Rick Stein's Long Weekend

Zoo Station, where Rick Stein's long weekend began

Two programmes recently featured Berlin - Rick Stein's Long Weekend, and Travel Man's 48 Hours. Both featured quirky hotels, cold weather, art communes and a Trabant tour. The latter was the intended comedy element - there was much bleeping of profanities during these pre-watershed broadcasts. The cars, being made of Bakelite, are hardly robust and weren't easy to drive in their heyday, let alone after ageing the 25 years since the fall of the Wall and now having to manoeuvre through the 2016 Berlin traffic.

Both Rick Stein and Travel Man also featured the same restaurant - Billy Wagner's Nobelhart & Schmutzig, which is on Friedrichsstrasse just south of Checkpoint Charlie. It's the only time I've seen Richard Ayoade impressed by food. He normally has a nibble, sneers, and leaves. But this time he cleaned his plate and gave a thumbs up, speechless. So it must be good. Rick Stein was more effusely enthusiastic, as Billy Wagner did clever things with fennel seed, pork neck, leeks, kale puree, toasted pine needles and Rick's personal favourite - smoked eel. Billy Wagner is - well, if not a bit scary, then certainly intense. He cooks in front of you, hiding behind a Viking beard and a fierce stare. His food is locally sourced to the exclusion of anything else. Not even a lemon will grace his kitchen, because citrus fruits don't grow in Berlin.

Berlin is the home of Currywurst, which I didn't know, although I have eaten it there, from a snack kiosk in Park Sanssouci in Potsdam, because it's all I could afford. As you can tell, the two times I went to Berlin, I had limited gastronomic knowledge and not much money.

Beautiful Potsdam - and I ate Currywurst

Nonetheless, certain things I ate on those trips have stayed in my mind. Berlin is the city where I tried falafel for the first time. Falafel, now readily available in Waitrose, were entirely unknown to me in 1993. I have eaten them since in more authentic cities like Amman or Cairo, but it was Berlin where I had my first taste. I thought them a little strange, but didn't dislike them. Nowadays I love them and even make my own, they have become such a staple in my diet. I ate them last night, for example, as a return to cultured sanity in Leeds after taking my daughter to see Disney On Ice.

Amman

Unfortunately translated accompaniments to falafel in Jordan

I also remember eating a chicken and cashew nut salad in a small bistro just round the corner from Barbarossastrasse in Schoeneberg, the sort of place that had checked tablecloths, candles burning in Chianti bottles, and devoted regulars. It was the salad dressing that was such a revelation to me. Germans are well known for dousing their salads in vinegar, but this was a raspberry vinegar, not too sharp, not too sweet, just enough to make the dish amazing, and unforgettable. Sadly, the bistro seemed to have vanished when I returned to Berlin six years later, but as a friend had taken me there and my geography was hazy, it might have been I was just looking in the wrong place. I hope so.

Rick Stein showed how funky the Berlin food scene has become since I was last there, a ridiculous 17 years ago. And yet he was still very much able to find the traditional grub - the gigantic pork knuckles, cheese spaetzli, meatballs, sauerkraut, all washed down with litres of wonderful beer in bars full of oom-pah music and dirndl skirts. But in many establishments, the dishes have been made more delicate and refined, which has to be no bad thing. In fact someone just won Masterchef by doing just this - taking traditional British food and - in her words - elevating it to a new level.

Traditional German grub at the Leeds Christmas Market

Deutschland '83

"In touch with the ground

I'm on the hunt, I'm after you

Smell like I sound, I'm lost in a crowd

And I'm hungry like the wolf ..."

    (Duran Duran)

A rollicking ride with subtitles. Has to be a good thing, right? Sunday night television has turned into a battle of the drama Titans - War And Peace versus Endeavour versus Deutschland '83. Deutschland '83 is a German spy thriller from Walter Presents, Channel 4's new foreign-telly box-set-on-demand service. I'm sticking with Endeavour, then treating myself to Deutschland '83 during rare solitary moments of leisure. I'm using our new Chromecast, so that I can watch our tablet on the big(gish) screen of our television. It's been quite the revelation, even if our daughter now spends most of the time watching clips of cats being scared by cucumbers on You Tube rather than CBeebies. Gosh, we are almost in the digital age in our house at last.

