The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [107]
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 à l’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 à l’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, Cécile. 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 sautéed, 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 à l’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, juniper berries (for their characteristic ginny taste), onions