The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [106]
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 à l’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.