Spoonfuls of Germany breaks the sauerkraut and knackwurst stereotype of German food. The author, Nadia Hassani, assembles 160 regional recipes, which unveil the often overlooked and underestimated variety of German cuisine. The dishes range from the classic Bavarian Bread Soup to forgotten delicacies like Westfalian Pumpernickel Pudding—recipes that are rarely included in other German cookbooks.

Spoonfuls of Germany is filled with anecdotes, food tales and lore, and it demystifies urban legends like German Chocolate Cake (it comes from Texas!).
While the German culinary repertoire is notorious for its heavy meat offerings, this book contains enough authentic recipes to keep a vegetarian happy. All the recipes are prepared with ingredients that are easily available in North American supermarkets and specialty food stores. Hassani includes an easy and inexpensive recipe for homemade quark, the low-fat Austro-Germanic dairy product that has surged in popularity among American chefs. The book also offers a list of mail-order sources for German foods.

Nadia Hassani is an independent editor, writer, and translator. She was born to German-Tunisian parents and grew up in Frankfurt, Germany. Although she has been a passionate cook since her teenage years, her special interest in German cuisine got a boost after her immigration to the United States in the late 1990s, when she started missing the foods of her childhood. Hassani lives in rural northeastern Pennsylvania.