German Bakery

Yesterday I showed a sign for the Paris Bakery.  What do you do if you want to compete with the Paris Bakery?  Well, I guess you would sell baked goods from the German Bakery.  

This is a photo of a delivery truck outside one of the convenience markets in Tamarindo bringing baked goods from a German Bakery, which is evidently located at the Liberia Airport, which is an hour away.   

I was reading a book about Costa Rican history recently and learned a little about baked goods in colonial Costa Rica.  In the early 1800's, bread was a luxury eaten only by the elite.  Corn was the grain used by most people, as it had many advantages over wheat.  Its yield was 10 times per acre, and it could be ground into meal at home, rather than taken to a mill to be ground into flour.  Corn could also be grown and harvested with a lot less labor than wheat, which was critical because of the shortage of labor.  In just 52 years from 1569 to 1611, the number of Native Americans in Costa Rica declined from 120,000 to 10,000.

 

The discussion about German pastries above reminds me of a bit of trivia that I learned during a visit to Copenhagen.  What Americans refer to as "Danishes" are in Denmark referred to as "Vienna pastries."  The breakfast treats were popularized in Denmark when they had a strike and they brought in bakers from Vienna.  I don't know if that is true or not, as maybe the tour guides just like to fool American visitors to see what we will believe.  After all, we were gullible enough to take pictures of that little mermaid statue, which in my opinion has to be the biggest over-hyped sight in Scandinavia, and maybe the world, but I digress.

I want to acknowledge and thank those readers of this blog who have left comments during the past week or two, and apologize for not being able to respond to them, because I was traveling in Morocco until now.