The Man Who Ate Everything (30 page)

An hour later we pulled into the courtyard of the Hotel-Restaurant au Boeuf, three stories of white stucco and dark timbers, with pink and red geraniums in every window box, like most of the buildings in the Alsatian countryside. I had chosen Au Boeuf because its
choucroute garnie a I’Alsacienne
had won the Concours de la Cuisine Regionale in 1985, a competition run by an association of modest French country inns. Alsace has more than its share of superb restaurants displaying international ambitions. But a good choucroute, I felt, was most likely to be found in a family establishment serving convivial fare on well-worn crockery.

After a pleasant interlude with a smooth slab of goose foie gras—another Alsatian specialty—the choucroute was borne to our table. Down the center of an oval terra-cotta platter was a
mountain of golden sauerkraut; leaning up against it were distinct cuts of pork and charcuterie, and around the outside l
_a
eight yellow potatoes. Four red sausages taller than the other rose to the crest of the mound, where they appeared to support a stout pig’s shank, still in its skin. We heaped the choucroute on our plates and chose the meats at random, half a sausage here a cutlet there, washing everything down with a local Riesling.

We ate until we were satisfied, continued eating until we were full, and kept going until we were bloated and sleepy—not because the dish was flawless but because, among the scores of
choucroutes
garnies a I’Alsacienne
I had eaten in restaurants or prepared in my own kitchen, this was the first specimen I knew to be absolutely, certifiably authentic. It was a trophy to carry back home in the form of sensory memories, enhanced body weight, and a recipe that Jean-Jacques Colin, the prizewinning chef, generously shared with me. I might have used more onion than Colin and a less acidic wine to make the sauerkraut sweeter. But who am I to tinker with a genuine regional masterpiece?

After lunch we readjusted our seat belts and drove south to Colmar, which we would use as a choucroute base camp for the next few days. We set out again for two
winstubs—
Alsatian wine bars or taverns—in nearby Niedermorschwihr, one called the Morakopf (Moor’s Head) and another whose name a splash of choucroute has obliterated from my notes. I remember that we shared a table at the second with a sullen young couple who lived nearby, and that, as in many
winstubs,
everything in the place had been made from something else. The bar stools had once been wine barrels, a wooden shoe had become a wine cradle, an oval ox yoke was mounted on the wall with eight lightbulbs screwed into its sides, an iron tripod pot had been upended and little shaded bulbs attached to each leg, rough wagon wheels were hung as chandeliers, and so forth. When I first met my wife, she tried to turn every inanimate object she came across into a lamp, and I thought she would be captivated by the interior decoration. But she was too busy figuring out where to hide the day’s third
slab of poached bacon so that the restaurant would not notice that she hadn’t touched it.

The name of the restaurant does not matter much. It could have been the Caveau d’Eguisheim in Eguisheim or the Au Lion d’Or in Kayserberg, the refined Flory in Colmar or half a dozen other places we visited. But it could not have been the Ferme Auberge Deybach.

A
ferme auberge,
in its idealized form, is a working farmhouse deep in the mountains whose hospitable owners welcome guests for lunch or dinner, heaping timeless country food on long communal tables. The owner of our hotel warned us that every
ferme auberge
on the list we showed him harvested its ingredients at the local supermarket and earned its living feeding tourists instead of farm animals. We pressed him for the name of the genuine article, and an hour later, just in time for lunch, he produced the Ferme Auberge Deybach near Schiessrothried.

Our mouths watering, we drove into the cold and misty mountains, asking directions to Schiessrothried every few miles. It was not until our rented car had gotten stuck at a sixty-degree angle on the edge of a ravine in the freezing rain halfway up a hiking trail that we realized that Schiessrothried is not a town but a sylvan lake high in the Vosges. We inched backward several thousand feet to a paved clearing, turned the car around, and followed a series of signs for the Ferme Auberge Himmel-Something, where we would ask for directions. Outside were two scrawny yellow horses, several tons of rusting farm machinery, and four chickens scratching at the earth around the horses’ ankles. Inside was a large gloomy room lit by two small candles, a
tarte aux pommes
(yet another Alsatian specialty) baked the previous month, and a dour farm couple who reluctantly redirected us to the Ferme Auberge Deybach.