Which is more than we can say for the East Germans. Seeing them fail to keep up with Western technology is one of the greater sources of amusement in Deutschland '83. They are stumped when a break-in to a safe gives them a list of nuclear targets stored on an encrypted floppy disk. It's not the encryption that's the problem, it's the actual disk. Their computers can't play it. They need an IBM, illegally procured and imported. And then there is the hero's dumbfounded attempt to master the phone switchboard in his office. And his naive response to a black marketeer offering to sell him a Walkman: "What's a Walkman?". The look of sheer astonishment and adulation on his face when he hears Duran Duran playing through headphones for the first time is glorious.

The music is wonderful, of course, if you are of a certain age that is mine. Yes, even 99 Luftballons. The theme song is Major Tom, but sung by Peter Schilling, not David Bowie. Though the name still feels poignant in the week of Bowie's death. Bowie's music features elsewhere - China Girl, Modern Love - alongside New Order, The Eurythmics, The Cure, The Police, Blondie and 10cc. And we're only on episode three. Further delights await. But there will be Phil Collins at some point. Even in the early '90s, German radio was almost continuous Phil Collins.

"Earth below us, drifting, falling, floating weightless, coming home..."

Our hero is Martin Rauch, former East Berlin border guard and now, thanks to an agent aunt who indulges in nepotism, Moritz Stamm, East Germany's newest spy recruit. But - oh dear - turns out he's pretty rubbish at it. Every week he messes up, but somehow gets away with it. It probably helps that he is posted to a West German general who is so distracted by the antics of his own children (one a soul singer on a Bhagwan commune in Cologne, the other a newly recruited pacifist) that he totally fails to notice suspicious goings on around him. Like his sister-in-law getting drugged at a party after she stumbles across Moritz making an illicit phonecall. Like Moritz clumsily dropping crucial bits of paper during information exchanges. Like Moritz splattered in blood after nearly being killed by a Ninja waitress. Like Moritz failing to recognise an old friend from his hometown in Braunschweig and the old friend failing to recognise Moritz - because the real Moritz Stamm has been shot dead on a train. Like Moritz sneaking off to his chain-smoking aunt's car at a petrol station to have blood taken to see if he can be his mother's kidney donor. (And what everyone in Germany - not just the General - failed to notice in that scene was that Moritz got back into their car and managed to drive off despite a) having left a petrol nozzle attached to it in the previous scene and b) not having paid.)

Lamps get bugged, offices get broken into. Sometimes it isn't Moritz's incompetence but twists of fate that intervene. American generals decide to switch hotel rooms because one fancies a view. A bugged Art Deco desk meant for a Nato official is gifted on to his secretary. An antiques dealer works late into the night, letting his friendly dog sniff around his shop while Moritz attempts to bug said desk. The girl Moritz has to seduce to procure secrets loves cats, but Moritz is allergic.

A desk switch in Brussels

Martin/Moritz is doing it all for love. For his girlfriend back home, who is pregnant, but not necessarily with Martin's child. For his mother, in desperate need of that kidney transplant. Getting her treated in a West German hospital is the bribe meant to lure him. That and the recruiter breaking Martin's fingers - the real Moritz Stamm was an accomplished pianist, and Martin can't play a note. So it fills a gap in the story and tortures Martin into submission in one fell swoop. Clever, but not nice. They drug his coffee to finish the job.

Despite occasional violence and everyone trying to prevent nuclear armageddon, the mood is light. Both sides seem equally clueless, which is not what you expect from German officialdom. It's a bit too Austin Powers at times. I don't think life under the Stasi at the height of the Cold War can have been that funny. Although East Germans always struck me as having a better sense of humour than West Germans. However, I am not looking forward to what pregnant Annett, a loyal teacher of Young Pioneers, might do with her discovery of Martin's mother's hidden Western book collection, many titles of which Martin procured for her during confiscations at the border. But we shall see. Having baby brain, she might just wander off and forget all about it.

