Strasbourg Explored - Day 2

Part II of a hopefully seven part series on my eating holiday in Alsace

I search for Croissants, and am disappointed

I generally don’t take breakfast at hotels, even in France. Indeed, especially in France - It’s much preferable to wander around the streets of the city looking for a croissant, or a warm brioche, or some other tasty morning treat. But as I soon discovered in Alsace, and began to understand this first morning, croissants aren’t a specialty of eastern France. This is true even though the flaky pastry originated in Vienna – far closer to Strasbourg than to Paris. Most astonishing, many Alsatian croissants feature a sickly white sugar topping, which I haven’t even seen among the many perversions we get here in America. It’s just not worth eating, and after chewing unhappily through a doughy over-sweet version of my favorite breakfast this morning, I gave up on any croissant that didn’t look like the ones in Paris. Later, I found out the truth – any boulanger that had the iced topping was a German trained bread-maker, and was much stronger in the rich kugelhopf, an almondy brioche, and in the dark breads that so characterize German baking. But no French baker would ever mark their pride and joy in such a Cainish way – and I was much happier once I figured that out.

The European Parliament Proves its worth

Sated, if discouraged, I thought I would visit the European Parliament on the upper outskirts of Strasbourg. This, after all, was an opportunity to see what promises to be a fledging power at birth. I arrived at the bucolic site, flanked by the lazy arm of the town’s river, only to be entirely puzzled. There was no security around the parliament, or anywhere else, and though I wandered for a full hour around the great cylindrical base of the building, there wasn’t an entrance to be found anywhere. The place couldn’t have been more symbolic of the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the current European establishment – a mighty building of soaring ambitions, of words, and doctrines, and agreements, but entirely shut off from humanity and its people. And this is to be the founding myth of European nationhood, the dream of a few lazy bureaucrats? I doubt it very much.

I anger a native

I had heard about a local delicacy known as flammekuchen, but called tarte flambé in French. It’s a pizza like dish featuring a thick crème fraiche sauce topped with caramelized onions and rich lardons, cubes of local bacon. I’ve always cautioned those who think pizza is solely an Italian specialty. Between the pissaladiere of Provence, a tart of olives and anchovies over oil rich dough, and the tarte flambé, France makes a glorious run at her southern neighbors. But the thing that had always puzzled me was that thin crackly tarte flambé dough looked different than pizza in the pictures. I wanted to find out why.
I sat down at a local bistro that had flammekuchen, and minutes later, a fiery hot tart was in front of me. I asked the woman who served it how they had made the dough – “oh, just water, yeast, flour, and salt”, she said. “Like any bread”. I looked unhappily down at the flaky, obviously unleavened tart, arrayed on the traditional wooden platter, and smiled back up at her. “Well. There’s obviously no yeast in this. Are you sure?” She frowned angrily at the silly American, and said, “Yes, of course. What would you know?” I was tempted to answer that I knew enough to recognize dough that didn’t have yeast in it, but I held my tongue – any lingering annoyance on my part was drunk away with a half bottle of terrific local gewurtztraminer wine. But just after I finished eating, I headed straight for the small bookstore I had seen on my way to the restaurant, and checked the recipe. No, it doesn’t have yeast in it – in fact, flammekuchen is a sort of light croissant dough, made by beating fatty European butter to a thin sheet and folding it into a plain dough of flour and water. But I didn’t go back to the restaurant to gloat. There was dinner and dessert to find.

The Story of Porcus

On my way from the train station to the hotel on the first day in Strasbourg, I had walked by an astonishing charcuterie, the window filled with row after row of obviously perfect Alsatian salamis, and sausages, and pates, and all of those stuffed into buttery doughs. But now, I couldn’t remember the name, and I couldn’t remember where it was, and I spent most of the first night dreaming about fatty folds of glistening pork, just out of my reach. Reckless wandering around the streets of Strasbourg didn’t work, and finally I stomped to the front desk of my hotel.

“Listen here”, I said. “There’s a characuterie somewhere. Its name starts with P. It looks delicious, and I have to find it. You’re going to help me”. Whether it the grim, fanatical insistence in my voice, or the ominous rumbling of my stomach, the woman behind the desk kindly pulled over a chair, and handed me a coffee. A few minutes later, the internet had yielded another of its manifold fruits. My elusive goal was appropriately called Porcus, and it was located just behind the Rue des Orfevres. I thanked the bewildered woman, and made off at full speed for the fabled prepared meat dealer. You never know when French shops might close for the night ,or for a break, or, in fact, for the entire summer.

My efforts were worth it, in the end, as I later ate a delicious feuillete de volaille ( a sort of pastry stuffed with meats and vegetables) at home, with its usual accompaniment of cornichons pickles. The Rue des Orfevres, furthermore, had yielded the excellent Patisserie Naegel, clearly the best maker of desserts in Strasbourg, where I found an astonishing tart of figs sitting on a fresh puff pastry. I ate the tarte aux figues wandering absently past the back of the Chateau Rohan, where Marie Antoinette had arrived from Germany to marry the last Bourbon King. By the side of the river, I saw a beggar I had passed by in the morning. He was drunk, unsurprisingly, but he also had a small plate of pate and a couple of olives, with a decent looking nub of bread. Could this be any place but France?

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.