I should have known the holiday proper started the moment I tried to navigate Thale with a boot full of groceries and absolutely no phone signal. We'd stopped at a supermarket in Quedlinburg on the way up, smug as you like, thinking we'd outsmarted the Sunday trading laws. Four bags of fresh stuff, enough wurst to sink a small boat, and a jar of something pickled I couldn't identify but felt culturally obliged to purchase. Then the sat nav gave up somewhere near the Bode Gorge, and I found myself reversing down a farm track while my other half held a bag of leaking sauerkraut out the window like some sort of Germanic white flag.

The cottage itself, when we finally found it, was one of those proper timber-framed affairs that makes you feel like you've stumbled into a Grimms' fairy tale, albeit one where the witch has excellent central heating and a dishwasher. The NOVASOL place had that particular smell of old wood and recent renovation, and a kitchen that immediately made me want to cook something ambitious and probably ill-advised.

We unpacked the shopping with the solemnity of archaeologists cataloguing a dig. The local butcher had talked me into Blutwurst with the confidence of a man who could see straight through my schoolboy German. I'd nodded enthusiastically, not entirely certain what I was agreeing to, and now here it was, sitting on the counter like a dark secret. The plan was simple: we'd eat in, save money, live like locals. The reality, I suspected, would involve rather more compromise and possibly a trip to the nearest pub.

That first evening, I attempted what I grandly called a "Harz-inspired feast." The local potatoes, proper waxy ones, behaved beautifully. The kale, which I'd bought from a tiny farm shop where the woman spoke no English and I spoke approximately twelve words of German, turned out to be tougher than old boots. I simmered it for an hour, added butter, added more butter, considered adding an apology. The Blutwurst sat in the pan looking knowing. We ate at the kitchen table with that particular quiet that falls when neither party wants to be the first to comment. My other half eventually said it was "interesting," which in our household is the culinary equivalent of a yellow card.

The next morning, defeated but not deterred, we walked into Thale proper and found a bakery that smelled of heaven and cinnamon. I ate a Schrippe the size of my face, still warm, with proper butter and ham that actually tasted of something. The coffee was strong enough to stand a spoon in. I sat there on a wobbly chair, watching locals come and go with their paper bags of bread, and felt a proper fool for trying to rush the relationship with this place. You don't arrive in the Harz and immediately cook like you've lived here forty years. You eat the bread. You drink the coffee. You listen to the woman behind the counter tell you, in gestures and patience, which cheese is best.

We found a pub that evening, one of those half-timbered places with low beams and a landlord who looked like he might have been there since the Thirty Years' War. I had a Hefeweizen that arrived in a glass the size of a small bucket, and a pork knuckle that made all previous pork knuckles seem like practice attempts. The meat fell away from the bone with the slightest encouragement. There was sauerkraut, proper stuff, nothing like my leaking bag. My other half had trout, local from the Bode apparently, and we didn't talk much because there wasn't much to say beyond the occasional appreciative noise.

The market in Thale on Saturday morning became our ritual. I'd go with an empty rucksack and return with it full of things I couldn't name but definitely wanted. A woman sold honey from hives I could see on the hillside behind her stall. Another had cheeses wrapped in cloth, each with a handwritten note about which meadow the cows had grazed. I bought bread from the same bakery, queued behind the same locals, gradually learned to ask for things without pointing and hoping.

By our third attempt at cooking, I'd scaled back my ambitions considerably. Simple things, local things. Fried potatoes with onions, the proper waxy ones. A piece of smoked pork from the butcher, which I asked for by pointing at my own shoulder and making what I hoped were appreciative noises. The landlord at the pub had given me a recipe for kale, written on a beer mat in handwriting that wandered like the Bode itself. It involved a sausage called Pinkel, which I found hilarious and my other half found less so after three repetitions.

We still ate out plenty. There was a place in the next village, no more than a few miles, where the landlady made Apfelstrudel that made me want to weep. Proper thin pastry, proper tart apples, proper vanilla sauce poured over with a generosity that felt almost personal. I asked for the recipe, which she found hilarious, and instead brought me a second portion "to study."

On our last evening, I cooked again. Nothing fancy. Potatoes, a piece of ham, some of that market kale cooked properly this time, long and slow with a bit of stock and patience. We ate at the same kitchen table, opened a bottle of local beer, and it was good. Not pub good, not landlady good, but good in a different way. The kind of good that comes from having spent a week paying attention, from getting things wrong and trying again, from the particular pleasure of feeding yourself in a place that's slowly becoming familiar.

I left the jar of mysterious pickles unopened on the counter. Some things, I reckon, you need longer than a week to understand.