There is clearly good money in being a double agent. Tischbier, the pacifist leader and Moritz's spy boss lives in some sort of palace. Moritz needs to brush up on the high life if he is a success - his lack of knowledge of steak ("Just bring me some meat from a cow") is what leads to the later Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon assault by the waitress. Moritz's previous exposure to haute cuisine has been his aunt smuggling in Nescafe. He finds the choice in a Bonn supermarket overwhelming. It's infinitely more impressive than any German supermarket I've ever been to.

It's hard to believe that it all takes place only five years before my first ever trip to Germany. And only six years before the fall of the Wall. The system in 1983 seems utterly entrenched and impenetrable. There is genuine threat, and no sign of change. In 1988 I probably knew little about the East, and had only got as far as 1924 in my school history lessons on Germany.** But 1988 is the year I went to Cologne and Bonn, where Moritz is stationed. I was 15, and on a school exchange. It was a whirlwind day trip from Mainz, and while we devoted a reasonable amount of time to Germany's highest motorway bridge, Cologne cathedral and a lunch of chicken and chips at Cologne station, we only managed to see the main squares of both cities. Oh, and the outside of Beethoven's house. Bonn seemed far too small and - dare I say? - parochial to be a capital city. It is so right that the accolade was subsequently restored to Berlin. I wouldn't mind a piece of one of those now abandoned embassy buildings though - then I could live like Tischbier.

Genuine 1988 Cologne beer mat, which must have supported lemonade

Beethovenhaus, Bonn, dingy '80s photography

** Interestingly, my first German teacher, whom we all suspected of Communist tendencies because she wore black trousers, rode a motorbike and we were stupid teenagers, taught us that the word for "orange" was Apfelsine. Whereas two years earlier in 1983, Apfelsine is one of the East German words that Moritz is told he must forget, and use Orange instead. So now I'm wondering if we were right all along...

Great Continental Railway Journeys: Freiburg to Hannover

German Romantic poetry 

Michael Portillo arrives in Freiburg liked the well-heeled public school boy that he is, adorned in a racing green blazer with white pinstripes. He is here to discover the meaning of Germanness. In 1913, the year of his Bradshaw's, Germany was still only recently unified. It was still trying to carve out a national identity, and hadn't yet started the First World War. Shame on me, four sentences in and I've already mentioned "the war" in the same breath as Germany, like Basil Fawlty and The Sun newspaper before me. Back then it seems that we Brits liked Germany as a holiday destination a lot more than we do now. Schiller and Goethe had filled our heads with Romantic nature poetry, and we had fallen for the Brothers Grimm, whose disturbing tales from the forest had been made a lot more wholesome in translation. In fact, we liked travelling to Germany so much that around 6,000 of us were trapped behind enemy lines when World War I broke out.

Most of us were after a cuckoo clock. Some of us still go all the way to Germany to buy one, as evidenced by the customers in a shop in Triberg in the Black Forest. In the shop, Portillo has a go at carving a leaf under the watchful eye of the master carver. Afterwards the carver allows Portillo to keep the leaf as a "souvenir", too polite to say that it's because the result is too shit for him to use. Apparently, the traditional triangular shape of the Black Forest cuckoo clock was inspired by the roofs of new houses built along the Black Forest railway. And originally the cuckoo clock was intended to be a "cockerel clock", but this involved the internal bellows having to play too many notes.

Soon Michael is tucking into a Black Forest Gateau, at pains to point out that we leave out the most important ingredient - the boozy Kirsch - in the English translation. However, the most significant ingredient in his slice appears to be thickly whipped cream, which of course makes it very authentically German. The slab is gigantic, mouthwatering, covered in dark chocolate shavings, and sums up so much of what is marvellous about the world. "Yummy," as Portillo says.

Soon Portillo is heading north to Heidelberg, where I lived for a year in my early twenties. (I always knew this slide of Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof, taken while changing film rolls en route somewhere, would come in useful one day.) Here Portillo's theme of Romantic poetry continues. He wonders why the city has been such a pull to artists over the years, inspiring emotionally charged dramatic works from the likes of Turner to Brahms. An academic claims it has something to do with ruins being fashionable, and Heidelberg's ruined Schloss halfway up the Koenigsberg is certainly spot-on as far as ruins go. What Portillo doesn't know is that there is another ruin directly above where he is standing on the Philosophenweg - it's a former Nazi open-air theatre known as a Thingstaette, built to put on plays of Norse legends for the Volk of the 1930s, now abandoned and overgrown, and beyond creepy.

