Edible Destination
Bavarian Heritage with a Hoosier Heart
OLDENBURG BY JANE SIMON AMMESON
Oldenburg’s Pearl Street Pub.
W
ith its soaring church steeples dominating the sky in the gently rolling hills of Southeastern Indiana, Oldenburg, known as the Village of Spires, is the perfect place for a taste of early-19th-century Bavarian hospitality, charm and cuisine. “The majority of people who live here are German,” says Paul Selkirk, who—though he isn’t—has for the last 35 years been festival chair of Freudenfest: German for “festival of fun.” This celebration of all things German is held the third weekend of July and attracts about 12,000 people to this village of 600. “All the food we sell at the festival is homemade. Townspeople just get together and start cooking.” That cooking includes homemade pies, which are auctioned off at Freudenfest, ranging from $15 to $1,000. The proceeds from the auction, as well as all other sales, including the numerous German draught offerings in the biergarten, are used for the beautification, preservation and restoration of Oldenburg. “We have people who have been entering pies since I began running the auction 20 years ago,” says Marla Nobbe. “And who knows how long they were donating pies for the auction before that. Because the festival is in the summer, we mostly have fruit pies, but there are cream pies too.” In an interesting culinary twist that seems so Southern Indiana, the specialty of several long time restaurants isn’t just the German dishes found at the Freudenfest or featured on their menus. “If you want Bavarian food, we have brats and metts, which are smoked sausages,” says Betsy McCray, the daytime bartender at Wagner’s Village Inn, which opened in 1959. “We serve it with homemade sauerkraut that a man in Oldenburg makes and that we keep in a big ceramic crock that came from Germany. But we’re also known for having the best fried chicken in Southern Indiana.”
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edible edibleINDY INDY summer summer 2015 2015