As it turned out, the Deybach was not far from that paved clearing at the base of our near-fatal hiking trail. We had missed it earlier because we were not on the lookout for a dilapidated wooden shack near a ski lift guarded by two rabid Alsatian dogs.

Inside were seventy-five German students on a walking tour, crammed together at makeshift tables, and an immense proprietress wearing a man’s sleeveless undershirt. First she refused to talk to us at all and then spoke only in German, while speaking only French to the German students. Lunch appeared to be a thick potato soup followed by a half-inch-thick slab of raw bacon nailed to a wooden board. We let the students at our table practice their English on us (“A wonderful man is President John Kennedy”) while we shared a warm pitcher of local white wine and waited for all seventy-two of their friends to be served. At last the proprietress threw a completely unripe Muenster (Alsace’s famed cheese) on the table before us and grunted in German, “Too late for lunch.”

We sped back into Colmar, bought five Alsatian cookbooks and more recipe postcards, and snuggled in our hotel room, where I worked on my master chart until dinnertime. Not one of the cookbooks had a recipe for raw bacon slab nailed to wooden board.

My memories of choucroute all run together now, but the crucial variations are preserved on paper. After a while, I could simply take a few bites, ask the chef a question or two, and understand how his version was made. This left us with an acute disposal problem regarding the ten pounds of
choucroute garnie a I’Alsacienne
remaining on the platter each time we dined. A ruthless investigator would have shoved the choucroute aside and eagerly turned to the wealth of other savory Alsatian dishes on the menu. A courteous investigator would bring a plastic garbage bag and scoop up the choucroute when nobody was looking. A guilt-ridden investigator like me, brought up worrying about the starving children of Asia, gets rid of ten pounds of surplus choucroute by eating half and artfully arranging the rest to appear as small as possible.

As the days passed, we discovered an important medical principle that, to my knowledge, has hitherto been undocumented: when you have eaten
choucroute garnie a I’Alsacienne
twice a day
for five days, your wife’s face turns green, she claims that yours has, too, and you both lie immobile in a netherworld between sleep and wakefulness for the next eighteen hours. Then you can eat again. The French would call this a liver attack, but they call everything a liver attack.

When we recovered, we fled north to the bright lights of Strasbourg and its fabled patisseries, delicatessens, and chocolatiers. We averted our gaze whenever we passed the Maison du Lard restaurant across from the hotel garage and feasted instead on the modern Alsatian cooking of two brilliant chefs highly honored by Michelin and Gault-Millau: Antoine Westermann at the Buerehiesel in Strasbourg’s lovely Orangerie and Michel Husser at the Hostellerie du Cerf in Marlenheim. What a relief to eat food that was invented only yesterday!

Westermann does not offer choucroute in his restaurant. There is only one true choucroute, he joked, and gave his family recipe, currently entrusted to his grandmother, Cecile. Husser serves a wonderfully up-to-date choucroute. The sauerkraut is simmered briefly with three traditional meats to give it flavor. These are removed (and served to the staff for lunch), and the sauerkraut is garnished with foie gras that has been smoked over oak for two hours and then sauteed, and with suckling pig, some of its parts roasted in a mustard sauce, others dry-salted a day ahead, poached in broth, and caramelized in honey and vinegar. The dish is a triumph.

It was snowy and cold when we returned to New York, perfect weather for sharing a real
choucroute garnie a I’Alsacienne
with friends. I decided to construct my own recipe, following this convenient working definition of “authenticity”: if it
could
have been made in Alsace by a traditional cook, it is authentic. When my chart gave me permission, I chose what most pleased my tastes, which lean toward the spicy, crunchy, sweet, and mellow. But I would not go beyond the flavors, textures, and methods I had found in Alsace. Authenticity seems more a matter of ranges and limitations than of outright prescriptions.

