Himmel un Ääd in Cologne: what it is, what to order, what to avoid

Overview

Himmel un Ääd is the dialect spelling of Himmel und Erde, “heaven and earth”, and the name is the recipe. Heaven is the apple, which grows up in the trees. Earth is the potato, which in older and regional German is the Erdapfel, the “earth apple”. Put the two together on one plate and you have a pun that has outlived most of the people who found it funny.

In Cologne the dish is three things, not two: a mound of mashed potato, apple on the side or folded through it, and slices of fried Flönz, the city’s own word for blood sausage. Fried onions go over the top. The sausage is what makes it Cologne’s: across the wider Rhineland and into Westphalia, heaven and earth is an ordinary home dish, sometimes served with liver sausage, sometimes with bacon, sometimes on its own. Here, written in the city’s dialect on a beer-hall menu and paired with Flönz, it is a fixture of the local kitchen in a way it is not elsewhere. It would be dishonest to call it unique to Cologne; it is the version the city claims as its own.

It is peasant food in the plainest sense — a cellar’s worth of potatoes and apples and the cheapest cut of the pig slaughter — and it eats like it: soft, sweet and salty at once, rich without being elaborate. The sweet-and-savory pairing is the part that surprises visitors, and it is the whole point. The apple’s sharpness is there to cut the fat of the sausage, the way a sauce would in a more formal kitchen.

The dish itself has no protected designation, but the sausage does: Flönz has been an EU protected geographical indication since 2016, which ties the name to blood sausage made in and around Cologne. There is no founding story worth repeating. The only origin that matters is the one in its name.

What to order

On the menu of a Brauhaus, the traditional beer hall, it usually appears under exactly that dialect name, and that is how to order it. What arrives should be:

• the mash — real potatoes, smooth or coarse depending on the house, often with butter and a little of the cooking milk. In some kitchens the apple is cooked into the potato; in others the mash is plain and the apple sits beside it.
• the apple — either Apfelmus, a loose apple sauce, or pieces of apple stewed until just soft. Both are correct. A tart apple is the better version; the sweetness should stay below the salt of the sausage.
• the Flönz — thick slices of blood sausage, fried until the outside tightens and the inside goes soft, almost spreadable. Cologne’s blood sausage is studded with small white cubes of back fat, and those cubes are how you recognize it on the plate.
• the onions — fried in rings or strips until brown and sweet, piled over the sausage.

A plate of it is a full meal, and in a beer hall it comes with Kölsch, the city’s pale top- fermented beer, in small straight glasses that the Köbes — the waiter in the blue apron — keeps replacing until you put a beer mat on top of your glass. That is the one thing that marks a visitor out at this table: not knowing that the mat is how you stop.

Two near relatives share the menu and are worth not confusing. Kölscher Kaviar, “Cologne caviar”, is the same blood sausage served cold, with raw onion rings, mustard and a rye roll, the Röggelchen. It is a snack to drink with, not a meal. And if you see Blutwurst with potatoes but no apple, that is simply sausage and mash: good, but the heaven is missing.

What to avoid

The dish has so few parts that a shortcut on any one of them shows.

Mash that is gluey and tastes of very little has probably come from a packet. Real mashed potato, smooth or coarse, tastes of potato and butter; the flaked kind holds a scoop shape like ice cream and tastes of the packet. Apple sauce that is uniformly pale, very sweet and fine as baby food is from a jar. Neither makes the plate inedible, but together they leave you with sausage and sugar.

The sausage should be fried to order. Slices that arrive gray and rubbery have been poached and held; slices curled and dry at the edges have been sitting under a lamp. The fried crust and soft center are the textural argument for the whole dish, and a kitchen that cooks the blood sausage in advance has given that up.

Watch for the substitution, too. A plate billed as heaven and earth that arrives with a grilled pork sausage instead of blood sausage has been adjusted for people who were expected to balk at the original. It is a perfectly edible lunch and it is not this dish.

And do not mistake it for Schlesisches Himmelreich, “Silesian heaven”, which shares the celestial name and nothing else: it is smoked pork stewed with dried fruit, served with dumplings, from Silesia, a region now mostly in Poland.

Practicalities

This is beer-hall food first. You will find it on the menu of most traditional Brauhaus kitchens in the old town and beyond, and much less often in restaurants that do not serve Kölsch on draft. The old town begins at the cathedral, which stands beside the main station, so the beer halls around it are a short walk from the train.

A plate costs roughly €12 to €18. At the lower end it is the cheapest full meal on many of those menus, and a plate well below that range is a sign of the shortcuts above rather than a bargain.

It is a dish of the cold months by origin, made when the potatoes and apples were in store and the pig had just been slaughtered, and it tastes most like itself between October and March. Most beer halls keep it on the menu all year regardless. It is eaten at lunch as readily as at dinner; a weekday lunchtime is usually an easier time to find a seat, while evenings and the days around a home football match fill the long tables fast. On the street-carnival days, from Weiberfastnacht to the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, and on 11 November, when the season opens at 11:11, expect the old-town beer halls to be crowded and not a place for a quiet plate.

Beer halls work on shared tables and tallies: the Köbes marks each glass on your beer mat, and that mat is your bill. Settle with him rather than at a counter. Cards are now common, but some older houses still prefer cash, so carry enough for the meal and the beer.

Order it hungry. It is not a dish that rewards picking, and the sausage is at its best in the first minutes, before the fat sets.