VIENNA
Food & Travel
If there had been a couch, I would have cast myself upon it like a toppled odalisque, to dream sweet dreams of butter, cream and pure white sugar. Sigmund Freud's famous divan, however, was notable by its absence, sent into permanent exile in London along with its owner, bitter memories and miasma of troubled psyches. However, in his gloomy apartment in a solid, respectable part of Vienna, flanked by the charmingly shabby Café Freud (good Melange coffee-with-milk plus assorted psychoanalytical iconography) and a curious erotic establishment (at the sign of the buttocks rampant!), I formulated my own ground-breaking, not to say hip-enhancing, Schlagober Theory. My analysis is based on cream and the subconscious. Whipped cream. Lashings of the stuff. Er, get the picture? Personally, I think its a brilliant theory that neatly combines sex, desire and cake. When Julie Andrews exhorted us to climb every mountain, she meant - mountains of cream! Eat your heart out Dr Freud, or at least consume it in the form of a heart-shaped sponge layered with marzipan, buttercream, almonds and strawberries. Mit Gobers of Schlag, of course.
After a few days in Vienna, drowning in a sea of schlag, whipped cream soon comes to dominate your dreams (see, there I go again, Herr Dr). There are frothy mounds billowing over cups of coffee black as the night, sweet as love, hot as hell. Creamy snowdrifts bolster the baroque, sculptured tortes that crowd the counters of countless Kaffeehaus and Konditorei: the hard-core even have whipped cream on their whipped cream. Schlag on schlag action. Addiction is rapid, and one quickly acquires a multi-torte daily habit. Which is better? Sachertorte at the eponymous gilt and crimson Hotel Sacher, or the Ur-Sachertorte at arch-rival, Demels, perhaps the greatest patisserie in the world, where a glassed-in patio reveals the specialist pastry chefs at work, black marble tables are illuminated by resplendent chandeliers, and tiny handbag-dogs fastidiously lap water from outsize silver bowls. Every legal twist and turn in their Seven Years War to establish the right to bake and sell this most refined of chocolate cakes, inspired by Prince Metternich, was keenly followed by press and public alike, envious of the lawyers frequent tasting sessions. Sacher, we, too, judged the victor by a narrow apricot jam margin but then Demels richly layered Dobostorte, chestnut and cream gateaux and vanilla slices were simply incomparable.
And, who makes the best Apfelstrudel with the most luscious, cinammon-scented filling and pastry so fine you can, as the Viennese say, read a love letter through it? If not served freshly-made, Strudel has as much charm as a collapsed soufflé, and it was a close call for honours between the glittering Café Mozart of Third Man fame (confiscated from its original Jewish owners) and the understated, lofty Café Prückel where you can eat stalwart Viennese specialties, play cards, write letters, read the papers, arrange business deals, bill and coo over Kaffee und Kuchen, all under the watchful eye of the tuxedoed Herr Ober? And, is it possible to compare the bookend wedges of marbled Gugelhupf at the dark and smoky, delightfully frayed Café Hawelka with the lightest of cheesecakes at the Adolf Loos-designed Café Museum? Then there are the vanilla crescents and walnut torte, the chocolate Rehrücken shaped like a stags backbone and larded with almonds, the poppy seed rolls, plum slices and coconut kisses. Its all too wunderbar for words. You need more than a flying visit. It could be the work of a lifetime. Or shorten it altogether.
Perhaps the locals are made of sterner stuff. As a pamphlet, Wien wie es ist und trinkt published in 1850 states, The Vienneses great weakness is their stomach, in the service of which they show remarkable strength. The Viennese household cook was always much sought after and admired and her reputation stood or fell on her ability to cook meat dishes, especially the classic triumvirate: Gulasch, Wiener Schnitzel and Tafelspitz.
Gulasch is a daily, roll-up the shirtsleeves dish given to the country, along with Apfelstrudel, by her old partner, Hungary. Veal or beef, paprika, tomatoes, garlic, onions its unmistakable aroma means Vienna and is as nostalgia-laden as tart, young Heurigen wine, the Viennese Woods, Boys Choir and Lipizzaner horses. Less fiery than the Magyar version, but more various: as Rosl Philpot wrote in Viennese Cookery (1965), there is mushroom Gulasch for the lean days, sausage for wash-day, fish for fast days, beef for all day and every day, pork for cold winter days and veal for special days. At Zum Schwarzen Kameel, a smart, historic restaurant in the city centre, the latter is still served in unadorned, rich simplicity, with a thick, savoury sauce soaked up by homemade Nockerl.
