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Baked Hens and Roast Oxen

Ting THE HEARTIEST SPECTACLE of eating, drinking and dunken masse that we have ever taken part in is staged with traditional panoply and show at Munich's annual Oktoberfest, or anyway it was in the days before Hitler. The sheer gluttony of it lured us back to Munich for three successive years to participate in the first and foremost of the Seven Gustatory Wonders of the World-two weeks , dayand-night, of celebrating the harvest, out in the open, in a meadow-like park, the Weise, set apart by the Bavarian city for its greatest of fetes with beer, barbecue and baked hen —and the beer of Munich is correctly called "liquid bread ."

Miles of beckoning snack booths and bars meander in every direction, chirping and groaning under all the salubrious specialties of South Germany; for here the best of best of food is prepared in super-picnic style and eaten, hot or cold, on the spot. And it hits the spot! Dripping fat-fine (fettfein) "baked hens" turning on electric spits, before glowing charcoal braziers, right out in the open. While the biddy livers are being separately tossed in sizzling butter or handed out a dozen to a skewer; sausages of six dozen kinds sputtering back at red broiling coals, and a savory fog of sauerkraut steam hanging low to keep things nice and cozy. Rows and rows of stickfish (Steckerfisch), blistered to velvety brown over shallow trenches of glowing charcoal , disappear like magic, borne aloft on the very sticks they're grilled on, through laughing, singing crowds, to the nearest beer fountain, where they join the lusty procession down prodigious red lanes.

Kids hovering like bees around kiosks of sweets, with spun candy glass and licorice coal mines in action, everywhere big valentine gingerbread hearts bearing lively legends like "Ich Liebe Dich," spelt out in frosting as pink as the noses of suckling pigs on their way to the spit. Every swain has to buy at least one of these love-tokens for the girl-friend to hang around her neck (gingerbread, not pig), thumping her bosom at every skip she takes.

The great pavilions of the breweries, Löwenbrau, Pschorrbrau, Augustinerbrau, Hackerbrau, Spatenbrau and Matthiasbrau, hold 3000 beer drinkers apiece, all seated at once, around stout tables attended by applecheeked Alte Jungfrau, those "old-young girlsters" with physiques matching any of the brewery handlers who swing endless barrels around with the ease of Sandow and the daring of that young man on the flying trapeze. All Oktoberfest beer is sold in masts only; tall, thick earthern krugs or glass mugs that hold a whole liter, which is about 10% more than a quart. But waitresses in Bavaria have the muscles and stamina to carry four of these masts (more than a gallon) in each dripping red fist and charge through the beer garden crowds without spilling one glob of foam. It takes a hand like a ham to merely enclose the handles of such a flock of mugs and a vice-like grip to lift them all together when full.

Bands blare beer music (Souza's militant Yankee marches are specially liked), crowds rock and sway with the volume of song, utter strangers of all classes mingle equally, masons and teachers, mechanics and bankers click steins, for all barriers are down at this greatest of snack-fests. And the beer-sipping is much slower than our tempo; for their beer isn't drunk quite as cold as ours, but stays cool and refreshing for an hour in the perfect earthenware containers. Everybody nibbles big pretzels which good looking blonde salesgirls carry around, swinging from wooden crosses. Big black radishes and turnips are spiraled thin out of little machines on wheels and salted to taste by the busy but obliging vendor.

By noon the great barbecue spectacle is ready to begin, and from then on it lasts until closing time. Trumpeters announce the exact second when the first Ochsenbraten (roast oxen) of the day is done, and then the band comes down from its platform to head a parade of high-hat chefs, waitresses, and comics, bearing barbecued baby pigs, roebucks, chickens, geese, ducks, sausages and such. Around and around they march, while snackers fall in as though fascinated by the sometimes pie-eyed pipers, ending up in a line before the huge roasting ox, where each tries to point out to the knife-wielder the exact tidbit he thinks should be coming to him. This Ochsenbraten show is staged on an elevated platform at the end of the beer hall, where all can see the whole ox clamped onto its gigantic spit, rotating before a vertical grill that extends high above the cook's head. The speed with which one of these juicy and tender, though gigantic, carcasses is reduced to a sorry skeleton by the ravenous piecers is a sort of minor miracle. And so is the endless flitting from one food spectacle to another and agilely back to beer and battercakes again.