great scott county

Ingrid Carter infuses her dishes with heritage

As Edwin was preparing to take his 16-year-old-bride to America he didn't talk cooking, because Ingrid didn't know how to do much more than boil the water they had to lug home from the street corner where horses drank, since the bombed out pipes still hadn't been repaired. But she had watched her mother Charlotte season and marinate Sauerbraten. She had taken mental notes as her mother chopped eggs and diced tomatoes for her own German Potato salad.

Gradually, with practice on Red cabbage and potato dumplings, the knowledge of German cooking came back, and on May 13, 1987 the Carters put out their "wilkommen" sign in front of their very own German restaurant, Gasthaus Edelweiss near the railroad tracks in the Southwest Virginia mountain town of Weber City.

Ingrid has developed the recipes, and it is she who greets guest three days a week, while Edwin cuts pork tenderloin and transforms it into Schnitzels of several varities.

Ingrid does all the baking - usually three or four Central European desserts each day.

When Edwin brought Ingrid to Appalachia, she knew almost no English, and picked up the language first by reading Comic books and associating the pictures with the words.

The parents of five children, Edwin and Ingrid revisit her homeland often. Germany is never far away from her thinking. It's there in her plates of Rouladen, Sirloin sliced thin,filled with pickles, seasoning, and mustard, rolled, browned in butter, and sauced. It's there in the shards of the Berlin Wall in a glass case below the 50th anniversary vase the local German club gave them. Ingrid thinks often about her mother's sacrifices in the days after World War II, and the death of her farther Hans, a professional bookbinder, probably somewhere in Poland, where his last letter to his family was postmarked. After the adversity, suffering, and deprivation she lived through, Ingrid opened Gasthaus Edelweiss as a way to bring delight into her newly adopted mountain home and to honor the culinary traditions of the place she left behind as a new bride half a century ago.