightRadar24 caches flight info, but for the moment you can find the full flight track of LH-434 here.

…ETA: A little additional info in this blog posting at FlightRadar24.com, as well as confirmation that the passengers were put up overnight at or near FRA and will be flown to ORD today. (Which is good, because frankly if I’d been on that plane, I’d sure have preferred to get off and have a meal and a sleep before getting on another one…)

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AnimationArtCommercialsFilmGermany

The Underberg Ad: “Through the Night to the Light”

by Diane Duane

Its name in German is “Durch Nacht zum Licht”, and though I’ve loved it for years I had no idea it was so famous.

Some years ago, back when the Sky satellite system had not yet gone digital, numerous analog European stations shared various transponders with the English-speaking services on that generation of Astra satellites. A number of these were German — Bayrischer Rundfunk, the two German national stations ARD1 and ARD 2, Hessische Rundfunk, and various others, including the commercial broadcaster RTL.

One night RTL 2 showed a compendium edition of 50s and 60s German commercials. (The compendium as a whole is available on YouTube, here: about thirteen minutes of assorted stuff. I strongly recommend watching it if only for the below Lady in the Terrifyingly Pointy Bra.)

pointy-bra

 

Anyway, I love programs like this, and so I taped it; and some while ago while we were dubbing some old tapes to CD (this was before DVDs), I made sure to dub that program as well, because I really wanted to share this commercial (and a couple of others). The sponsor is the  herbal digestive bitter called Underberg (which is still sold and quite effective. The main active ingredient, if I remember correctly, is valerian, but I strongly suspect the alcohol content is important in offsetting hangover symptoms.)

This commercial is the freakiest evocation of a hangover nightmare (or frankly any other nightmare) that I’ve ever seen on TV. It turns out that the animator, Hans Fischerkoesen, was famous in Germany: he was often called “Germany’s Walt Disney” and you can read more about him here. Anyway, the thing is impressionistic and there are rats and skeletons and clutching spectral fingers and it’s just terrific. 

So here’s that ad. As it’s clipped out of the compendium setting, it ends a little abruptly. Sorry about that.

Enjoy (if possible!).

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DiscworldGermanypublishingStar TrekStar Trek and other licensed propertiesthings that piss you off

What’s the Rihannsu for “soup”?

by Diane Duane

If the above (and below) images look a little bizarre, well, they should. They’re from long-ago German editions of My Enemy, My Ally and The Romulan Way into which the publisher inserted soup ads.

Yes, really.

The story came up again briefly in a series of posts over at the forums at Mark Reads, and I thought I’d store the images here now that I’ve got the scanner seeing sense (short version: disagreement between new printer and old legacy TWAIN driver, never mind the long version, too annoying, solved now).

To quote the original posting:

...It was in or near this chapter of the German translation [of Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids (“Pyramiden“) that Peter ran into something that made our conjoint blood run cold: a soup advertisement.

 

Maggi Soups were at that time in some kind of pestilential relationship with Heyne Verlag (then the German publisher of Terry’s books, BUT NOT FOR LONG), and Maggi had taken to inserting little soup ads into the plots of books Heyne were publishing. I knew this because they had stuck one into the middle of the German edition of The Romulan Way (a.k.a Die Romulaner.* One minute things are normal on the Bridge… the next minute, Mr. Sulu is wishing he had a nice cup of soup. GOD I wish I was making this up. …The altered passages were instantly identifiable by page-wide black spacer bars inserted into the text to make them fit into the flow of the printing.

 

So on the way to the Jungfrau, we picked up this copy of Pyramiden as we were passing through Zurich. In our “base station” hotel that night in Interlaken Ost, Peter was paging through the book… and there were the Black Lines. Peter immediately called the Pratchett residence, and Terry was out, but he got Lyn.

 

Lyn, being a sensible woman, didn’t believe him at first. Because who would dare pull crap like that with Terry? So Peter read the altered text to her, translating as he went. Lyn’s mouth fell open. She said, “I’ll tell Terry when he gets home.” And when Terry got home, he straightway called Colin the Agent of Doom, and Colin called Heyne, and shortly Terry was not with Heyne any more. AND SERVED THEM RIGHT.

 

It was a pleasure to do Terry that service, but a pain in the butt that it had to be done. Seriously: SOUP??

…We no longer have that copy of Pyramiden, alas: it was sold long ago at a Discworld convention charity auction. But we still have the Rihannsu books in question, so now you can see what the pages looked like. Behold: one of the more sordid yet somehow mean and small and pitiful examples of corporate greed you’re likely to see.

*I keep thinking the “a” in “Romulaner” should take an umlaut. …Never mind.

ETA: an addendum, 3 October 2023: From a German source, an amusing sidelight on the fallout from the discovery of the soup ads in Terry’s books. 

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The Feuerzangerbowle lady gets ready to torch a booze=soaked sugar cube
ChristmasDrinkEuropeGermanyTravel

In the “Christmas in Germany” Dep’t: the Feuerzangenbowle

by Diane Duane

…or, “You’ll Burn Your Bangs / Fringe Off”

So there’s this drink. It’s mulled wine augmented (a kind word) with flamed overproof spirit, usually rum.

…Okay, wait. A moment’s worth of scene-setting is called for.

So it’s 2014, and we’re in the Münich area for the Christmas period—something that for some time we’d been planning to do when we had enough money: and that year, we did. After a night or two spent in Münich proper and touching base with some friends / business acquaintances, we headed off to the nearby ancient university city of Augsburg to spend Christmas there. As do many other German cities, Augsburg has a very nice Christmas market—the Christkindlesmarkt—and we spent a happy pre-lunch and post-lunch hour there picking up some small presents for friends and family, and (as one does, if so inclined) visiting the local food and drink stalls.

A stall we’d never seen elsewhere was one selling Feuerzangenbowle. We looked on in wonder for a while, and Peter (having recently acquired a new lens for his camera, and a powerful new camera-dedicated flash) started taking some photos.

By a truly magical bit of timing—and also by dint of being really good with his camera—he managed to get this shot of the lady in the Feuerzangenbowle stall dosing the sugar cubes sitting on the cups’ little built-in tongs (that’s the –zange– part of the word) just before setting them on fire. (In her right hand she’s holding the device with which she’ll torch them.)

The Feuerzangebowle ladt

So after he had the camera put away again, P. ordered one for himself (I was then standing off to one side drinking glühwein, less dramatic but also potentially much less angst-ridden) and brought it back. “Oooh,” he said, “smell that, isn’t that lovely, smell the sugar caramelizing…” And I bent over to take a sniff.

And suddenly we could both smell something that WAS NOT SUGAR CARAMELIZING wut wut WUT WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE TO ME NOW  MORWOOD?!

So after the excitement (and the flames) die down, my bangs are only missing a LITTLE bit on the right side. “Oh look, that just crumbled right off, you’re fine,” says the Helpful Voice, while the Helpful Fingers brush at me. (Note to self: Alcohol flames are usually colorless and well-nigh invisible. Alcohol flames are usually colorless and well-nigh invisible. ALCOHOL FLAMES FUCK FUCK FUCK oh well I have a haircut scheduled after the New Year anyway…)

…Seriously, it’s okay. I’m fine. But make a note for yourself:  DO NOT LEAN OVER THE DAMN FEUERZANGENBOWLE until the flames have GONE OUT.

(eyeroll…)

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