Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 29, 1994                   TAG: 9406300012
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

WUNDERBAR!

The possum crawling down the wall, its paw sunk into a can of Beanee Weenees. It's a kind of mascot for Jagerheim, which means "hunter's home" in German. Also, it's stuffed.

The homemade German noodles, called spaetzle, which are boiled in a pot then fried in an iron skillet slathered with bacon grease. Not scary - tastewise, anyway - but definitely an artery-clogger.

And Erna Gass, die Dame behind the dinner menu. German to the core (she hails from Koln - with the two-dotted umlaut over the O), Erna is 53 years old with biceps made of brick. She can stand the kitchen, even the 105-degree heat.

Erna Gass, who's been cooking German food since she was old enough to peel a potato, does everything exactly perfect - or she doesn't do it at all.

Ask her about the American-style breakfasts she's learned to cook, and she doesn't concentrate on the successes, but on the one time she got it wrong. She was trying out biscuits - one of the South's four basic food groups - and a waitress pronounced them perfect: fluffy, soft, just the right shade of brown.

"But for some reason, I didn't get it right," Erna recalls, wiping flour off on her apron. "I only got 11 biscuits out of the dough, and the recipe said I should get 12. I had to keep practicing till I got it right."

Erna cooks for her 27-year-old son, Gunther Gass, who owns the restaurant, located in the old Blue Jay Motel restaurant west of Salem on U.S. 460.

Asked if his mom was a drill sergeant, Gunther said: "No, she's a drill instructor. That's worse; that's Marine Corps."

So it stands to reason that quality control isn't really an issue at Jagerheim (pronounced "YAY-ger-hime''), which specializes in huge portions of bone-sticking meats and starches.

For German food novices, here's a lesson of the wurst kind:

Bratwurst is a coarsely ground veal-pork combination, fried in its casing. Jagerheim serves it on a hard-roll sandwich with sauerkraut ($3.95) and on a platter with German potato salad (warm or cold - your choice), a house salad and bread ($4.25).

Knockwurst is basically the same thing - only with different seasonings and more veal than pork. The knockwurst sandwich is $3.95, the platter $4.75.

Spaetzle is the aforemented German noodle, made with regular flour ("NO SELF-RISING!" Erna snaps), eggs, salt and water. A wooden spoon - "NEVER METAL!" - is used for the hand-mixing, and a hand-held spaetzle press is used to squeeze out the noodles.

We took a turn at spaetzle-squeezing - which Erna Gass does at least 40 times daily - and came to understand just why her biceps bulge. It beats lifting free weights at the Y any day.

"Holy-god-oh-mighty, it's hard work," she says. "If the dough is too soft, your noodles are mashed potatoes. If it's too hard, you can't squeeze it through. It has to be perfect."

The secret to red cabbage, German-style, is to add apples, bacon, spice, brown sugar and vinegar. Red cabbage is a popular side dish to the house specialty, Jager Schnitzel, which has fried boneless pork chops cooked in a cream gravy with mushrooms and onions, plus noodles ($7.75).

And real German goulash - which was always one of those mystery-meat casseroles, in Ohio anyway - is diced cubed beef in a brown gravy sauce, served over spaetzle ($6.95).

A farmer who ate at Jagerheim recently was startled to see goulash on the menu at all, Gunther recalls: "He said, `Goulash?! You serve goulash?! Back home, goulash is the slop bucket we take out to the pigs.'''

While most of the restaurant's clientele are of German descent or have traveled there, Gunther likes to point out the wide selection of American offerings, too: hamburgers, grits, tuna salad, omelettes, french fries. The restaurant, open for a month now with hours from 6 a.m. to midnight seven days a week, "exercises people's taste buds," he adds.

"Our biggest complaint is people are too full to eat dessert."

And what homemade desserts they offer - German chocolate cake, black forest cake, carrot cake, apple supreme pie, cheese cake, turtle cheese cake, black forest cheese cake ($1.95).

Nancy and Robert S. Jones, a delightful couple traveling south on I-81 from Baltimore, were thrilled to find authentic German offerings near the Dixie Caverns exit. They liked the restaurant so much, they went out of their way to stop for lunch there on the trip back.

"I had the apple supreme last week on our way down to North Carolina," 85-year-old Nancy Jones said. "It was so wonderful, I was afraid to order it again - for fear it wouldn't taste as good."

"We've been to Germany. My middle name is Schmid," Robert added over half of a Bratwurst sandwich. "This is it. This is definitely the real thing."

Jagerheim is Gunther's first turn at restaurant ownership, though he grew up in the business in New Jersey and has worked in several Roanoke Valley restaurants, including the one at the Roanoke Country Club.

Though he was born in the states, he can speak and cook German - with a pair of lederhosen hanging above the bar to prove it. Erna is headed home to Cologne, Germany, soon to visit her sick mother, but plans to come back.

For the interim, Gunther said, "We're looking for someone who can keep up with her in the kitchen."

Which is no small feat. She works from 5:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week, prefers her scorching-hot kitchen to the air-conditioned dining room, and she's tougher than a day-old biscuit - which, of course, she'd never serve.

"I gotta bar fight out there, I send her," Gunther jokes.

Leftovers

Speaking of biscuits, our old Salem buddy, Buddy Reynolds, recently opened up shop in downtown Salem, in what used to be Clancy's. The name is Buddy's, and the specialty is North Carolina-style barbecue.

This Conspicuous Consumer's favorite: the barbecue breakfast plate - two eggs over-easy, a bowl of barbecue, a biscuit and grits with cheese ($3.50).

Thanks to our resident Deutsche-ophile, Max Matthews, who helped us with spellings in this story and had this foreign-food fodder to add: "JFK visited the Berlin Wall in 1961 and pronounced, Ich bin ein Berliner. Everyone cheered loudly because they thought that meant, " 'I am a citizen of Berlin.'

"What the president actually said translates into: 'I am a jelly-filled doughnut.'''