Gib mir Deinen Saft

What's the Austrian sauce? Does this question make any sense to you? And what would you answer if "we don't have one sauce that we put on everything" doesn't count as an answer?

Another little anecdote from my two weeks of family home stay in Hokkaido:
On the third or fourth evening my host family asked me to cook something Austrian for dinner. I cooked Wiener Schnitzel and Kaiserschmarrn for them. So far, so good. A novelty for me was eating Schnitzel with chopsticks - i made small, bite-sized Schnitzel to make that feasible (also easier to fry ;-)). I explained them that we would not do that, but use knife and fork to eat the Schnitzel. They told me well, they just love to use their hashi because they are so practical. Uuuhm, i don't think that'd be so practical if the food wasn't pre-cut/came in bite-sized pieces. Anyways. They liked the Schnitzel and the Kaiserschmarrn. Yummy, yummy.
I helped them cook dinner every evening. Besides that one Austrian evening and one time Spanish paella - they had visited Spain and liked that - we always cooked something Japanese, and almost every day something different. Delicious, two yummy weeks for me :D
But back to the sauce. The day after Austrian evening we used soy sauce while cooking. On that occasion they asked me what the Austrian sauce was. At first i wasn't sure what they meant, but then they explained me well, they can use soy sauce to put on everything and also do that with most dishes. So they wanted to know the Austrian equivalent of that. I told them that we don't have the one sauce that we can/do put on everything. They did not except that as an answer... hmmm, i could not tell them anything else. After consulting each other they agreed that it must be lemon. Mainly because on the night before, i had also bought lemons and explained them that you squeeze lemon slices over your Schnitzel. They seemed content with the answer they found and i left them in their belief.
Cultural differences...

Mahlzeit, everyone!

Cheers
CGA

ps: nevermind if you don't understand the title of this blog entry. It's from an old German song - by 'old' i mean something like 20 years old.