Rostbrätel

Rostbrätel is firmly an East German dish, popularized through the GDR decades when marinated pork steaks were among the most sought-after foods at beer gardens, garden parties and travelling fairs. Cookbook author and television cook Kurt Drummer helped fix a widely repeated version on GDR screens. There is deliberately no official Thuringian recipe — the regional view is that quality lies in the cut of pork and a long marinade rather than in any fixed spice list, so the dish stays a household tradition passed down by families.

A thick, fat-marbled neck steak, charred and lacquered on the outside from the mustard-beer marinade, pink and juicy within. The first taste is grilled meat and toasted mustard, with a malty bitterness from the beer behind it. Heaped over the top are slow-stewed marinade onions, gone soft and sweet, cutting the richness. Eaten with bread or a roll to mop the onions and juices; a knife-and-fork plate rather than a handheld one.

The marinade does three jobs at once: mustard's acidity and enzymes loosen the surface of the meat, beer brings malt sugars that brown deeply on the grill, and grated onion contributes both flavor and more browning sugars. An overnight soak — 12 hours or more — lets all three reach into a thick cut that a quick rub could not. Pork neck is chosen for its intramuscular fat, which bastes the steak from inside over the coals; a lean chop would dry out long before it took on char.