I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I got my suitcase stuck in the train door at Wernigerode. There I was, arse half in the carriage, half on the platform, while a very patient German man held the button and pretended not to notice my emergency flapjack tumbling out onto the tracks. Still, I retrieved it, brushed off the gravel, and decided that was my snack for the journey sorted. Standards officially lowered.

The drive from Wernigerode to Thale took about twenty minutes, winding through dense Harz forest that looked like someone had cranked the saturation up too high. Every bend revealed another absurdly picturesque half-timbered house or a sudden glimpse of the Bode Valley dropping away beneath the road. I kept nearly driving into hedges because I was gawping at the scenery. By the time I pulled up at the holiday home, my nerves were shredded but my appetite was absolutely raging.

The place itself was one of those solid, unpretentious German properties that immediately makes you feel you've done something sensible with your money. Clean lines, a proper kitchen with actual sharp knives, and a terrace that looked out towards the Selke Valley. I dumped my bags, including the gravel-dusted flapjack, and headed straight for the kitchen to assess my prospects.

Here's where I need to be honest with myself. I had grand plans about cooking proper German meals from scratch. I'd even packed a cookbook, which should have been my first warning. That first evening, I marched down to the Edeka in Thale with the confidence of someone who definitely knows what "Steinpilze" means without checking Google. I returned with an alarming quantity of pork, some potatoes that looked right, and what I believed to be sauerkraut but might have been pickled cabbage for salads. The resulting dinner was edible, technically speaking, though my attempt at Bratkartoffeln ended up more like hash brown fragments held together by stubbornness. I ate it on the terrace with a beer, watching the light fade over the hills, and decided that culinary failure tastes perfectly acceptable at altitude.

Breakfast became my reliable triumph. There's a bakery on Thale's main street that opens at six, run by a woman who clearly suspects all tourists of bread-related incompetence. I kept going back for more Broetchen, each morning pointing at different seeded rolls with increasing authority. By day three she actually smiled, possibly at my persistence, possibly at my pronunciation. I bought enormous pretzels the size of steering wheels and proper dark rye that made my usual supermarket loaf taste like cotton wool. Back at the house, I'd assemble elaborate morning spreads with cold meats, cheese, and cherry tomatoes, eating slowly on that terrace while planning absolutely nothing.

The local pubs saved me from complete kitchen humiliation. I found a Gaststaette near the Rosstrappe chairlift that served proper Thueringer Rostbratwurst with mustard that could strip paint, accompanied by potato salad clearly made by someone's grandmother. The beer was cold, the portions were defensive, and the landlord eventually stopped looking surprised when I ordered in my phrasebook German. Another evening I stumbled into a place in Friedrichsbrunn, about four miles towards Quedlinburg, where they were serving wild boar goulash that tasted of dark forests and autumn itself. I ate two bowls and had to be rolled back to the car.

The Harzer cheese nearly finished me. I'd read about this legendary sour milk cheese, how it's an acquired taste, how tourists often recoil. Naturally I assumed I'd be the exception. I bought some at a market stall in Thale, took it back to the house, unwrapped it with ceremony, and immediately understood why people use words like "challenging." It smells like a gym sock that has achieved sentience. I tried it on rye bread, with beer, with desperate optimism. I managed three bites before admitting defeat and hiding the remainder at the back of the fridge, where I suspect it continued to mature in sinister ways.

My cooking improved marginally as the week progressed, mostly through lowering my ambitions. I mastered the art of buying excellent local ingredients and doing almost nothing to them. Fresh trout from a farm near the Selke river, simply grilled with lemon and butter. Asparagus when I found it, boiled and draped in hollandaise from a jar I wasn't too proud to purchase. The kitchen became a place of assembly rather than transformation, and I think that's when I started actually enjoying it.

The farewell meal happened at a beer garden in Thale, not at the house. I'd meant to cook something triumphant, some final proof of my culinary growth, but instead I sat with a cold pilsner and a enormous schnitzel, watching local families argue good-naturedly across long tables. The food was better than anything I'd managed. The atmosphere was better than my terrace, lovely as it was. I realised somewhere between the second beer and the inevitable Apfelstrudel that this was the point all along. Not mastering German cookery from a holiday let, but finding where the locals actually eat, buying bread from people who wake before dawn, accepting that some cheeses are simply not meant for me.

I left the remaining Harzer cheese in the fridge for the next guest. Consider it a test of character, or possibly a biohazard. Either way, I departed fuller and slightly wiser, my suitcase considerably lighter without the emergency flapjack, my pronunciation of "Broetchen" at least passably competent. Some holidays teach you about mountains or history or yourself. This one mostly taught me that I should stick to breakfast, trust bakeries over my own ambition, and never, under any circumstances, attempt to retrieve baked goods from railway tracks.