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Germany produced several cookbooks during the Great War, catering to both civilians on the homefront and soldiers in the trenches. While a specific U-boat cookbook was elusive, the Kriegs Kochbuch (War Cookbook), published in 1915, offers a glimpse into wartime cuisine before severe food shortages began to plague Germany. Many recipes consist of basic ingredients that could feasibly be found in the confined and resource-limited space of a U-boat.

The sauerkrautsuppe, or sauerkraut soup, recipe exemplifies the simplistic nature of wartime cooking. It instructs one to replace the pickles from a previous recipe with sauerkraut, indicating wartime substitutions while leaving some crucial ingredient measurements vague—an issue that often arises in older recipes.