ROULADEN: THE FOOD I WILL NEVER LEARN TO MAKE

By Eryn Mayfield

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Rouladen, or rinderrouladen, is one of the most German dishes I can think of. It’s a meat dish consisting of bacon, onions, mustard and pickles all rolled up in a thin slice of beef. It’s also one of my favourite foods.

My oma made it for me, particularly when I was a kid. To be honest, my mum is kind of awful at cooking, so I always looked forward to dinners with Oma, especially if rouladen was involved. I don’t get the chance to eat with her as often since I moved over six hours away from home, but her rouladen has never stopped being a top-ten food for me.

I yearn for it, probably more than I’ve ever yearned for anything, let alone a food. I am constantly pestering Oma to make it for me when I go home for a visit. It isn’t a dish that can be made on a whim. It requires a lot of preparation and a specific, very thin slice of beef that you can only buy from a butcher. It also requires one (1) Oma to make, which I’ve established is a resource that’s a little out of the way.

For these reasons, I don’t get to eat rouladen very often. In fact, until my last visit home (only a few weeks ago at the time of writing), I hadn’t had it in over ten years.

So, why don’t I just ask my oma how to make it? She clearly knows how.

Well, there’s one issue with that.

My oma absolutely sucks at giving instructions for recipes.

During my latest trip home, I ended up talking with Oma about curried sausages a lot. She has a very specific way of making them, and it’s apparently different from how a lot of other people do it. (I’m not entirely sure why.)

When I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I called her to ask for her recipe. However, instead of being told the steps to making curried sausages the way she does, I got a riddle.

‘You have to add some onion into the pan first.’

‘How much onion?’

‘I don’t know. Some.’

Later, once we’d moved on from the onions and she was telling me in detail how to boil the sausages, she casually mentioned that the onions needed to be finely chopped. So, once again, I asked how much onion was needed, and, once again, she told me:

‘I don’t know. Some. For taste.’

How helpful.

After I spoke to Oma, I called my mum to tell her about my trip and, of course, to giggle about the very non-specific instructions Oma had given me. My mum laughed and then told me that she had actually asked Oma for her rouladen recipe, seeing as I keep pestering everyone about it, and that she, too, had been a victim of Oma’s recipe riddles.

‘Once you roll them, you need to cook them in a pot of water.’

‘How much water? A full pot? Half a pot?’

‘Just some water.’

‘How much?’

‘Enough.’

In all fairness, I don’t think even my oma is entirely sure how to make rouladen. While she was making it for me, she told me she hoped it would come out okay because it’s a bit hit-or-miss. Sometimes it flops, and she isn’t sure why.

My oma is fit and healthy. She lives in the country and attends dance classes for seniors to stay active, but she is getting older. I forget how old she is because I don’t like thinking about it, but I know she’s somewhere in her mid-seventies.

Her age is another reason I’ve been reluctant to learn how to make rouladen. To me, that food is hers and hers alone. I don’t want some random recipe from a blog on the internet, and I don’t want some restaurant’s attempt at an ‘authentic’ rouladen. Whatever I make or eat would always feel like a bastardised version of her cooking. It wouldn’t come with the same warmth as eating her food, or the same feeling of knowing that her hands have touched the same recipe as mine.

I want my oma’s cooking for as long as I can have it.

So, every time I plan a trip home, I’ll keep asking her to make her rouladen, even though I know the preparation is time-consuming and probably a bit of a chore. Hopefully one of those times she’ll say yes, and I’ll get to share my favourite food with my oma.

I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m probably never going to learn how to make rouladen for myself.

There’s something comforting about knowing there are some things I don’t have to learn. Some things can remain a little mysterious. Some recipes can stay unwritten, passed down through vague instructions about adding ‘some’ onion and ‘enough’ water. Some dishes can remain tied to the person who made them, rather than becoming something you can recreate whenever you feel like it.

I’d rather sit at her table and eat the rouladen she made, knowing that the recipe exists somewhere in her head, in that wonderfully unreliable place where measurements are optional and instructions are more like riddles.

Maybe that’s the part of the recipe I actually want to remember.

Because, in the end, it was never really about rouladen.

It was about my oma.

And I want to remember my oma.

I want to remember pestering her to make my favourite food. I want to remember sitting down to eat it. I want to remember that there is still someone in my life who can make a dish that tastes like home, even while I live so far away.

Maybe, when the time eventually comes that my oma can no longer make rouladen for me, I’ll change my mind and finally try to learn how to make my own. But until then, I think I’ll leave the recipe where it belongs. With her.

After all, some things are worth not knowing how to make.

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