I'd kill for Helene Weigel's crispy deep-fried chicken. But I could take or leave her vinaigrette and crouton salad.
No. Bertolt Brecht's wife never cooked me lunch. Though, in a way, she did - and from beyond the grave.
Looking for a place to eat, my assistant and I glimpsed some tables set out in a cobbled courtyard off Chausseestrasse, just to the east of the line of the old Berlin Wall.
Leafing through the menu, it dawned on us that we had stumbled into Brecht's former residence and that the foundation running it was helping to balance the books by serving visitors his favourite dishes, prepared according to the letter of his wife's recipes.
Brecht lived at 125 Chausseestrasse from 1953 until his death in 1956. Weigel stayed on until her death in 1971. They are buried together in the cemetery alongside the Dorotheenstädtische Friedhof, which is the final home of a number of other luminaries including Hegel.
It turns out that the playwright and his actress-manager wife are physically closer in death than they were in life. The guided tour of their house reveals that they occupied separate quarters on different floors. It is not the only revelation.
You learn from the carefully preserved book shelves that Brecht and Weigel brought back from their American exile a passion for cheap thrillers. And you see that even the most avant-garde of people cannot help but be prisoners of the aesthetic and social conventions of their times.
By today's standards, the Brechts had a very traditional marriage - a point which seems to have caught the attention of the artist Marc Chagall. He did a little sketch, which Brecht hung at the foot of his bed, showing the playwright stretched full length on the ground while Weigel hurries from an oven with what looks like a plate of cakes.
It was she who saw to the decoration and furnishing of the house and while much of it is in exquisite taste, the conservatory hosts a collection of pewter plates and jugs and a green glass fishing float of the sort you once saw in cheap Italian restaurants. It is pure 1950s middle-brow.
Brecht, as you might expect, enjoyed a privileged status in the defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR). Chausseestrasse 125 was given to him so that he would be near the Berliner Ensemble, which is about a quarter of an hour's walk away. Yet he never walked, always preferring to drive.
What passed for the good life in the former GDR was nevertheless a long way short of the comfort and convenience enjoyed by many lesser artists in the west. With its framed photograph of Lenin, its distinctly austere decoration and its glorious, pre-Sputnik era television set, the home which Brecht and Weigel shared is also a monument to an entire culture whose foundations collapsed in the space of a few months.
Not that the culture itself disappeared. Visitors to Berlin are struck by how difficult it is to see where the Wall once ran.
For those of us who live here what is equally striking is how different the two halves of the city remain outside a relatively small area in the centre.
I know someone who says he can tell the men apart by their shoes. I would not go so far as that, but I reckon I can tell the women apart by their make-up.
With their simpler yet warier air, all but the the youngest easterners still give an impression of being semi-detached members of the capitalist world into which they tumbled 10 years ago. Most say they would not like to turn back the clock, yet many resent the way in which the conquering westerners have swept aside the easterners' identity.
The Brechthaus is as good a symbol as you will find to that uneasy ambivalence. Notwithstanding the commercialisation of Helene Weigel's cookbook, it exists not to embrace capitalism, but to celebrate the lives of two of its more dogged opponents - and certainly the service at table on the day we dropped in gave little quarter to decadent bourgeois expectations.