Heidelberg Schloss, spot on as ruins go

View of Heidelberg from the Philosophenweg

Nazi Thingstaette on the Heiligenberg

Portillo moves on via double-decker train to Frankfurt Main Hauptbahnhof, Germany's busiest railway station, which is a lot more architecturally appealing than Britain's busiest railway station, Clapham Junction. Portillo thinks we need more double-decker trains in Britain. He is possibly right. They could go a long way to solving commuter overcrowding.

Frankfurt Rathaus

In Frankfurt, Portillo visits the surprisingly silent and hi-tech stock exchange, meets a patronising TV journalist charged with explaining finance to the masses, and looks thoroughly undignified trying to get his chops round a Wurst. He also visits the Goethehaus to learn more about the man billed as Germany's Shakespeare.

Goethehaus

"Mainhatten" skyscrapers

European Central Bank

And then on to Goettingen, which is famous for its university. Most of what Portillo sees there he could have covered in Heidelberg, since that is also a city with an ancient university (older than Goettingen's) that has produced a number of Nobel-prize winning scientists and has a tradition of Borschenschaften (fraternities). Heidelberg also has a Studentenkarzer (prison) with the same black heads silhouetted on the walls by naughty students of the bygone age. And it has pubs full of pictures of fencing matches and men with facial scars.

Gaenseliesel, Goettingen, kissed and decorated by graduating students

But it turns out Portillo is really there to see Goettingen's wind tunnel, built in 1907 to aid the study of aerodynamics, so people could build aeroplanes less likely to fall out of the sky. Now the research centre has a model railway where people use a catapult to fire engines along a track at 400km/hour. They make the sleek high-speed ICE trains Portillo is using seem like clanking old steamies.

Hannover Rathaus

Portillo's final stop is Hannover, where I have only ever spent an afternoon. Portillo visits its spectacular Rathaus (city hall), which signifies Hannover's importance at the time of the Kaiser, when it was built. Given that I have a photograph of the view from the top of the Rathaus dome, I must also have travelled up the unusual curved lift with sloping floor that Portillo rides. Yet I have absolutely no memory of doing so. Maybe my host was feeling stingy and made me take the stairs. Maybe the lift was closed for refurbishment. Or maybe my vertigo just means I have blocked the experience out entirely.

View from Hannover Rathaus

My afternoon in Hannover was at the end of a month-long interrailing trip I took aged 25, finally done with study but not yet in the world of work. I was trying to brush up my German ready to seek employment. I travelled by train all the way from Luebeck in the north of Germany to Lugano in Italian-speaking Switzerland, which makes this the first of Portillo's railway journeys that I have covered in its entirety, and more. Thanks to the kindness of friends, I didn't pay for a single night's accommodation during the whole trip. I mostly slept on floors, with the odd blissful night on a futon (if such a thing is possible). In Lugano, I had to cram into a narrow single bed with a Danish architecture student. As it was the days before wifi and mobile internet, I finalised my itinerary by sending postcards from one destination to the next and making fleeting calls from coin-guzzling payphones. Yet I was always met on time at each station by whoever I was visiting: it seems that in the pre-Instagram era somehow we coped.

I always refer to the trip as "the march for open windows" owing to the Germans' fear of draughts and penchant for stuffy rooms, which made some of the long train journeys unbearable. In answer to Portillo's quest, for me, Germanness is about strange dichotomies. It's Ordnung surrounded by decadent cake. It's an open-door policy in the midst of blinding bureaucracy. It's the vegetarian health freak in a country whose restaurants serve up the Schlachtplatte (slaughter plate). It's the hypochondriac who on the one hand regularly takes a Kur, peers obsessively into a Flachspueler (stage toilet) and plays team sport, but chain smokes on the other. It's the cultural hybrid of someone who loves David Hasselhoff for his music as much as they do Beethoven. It's rimless glasses to see with, and men wearing jackets so brightly coloured that it's clear they don't use them. (Heck, some of them make Portillo's look if not stylish then at least very much at home.) But for all this, it's a place I love - and miss. If only for the cake.

