Part I of what I hope will be a seven part post about my eating holiday in Alsace

I grabbed a croissant from Le Fournil de Gare, a small boulanger opposite the Gagny train station. It was warm and yeasty and chewy and buttery. Almost perfect, I thought, as I strode towards the commuter train that would take me to Gare de L'Est and thus to Strasbourg. I needed a holiday, I had decided a few weeks before. Yes, mounds of law school debt awaited me when I returned to the real world . And I hadn't exerted myself that heavily over thirteen weeks of my summer job - apart from a few late nights, the summer associate's lot isn't the harshest even among the cushioned paths of the western elite. But it would have been a shame, I thought, to have been in London, just a few miles from Paris, and to have neglected Europe. And so I booked my tickets on the trans-Channel Eurostar, and imposed myself yet again on the hospitality of my ever-ready uncles in the suburbs of the French capital. It was time to travel.

I spent a long time musing over where to go. France is a diverse country; of sun and of mountains, of plateaus and plains. But as always, my priority was food. And as the Larousse Gastronomique notes, there are few places better blessed with edibles than Alsace, oft-traded between France and Germany, and the better for it. After much thinking, my plan ended up incorporating some of the most interesting places I could find in the eastern province. I would start in the great Alsatian capital of Strasbourg, and then, after a brief stay there, would trek down to the little towns of Obernai and Selestat in the wine-making south. On the way, I'd eat and hike as much as possible, to offset the grosser excesses of my eating with the rough discipline of mountains and forest. If all worked out as planned, it would be a perfect vacation. How could I go wrong?

The Topless Jumble

A short time later, though, I found myself staring not at the glorious foothills of the Vosges, but at a topless woman in Gare de L'est. She wasn't, unfortunately, there in person, but stamped tawdrily on a magazine, with the word “Jeux” or “games” written diagonally across her head. I wondered for a moment what she could mean - I mean, nude games? Eventually, my curiosity overcame any embarrassment I felt at leafing through such a thing in public. I gingerly picked it up, and backed unhappily into a remote corner of the store.
Well, it turned out to be the jumble – the word search, in other words. And it’s not as if the puzzle was particularly connected to the salacious cover – the first word to be found was "pain", or bread. I put the magazine back, unsure of what to make of it. But I do know that if anyone ever asks me to explain France to them from now on, I'll say that they can understand France if they understand the topless jumble. And by the time I thought of that, my train was minutes from leaving.

I scare a woman away. I am not surprised.

The trip from Paris to Strasbourg takes four hours, by Corail rapid train. For some reason, the real speedsters of the French railway, the Trains Grande Vitesse (TGV), haven’t yet made their way to this route. A more cynical person might note that it is telling of something in the French psyche that the TGV have long plied the holiday route to Nice, but still ignore the capital of Europe. But I am not cynical, or at least wasn’t just then.
In any case, I passed the time by alternatively eating and staring out the window at the passing countryside. As to the food, I did well, I think - a baguette stuffed with ham, a blueberry tart, small cornichon pickles, olives, some strong German beer, and a little pate. The only complaint I remember now about the sandwich was that too much butter had been spread on the ham inside, in an obvious effort to obscure the fact that both better ham and bread exists elsewhere. But that niggle didn’t stop me from enjoying myself. In fact, I ate so enthusiastically that the attractive woman sitting next to me moved away when we stopped at Nancy. Maybe I should have talked to her instead of eating, but by the time I thought of it I had got to the tart, and it
was very good indeed.

Zum Zwissell

Clearly, the chief job awaiting me the first night in Strasbourg was to get myself some choucroute garni, the headliner of Alsatian cookery. It’s not complicated, choucroute garni. It’s just some sausages and ham hocks piled on top of relatively humble preserved cabbage, or sauerkraut. But in all cases, choucroute in Alsace is a treat, made with some of the best sausages and smoked meats to be found anywhere. After a good bit of wandering around the great Gutenberg square of Strasbourg, dazzled in the shadow of the extraordinary one-towered cathedral, I found my target – Zum Zwissel, probably the most traditional winstub, or wine restaurant, in Strasbourg. I sat myself down outside in the delightful weather and ate for the next two hours – First a perfect onion tart, studded tastily with small cubes of local bacon (lardons), and topped with a thin layer of emmental, followed by a mighty plate of choucroute garni accompanied by a freshly grated bowl of horseradish to liven it all up. Washed down with almost a litre of the powerful Mutzig beer, I couldn’t really handle dessert, so I satisfied myself with a light sorbet there, and then a pistachio ice cream later. Standing that night in front of the Cathedral to watch the summer’s special light show, I remember noting that this was a great start to the trip. I had tasted the Strasbourg’s most famous export, and I was impressed. But that, surely, was only a start.