At the cooker with its massive chimney the family’s meals were prepared. In the 18th century this was still quite laborious: The dishes had to be cooked on the iron stovetop above the charcoal embers. The cooking pots thus had little feet or were placed on a kind of iron rack or grate, called a “Brantreitel”.  There was no oven for baking, but a waffle iron could be used.

People surely ate well at the Goethe House, but it is not true that Goethe’s mother invented the recipe for the famous “Frankfurter Grüne Soße”, or green sauce.