Tannbach

Say what? Never heard of this one? Can't find it in your Radio Times?

That's because it's on German telly. I'm never going to sit in front of Jeremy Kyle while my daughter is at nursery, but I do like to indulge in a bit of ZDF, Germany's (very loosely defined) equivalent to BBC2, which I can watch online for free on my sofa in York. Mostly I watch the news, and sometimes try and transcribe it, sad geek that I am, pretending that I still have a subtitling career. Occasionally I watch a thriller, since there seems to be a weekly murder mystery set in every different Bundesland, but my God, German police dramas are bad. Yes, Die Rosenheim Cops, I'm particularly talking about you.

Mainz

I have even been to ZDF. I did a German school exchange to Mainz (where ZDF is based) when I was 15, and the father of my exchange partner was a lawyer for the television station. He was good at getting free tickets to be in the audience of various chat shows and magazine programmes. Not the greatest quality broadcasts you'll ever see, but it's always fun and interesting to see television be made.

But at the start of January, ZDF showed Tannbach, which had me gripped almost as much as Edgar Reitz's absorbing epic Heimat. Although thankfully Tannbach only had 3 episodes and a total running time of 310 minutes (as opposed to Heimat's 3100). And OK, truth be told, it wasn't really a patch on Heimat. But it did leave you with a big sense of "What happened next?" as there was a lot left more to tell.

Not Tannbach - the house high on a hill overlooking the Rhine
used as the home of the main characters in Heimat 3

Tannbach is a small fictional village on the border between Thuringia and Bavaria (but it is evidently based on Mödlareuth). That border is to prove hugely significant, since we are in 1945 in the final days of the war, and Germany is about to be divided by the Allies into zones. Tannbach is initially liberated by the Americans, but after the meeting at Yalta it is taken over by the Russians. But a subsequent re-examination of the state border on an old map reveals that it runs directly through the heart of the village. Which means that unless the Russians and Americans can come to a sensible agreement, the iron curtain is about to run right along the village stream, separating the village into two like a mini Berlin. Needless to say, they don't come to a sensible agreement. Families are divided, hearts are torn, and there are unnecessary and tragic deaths.

There is so much going on in the immediate aftermath of the war it's hard to know where to begin. There are refugees. There are Nazis running underground and Nazis redefining themselves as Communist bureaucrats. There are Jews coming out of hiding and trying to locate their families. There are motherless babies and childless mothers. There is survivors' guilt and the shock of discovering what has happened behind the gates of the concentration camps. There are soldiers with their minds shattered by what they have seen. There is the indignity of foreign invasion and foreign ideology. There is the need to keep secrets, denounce enemies and to preserve standing and escape punishment for past crimes. Persilscheine, Entnazifizierung: there is the need to be officially declared clean in order to move on. For those that aren't, there is the threat of internment camps. There is much betrayal. No one trusts anybody any more, not even within their own family.

Village life seems to have carried on as normal during the war, but suddenly there is a starving population to feed and Germany's farmland is all in the East. The aristocrats lose their land, their large houses are torn down, and people in the Russian zone are resettled over hundreds of miles to farm smallholdings run by communes.

Later, there is the black market and smuggling, which only worsens as the border is fortified. There are people on the make, and people taking sides that they don't believe in simply for self-preservation. There is very much a chance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the uncertain future and the pangs for home (Heimat) make decisions impossible, yet split-second choices to stay or go can be the difference between life and death, imprisonment and freedom. Collaboration is all, but collaboration has consequences. One half of the village moves from the control of one secret police to another at the opposite end of the political spectrum. And the leaders of both sides try to brainwash their citizens to convince them that their way is the right way.

Above all, it seems to ask the question, is love for your family enough to make you happy and make you want to stay, whatever happens in the world around you? Needless to say, opinions on this are as divided as the village, as some characters flee at a glancing opportunity, and others remain bound to the land, come what may.

