The Café Steinmann in Berlin is usually remembered as a literary salon, a one-time home to thinkers as far-ranging as Goethe and James Baldwin. But this beloved Charlottenburg fixture was equally critical to the sciences, as the laboratory of Frau Nathalie Steinmann, whose contributions to modern gastronomy cannot be overstated.

Steinmann, an energetic and inspired woman who shared her husband’s passion for hospitality, was suddenly widowed at the age of 34, leaving her both the need and the opportunity to reinvent her meager business. A student of the new modern industrial practices, the widow Steinmann made the fortuitous acquaintance of Ernst Chladni, the physicist and musician who had demonstrated how a plate covered with sand would create different shapes and patterns when vibrated by specific sounds. Steinmann at once saw how food might serve as a medium for the phenomena, and commissioned a machinist in Stuttgart to produce what are now called Steinmann machines, for processing pastry dough, meringues, and fondant into heretofore unimaginable shapes. The results put the Café Steinmann on the map, and gave rise to an entire category of desserts named after its most celebrated patrons. But the cost of the process was a horrendous din, likened to both a small foghorn and a large dragonfly, which kept her successes in check. Steinmann’s invention was soon obsoleted by the Schultheiss-Bleier process that used frequencies beyond the range of human hearing, to the relief of patrons — but the annoyance of neighborhood pets, which earned the machine its nickname of ‘Hund-Störer’ (‘dog botherer.’) It is apt therefore to remember Steinmann not only as the mother of the modern science of acoustical food shaping, but for her kindness to both authors and animals.

Published December 8, 2022. Copyright © 2022 Jonathan Hoefler.