I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked like someone's back garden. There I was, winding through the Thuringian Forest in a hire car the size of a small boat, convinced I was about to become a local legend for all the wrong reasons. The mishap came at a T-junction near Schleusingen where I followed the cheerful voice straight into a farm track, scattering a small conference of very unimpressed chickens and earning what I can only describe as a look of profound German disappointment from a man in overalls who was definitely not expecting a Peugeot in his morning.

By the time I actually found the Hinternah, I was starving, slightly traumatised, and ready to eat my own steering wheel. The property sits in a proper pocket of countryside, all wooden beams and that satisfying creak of a place that has seen a few centuries come and go. I dumped my bags with the enthusiasm of a woman who had been surviving on service station pretzels since Frankfurt and headed straight for the kitchen to assess the damage I could do.

The first evening was a triumph of ambition over ability. I'd picked up supplies from a little market in Schleusingen earlier that week, or so I thought. Turns out what I had believed to be local Thuringian sausage was in fact some kind of smoked cheese situation that melted into a pan with the consistency of sadness itself. I stood there in that beautiful rustic kitchen, smoke alarm blessedly silent, and confronted the reality that I am a woman who can follow a recipe to the letter and still produce something that tastes of regret. The local Rauchbier I opened helped enormously. By the third sip, my cheese-adjacent disaster had transformed into a "rustic fondue-style experience" and I ate the lot on toast, telling myself this was exactly how the locals did it.

Morning brought salvation in the form of actual locals who knew what they were doing. The weekly market in Schleusingen was in full swing, and I approached it with the humility of a woman who had recently been outsmarted by dairy. The Thuringian bratwurst stall alone nearly finished me off, the smell of those proper sausages grilling over beechwood sending me into some kind of ancestral hunger I did not know I possessed. I bought four, because apparently I have no self-control when faced with 600 years of sausage tradition, plus a loaf of dense rye bread that could genuinely serve as a defensive weapon.

The pub situation around Hinternah is gloriously unpretentious. I found a Gasthaus in the next village where the landlord looked at my attempts to order in phrasebook German with the patient expression of a man who has heard "ein Bier, bitte" mangled seventeen thousand ways. He brought me a Pilsner and a plate of Thuringian dumplings in mushroom sauce that made me want to write poetry. Those dumplings, I later learned, are a serious business here, made with dried bread rolls and apparently requiring the steady hand of someone who has been doing it since childhood. Mine would have been weapons-grade projectiles.

Back at the cottage, I attempted to recreate the experience using ingredients from a farm shop I'd found near Neuhaus am Rennweg. The woman running it spoke no English and I speak barely functional German, so our transaction involved a lot of pointing and hopeful smiling. I came away with potatoes that still had actual soil on them, proper free-range eggs with orange yolks like miniature suns, and a jar of local honey that I have since eaten with a spoon while standing in the kitchen at midnight, wearing pyjamas and no shame.

My cooking improved marginally as the week went on, mostly through the strategy of keeping things simple and letting excellent ingredients do the heavy lifting. One evening I managed a respectable fried potato situation with those farm eggs and some of the proper bratwurst, eaten at the wooden table with the windows open to the forest air and another Rauchbier for company. Was it authentic? Probably not entirely. Was it delicious? Absolutely. Did I feel briefly like a woman who had her life together? For at least forty-five minutes, yes.

The local bakery in Schleusingen became my morning ritual, partly for the Streuseltaler that crumbled in that perfect way, partly for the woman behind the counter who gradually stopped looking surprised when I successfully asked for "zwei Broetchen, bitte" without sounding like I was having a medical event. Small victories.

By the end of the week, my fridge contained the acceptable remnants of someone who had genuinely tried, including a half-empty bottle of local apple wine that I had convinced myself I would cook with but mainly just drank. I left the Hinternah with a bag of those farm potatoes, a renewed respect for Thuringian dumpling makers, and the certain knowledge that I would be back, preferably with someone who actually knows how to cook them.