Berlin Wall fragments, sent to me by a penfriend in early 1990

I never went to East Germany while it still existed. My first forays east were post-reunification in 1994. Living in Heidelberg at the time, everyone there actively discouraged travel to the former GDR with a dismissive, "It's just a building site. Go in 20 years when it's all finished." Which meant I instantly set off to have a look. The building site aspect was certainly true, but it was still such an important place to visit. I remember sitting on the ICE train to Berlin, travelling at ridiculous western speed, and suddenly seeing abandoned watchtowers overlooking acres and acres of muddy soil, the forests gone, and the fields ploughed to ruin. This was my first sight of the East. The next was climbing out of the U-Bahn onto a deserted Potsdamer Platz. The Wall had been torn down but at that time nothing had been built in the space left behind, and I found myself standing alone on what felt like an ocean of blank concrete with a bitter March wind tearing through me. The square was once one of the most important and bustling meeting points in Berlin before the Wall turned it into a minefield and no-man's land. It since been entirely redeveloped and regained its commercial importance, but I shall never forget that wilderness in the heart of a troubled, emerging yet jubilant city. I walked a little further past Checkpoint Charlie and then directly through the Brandenburg Gate, something which would have been impossible just five years before. Unter den Linden was a boulevard of fine facades, but behind it were decaying bullet-pocked buildings. Artist colonies and developers were battling (often with each other) to bring them back to life.

Berliner Dom looking towards Alexanderplatz

I travelled on to Halle, Leipzig and Dresden. Halle was depressed and horribly polluted from the nearby brown coal mines. Leipzig was rapidly springing back to be something magnificent. Dresden was simply shocking. Very few of its finer buildings had been restored after the city was blown to bits by the Allies in 1945, and those that were had since been blackened by soot and neglect. An unspeakably ugly avenue of concrete high rises had replaced whatever road had once led from the station to the city centre. (Not that we don't have similarly hideous post-war rebuilds in the UK.) The Frauenkirche, since reconstructed as a beautiful symbol of peace and hope after the reunification, was just a heap of numbered rubble laid out across the grass.

Frauenkirche, Dresden in 1994

Leipzig

And yet great things were being lost, such as free child care, which in turn ended the universal employment of women. Publicly owned assets and companies were rapidly privatised and millions of jobs lost. The farmland of Tannbach was sold off. Subsidised rents were stopped. The economy went bust and exports of East German products became impossible after a low fixing of the East German Ostmark's exchange rate, as they could not compete with the Western market. A lot of teachers and academics were blacklisted as having worked for the Party when they were merely government employees trying to do a decent and enjoyable job. West Germans came back to reclaim their houses in the East forcibly taken from them after the war, but there was no reciprocal arrangement for any East Germans who had lost property in the West. There was a mass exodus from the East, making it difficult to sustain infrastructures and the less desirable properties.

Baustelle Reichstag, Berlin 1999

I made a daytrip to Erfurt in the former GDR from Goettingen in 1998. By then the pace of restoration had accelerated, and the central buildings were mostly bright and vibrant. It no longer seemed any different from towns in the West, My last trip East was when I went back to Berlin in 1999 and stayed for a weekend on my way home from Poznan in Poland.

And now - incredibly - those 20 years I was told to wait are up. By anyone's account, it is time to head back.

I hope that BBC4 buys Tannbach so that everyone in the UK can see it too, in the Saturday night foreign drama slot. But at the same time I hope that they wait long enough for me to have resurrected that subtitling career so that I can translate it for you, Bavarian and all.

Nigel Slater's Icing On The Cake

Yesterday's lemon & pistachio cake. Just because.

I have long been a fan of Nigel Slater's food writing. He can make the mundane utterly sublime. He can be eating sardines on toast yet give such an evocative description of every crumb that I instantly have to leap up and raid my larder to make some for myself. Well, I don't really have a larder per se. That's a bit posh. But I do have a few tins in a cupboard. When I've been organised about my online shopping.