The great dishes of the city were built on the spoils and influence of the Habsburg Empire, the melting pot kitchens absorbing all the best dishes from Central Europe and beyond. Schnitzel is another imperial immigrant, although its original country of origin Italy, Spain, even Turkey is disputed. A simple enough dish on the face of it, but one that needs painstaking care if it is not to become a soggy mess. The detailed Teutonic instruction can be remorseless, but only strict adherence to the rules will result in pork or veal (sometimes turkey, a sign of the times) escalopes with a crisp, even coating, the colour of a gypsy violin. In theory, they should be so grease-free you could if you so wished sit on them for a full second without a stain on your trousers. Portions can be alarming at Zu den Zwei Lieseln, a small, homely Beisl, the superb Schnitzels are the size of flying saucers and cover the rim of the plate.
Tables are always at a premium at Plachutta, one of the best places in Vienna for Tafelspitz, a three-part homage to the boiled beef dish reputedly favoured for Sunday lunch by the Emperor Franz Joseph. Forget leathery rags: juicy tenderness is achieved by long, slow simmering in a broth of vegetables and herbs. In Blue Trout and Black Truffles (1953), the epicurean Joseph Wechsberg wrote, Old-time Viennese butchers with the steady hand of distinguished brain surgeons were able to dissect the carcass of a steer into thirty-two different cuts and four qualities of meat. He recalled a Viennese restaurant, Meissl & Schaden, destroyed by Allied bombs in 1945, that offered 24 different varieties of cuts with highly subtle distinctions and mysterious, esoteric names..Schulterscherzl, Zwerchried, Ortsschwanzl who raised their own cattle at a large sugar refinery where the steers were fed on molasses and sugar-beet mash. Even today, it shows a lack of sophistication to simply order gekochtes Rindfleisch. One must specify the cut. As Wechsberg crisply noted, one would not enter Tiffanys and ask for a stone.
From the dozen or so cuts available at Plachutta, Tafelspitz or tenderloin, remains the most popular. The ritual is unwavering: start with the broth in which the meat (also from their own herd) is placed in bowls at the table along with noodles or strips of pancake, continue with the meat itself accompanied by Rösti, apple and horseradish sauce, sour cream and chives and puréed spinach. Finish with marrow, scooped from the bone onto toasted Landbrot. For dessert eat buttery curd cheese dumplings or Kaiserschmarrn, puffy pieces of fork-torn pancake liberally dusted with icing sugar and served with stewed, sharp purple plums.
The vision of the Viennese waltzing their way through life by the banks of the blue Danube belongs in the same Old Europe category as Mozartian fantasies on a theme of chocolate. As if to prove the point, every confectioner and pastry shop has its own edible tribute trio of chocolate, pistachio and marzipan confections; red and gold wrapped bonbons and chocolate boxes enrich the windows like Hapsburg jewels; and a life-like bust of Wolfgang cunningly sculpted in dark chocolate draws admiring crowds on the anniversary trail. It is part of dream Vienna, the city of our subconscious yearnings for schnitzels, strudels and whipped cream, served to the sound of zither music in smoke-filled coffee houses.
It is a flawed image, particularly given the dark, tragic years of the last century, although not altogether untrue. Present day reality, however, encompasses a very different city. Along with the high-flying, gourmet Steierereck restaurant, there are a number of neo-Beisln, neighbourhood restaurants such as Tancredi that serve classic dishes such as Viennese fried chicken with a modern, lighter touch, as well as Italian restaurants, sushi and noodle bars and vegetarian cafes. In the open-air Naschmarkt, doner kebabs and falafels outnumber sizzling Bratwurst and Leberkas (horse meatloaf one for the fearless), although there is still Sauerkraut and pickled gherkins to be bought straight from the barrel.
Across the road from the equally sumptuous Hotel Sacher and Opera House is the citys first branch of Starbucks, opened in 2002 on the premises of the former Café Zum Fenstergucker. Chutzpah, or what? Its been a relative smoke-free success, and there are now eight other outlets but in the city of a zillion coffee houses, it still seems a Mokka too far. Even if served with Gobers of Schlag.
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