Kohl's Cookbook A Gargantuan Success -- `Culinary Travels' Is Heavy On Meat And The Potatoes

BERLIN - One glance at Helmut Kohl's waistline confirms that the German chancellor never met a Wiener schnitzel he didn't like. Or eat.

Although Kohl has declared his exact weight to be "a state secret," chancellor watchers estimate he crushes the scales at 275 pounds.

So who better than the colossus of Bonn to write the definitive guide to German regional cooking?

Published last month, "Culinary Travels Through Germany" is a cardiologist's nightmare of beer dumplings, pickled pork knuckles and pig's neck on a bed of leeks.

Prominent among the 350 recipes is Kohl's beloved Saumagen - Palatine sow's stomach - which he routinely inflicts on visiting statesmen at his home on the Rhine River in Oggersheim.

Ingredients include one pig belly, a pound of pork, three pounds of ground meat, a pound of potatoes and a dollop of clarified butter. The lumbering gourmet advises that leftover stomach can be sliced the next day and fried a golden brown, a sort of Teutonic coup de grease for any dinner guest still alive.

"Now people will know that we like to eat and drink," Kohl declared at a press conference, "something we are unfortunately not reputed for."

A quick best seller

How this ode to sausage will enhance the reputation of the German palate remains unclear. Nevertheless, the anthology - co-written with wife and first cook Hannelore Kohl - has become an immediate best seller, with a second printing of 40,000 books about

to follow the initial run of 60,000.

"We certainly counted on great interest. But we really didn't expect that it would sell out so quickly or that demand would be so high," said Gudrun Rohe, spokeswoman for Zabert Sandmann Publisher.

The Kohls are not pocketing the proceeds from the book's sales - at least not all of them. A portion will go to a foundation for brain-damaged children.

Chancellor, cuisine match

"This cookbook isn't bad in that it's representative of German cuisine. Of course the cooking is heavy, massive, rather monotonous - only meat, kilometer after kilometer of meat, as far as the eye can see," Wolfram Siebeck, one of Germany's leading food critics, said in an interview. "The Germans' ideal chancellor and a cuisine to fit, just as the Germans love it."

The culinary Kohl has overshadowed another born-again food writer, former East German spymaster Markus Wolf. A major general for the East German secret police, Wolf reveals a life that is as much apron-and-spatula as cloak-and-dagger.

"The Secrets of Russian Cooking," published last fall, is part memoir, part recipe collection. Son of a leftist physician-playwright who fled Germany for the Soviet Union when Hitler came to power in 1933, Wolf grew up in Moscow, where he learned both spycraft and an enduring taste for borscht, blinis and beef stroganoff.

He writes, "Ordinary spying can be compared with the bread and potatoes of an everyday kitchen. . . . But then, man doesn't live by bread alone."

With Kohl, what you see is what you get - and in hefty portions, too. Interlarded with recipes for rolled veal kidneys and Bitburger beer soup are anecdotes from Hannelore Kohl and short essays by the chancellor on regional history and food.

Historic tidbits

We learn from Frau Kohl, for example, that the average German wolfs down 55 pounds of sausage a year.

The chancellor notes that it was King Frederick II who popularized the potato in Berlin with a relentless menu of potato soup, potato puffs and potato salad. They just don't make monarchs like that any more.

Or maybe they do. Kohl, whose name is the German word for "cabbage," is an unapologetic glutton, an old-fashioned cholesterol enthusiast.