Every traditional recipe includes sauerkraut, water, j
uniper
berries (for their characteristic ginny taste), onions (for their flavor and sweetness), black peppercorns, cloves, garlic, goose fat or lard, and potatoes. Chicken broth is sometimes mixed with the water, sometimes not. Bay leaves and wine are found in most recipes, fresh thyme and coriander seeds less often, butter and cooking oil never. Apples and carrots, which sweeten the choucroute, appear only occasionally, as do cumin and caraway—they are more German than French. Cooking times vary from one to twelve hours; the stove top is heavily favored over the oven.

Cookbooks usually instruct you to soak and arduously squeeze the sauerkraut handful by handful. (I demolished a salad dryer trying to automate the process.) This once made sense in the Alsatian countryside, where preserved cabbage and turnips were the only vegetables available during the long winter months; by April, the sauerkraut had become dark and highly acidic. But when Alsatians use choucroute nouvelle—fermented for only three weeks and used right away like the sauerkraut we get in the United States—the most they do is quickly rinse off the brine.

The meats found in nearly every recipe are smoked bacon, salted bacon, and smoked or salted pig’s knuckles or shanks
(ja-ret, jambonneau).
Nearly as universal are smoked
palette de por
c
,
Strasbourg sausages, and salted loin of pork, though some cooks prefer the untranslatable
echine,
which Cecile Westermann and others prefer to the shoulder for its flavor. Beef is out of the question. Every recipe includes three or four types of sausages; half of them call for quenelles of pork liver, poached at the last minute.
Lesjoues
(cheeks) and
epaule
(shoulder) are found now and then, sometimes fresh and sometimes smoked. Surprisingly, most of these terms are too technical for paperback dictionaries like the one I carried in France, and in the end I needed all four volumes of
Harrap ‘s Standard French and English Dictionary
next to my pots and pans. But literal translation is pointless, because French pigs are butchered into different pieces from ours and handled differently later.

I located diagrams of French and American butchering methods, aligned one over the other, and held them up to the light to see where the French cuts fall on an American pig. With my free hand, I telephoned the butcher and asked if he would saw off the part of the shoulder blade near the neck, keeping the backbone and first ribs attached, and could I get it salted. My goal was
echine salee.
I tried again with
jambonneau,
which runs from above the knuckle (also known in pork circles as the hock) to just above the feet. In reply, he pretended to have received a long-distance call on the other line. So I telephoned four ethnic butchers—two Italian, one Polish, and one German. They could provide some of the inexpensive cuts like knuckle and shank, though not the cheeks and neck, and nobody carried unsmoked, salted shoulder, loin, or bacon. Salting was invented as a preservative, but we use it now to deepen and concentrate the flavors of foods.

Before long I was in a taxi bound for Harlem with a picture of a pig in my pocket. From what I knew about the salted meats of the American South, I suspected that the answer might lie there. A friend had put me in touch with Aubrey Foster, general manager of the Pan Pan Coffee House, at 130th Street and Lenox Avenue, where every day in the basement he smokes a great deal of pork over hickory. I met up with Foster at the Pan Pan just in time for an early lunch of juicy barbecued ribs and an excellent chopped barbecued-pork sandwich. We pored over my pig diagrams and drove up Lenox Avenue to Clarence & Sons Prime Meats. I was tempted by the frozen possum and coon but stuck to business and discovered snowy-white salted bacon and smoked jowls (streaked like bacon but with a deeper taste); fresh jowls are available around Christmas, when Clarence’s customers order whole pigs’ heads. I was told that
the jambonneau
on my diagram is never available, because American hams are cut down to the knuckle, leaving only the lower shank.

While I was in the neighborhood, I bused down to La Marqueta in Spanish Harlem, beneath the elevated railroad tracks on Park Avenue between 112th and 116th Streets, where, if my
command of Spanish is accurate, I tracked down some fresh neck meat and what was probably a boned, unsmoked
jambonneau,
though it was much larger than I had expected and was referred to as a “horseshoe.” There was no salted loin; that’s what they eat in Harlem, I was told. I bought a fresh loin and salted it myself according to a recipe in Jane Grigson’s
The Art of Charcuterie
(Knopf). It took several days of work.