My Quest for Quark

After lunch, my mother would often serve dessert, “to close the stomach”, as she called it. Nobody in my family loved her desserts as much as I did. They ranged from heavenly Tiramisu to tinned fruit with cream, and I would never pass on either. It was not unusual for me to still sit at the kitchen table long after everybody else had left, savouring every spoonful of my mother’s concoctions. My father would hold his daily nap before returning to work, my siblings played or got on with their homework, and my mother cleaned up the kitchen. All the while I was trying to make my dessert last as long as possible. It was almost ceremonious.

Unless my mum had made Quark. If she had made Quark, I wanted to be over and done with lunch. I still ate it. I didn’t even dislike it. I just didn’t like it very much. Quark didn’t mean anything to me. It was one of my mum’s desserts, and it was good in cheesecake, and it was better with cherries than without – nothing less, nothing more. I left home to live in another country, but remained unmoved by the sudden lack of Quark. Even German cheesecakes I could do without. Quark simply did not matter.

And then, one day, I missed it. I went to three different supermarkets and scoured the fridges for milk products resembling Quark. My quest for Quark wasn’t what you would call obsessed – in fact, I was quite casual about it. No harm in looking, I thought. If I find some, I might give it a try, as a treat.

It was supermarket number three that brought my search to an end. Lucky supermarket number 3. On the top shelf, next to luxurious mascarpone and tiny balls of proper mozzarella, clearly sat a tub of “Quarg”. What a find! I read the label, looked at the price and double checked the weight. $3.79 for 200g. And I concluded that that was a little steep, for Quark that wasn’t even spelled right. So I moved on, feeling rather self-satisfied with my austerity. I can always make it myself, I thought. I’m still planning on making it myself, maybe, one day, when it’s raining, although I still don’t like it all that much.