Nigel Slater always strikes me as painfully shy on television. He sounds so exuberant on paper, but seems slightly awkward on screen. But his excitement over the food he has cooked for his plate is still infectious, and it always looks amazing, but makeable. And I also love his "food history" programmes, like this one about cake. I should call them "food nostalgia", because he has retained his childlike enthusiasm for the (probably actually not terribly inspiring) food of his youth despite the pretty miserable time his autobiography recounts him having. In this programme, the wicked gleam in his eye when he laughs as he bites into a fondant fancy is a telling image of the wonderful effect of food and how powerfully the senses of taste and smell recreate memories.

He starts in Konditor & Cook just behind Waterloo station, home of the most incredible lemon cake I have ever eaten. Nigel says he would just as happily buy a cake from a shop as eat a home-made one by Auntie Marjorie.(When did he meet my grandmother?) He stresses cake's universal appeal. It is the ultimate in comfort food in times of need. It doesn't have to meet Mary Berry's perfection. It just needs to be naughty but nice. But what makes a cake truly a cake?

There's a history bit. It all started with compacted porridge. There's a science bit. Why eggs bring the magic, originally whisked in by twigs. There's the religious affrontery and the banning of buns. There's why we have an innate liking for sweetness. There's a Home Economics lesson that teaches us that dropping cakes fresh out of the oven is actually good for them. There's what rationing did to cakes. Then there are just lots of glorious regional cakes with silly names - lardy, parkin, Rutland plum shuttles, Selkirk bannock, Norfolk vinegar, and Cumberland courting. (Never got one of those out of my husband.) There's the exceedingly crap ones we buy from Mr Kipling and Lyons - the aforementioned fondant fancies, Jamaica Ginger cake and a slice of Battenberg. Cake is what we do in this country to be sociable and make us smile. Or it was until we discovered binge-drinking.

Then Jenny Eclair comes on and tells Nigel why, despite being named after one, she hates cake. It's a throwback to her anorexic days at drama school. She claims cupcakes are the most evil of all - so disappointing and dishonest, so bad for you, as unnecessary and harmful as high-heeled shoes. Much as I personally love cake, I have to admit she does have a point. Cupcakes, piled high with swirls of buttercream and sweetie toppings, usually look so much better than they taste. The insurmountable icing invariably swamps a tiny morsel of dry sponge, and tips off onto the floor at the first bite.

Evil cupcakery

Finally, there's roadkill cake. (Yes, you did read that correctly.) There's cigarette butts on a cake. There's a fondant brains cake to teach people anatomy and fairy cakes decorated with chlamydia icing to educate teenagers about sexual health. And then a giant recreation of Nigel Slater's head. Not sure what he made of that.

But what makes a cake a cake? For Nigel Slater, it's the spirit behind it. The love that creates it. And the fact that we always share it.

It's impossible to deny that wherever I go, I eat cake. Grasmere Gingerbread in the Lake District,  Fat Rascals and macaroons from Betty's all over Yorkshire, Bara Brith in Pembrokeshire, Bakewell pudding in Derbyshire, brownies in Baltimore, Sachertorte in Vienna, tartes aux fraises in Paris, and pink-frosted cupcakes from a bakery on Bleecker Street in New York just like the ones Sarah Jessica Parker ate on Sex And The City (wearing stupid high-heeled shoes).

The winners will always be the Germans, however. Bakeries were the only shops open on a Sunday when I went to university in Heidelberg. Cake was the only thing that made me truly happy in a rather difficult year. There is much to be said for the healing powers of a bite of Apfelstrudel or a slice of Mohnkuchen or Streuselkuchen. Stollen at Christmas, washed down with Gluehwein from the Christkindlmarkt. But my favourite always - the simple baked Quark Kaesekuchen from the students cafe in Heidelberg's Marstallhof. It just about made up for the fact that everything else that the Mensa served was inedible - greasy gravy stodge with a side of cold fruit soup dolloped on to a metal tray. You weren't even allowed a plate. It was all stupidly cheap but utterly revolting. I still feel nauseous thinking about it. But the cheesecake was in another league.

Heidelberg,. The Marstallhof Mensa and Cafe is the building on the right