EATING VIENNA

“Oh where have you been my blue-eyed son?  Oh where have you been my darling young one?”

Vienna actually.

“And what did you eat my blue-eyed son?  Oh what did you eat my darling young one?”

Well, quite a lot of sausage, of course.  Blood sausage, for instance, one at a gorgeous, gothicky restaurant called Brezl Gwolb (that name looks like an anagram of something indecent) in the form of Blunzngröstl, i.e. a fry up in a pan with potatoes:

And blood sausage again from the buffet at Mayer am Pfarrplatz, a restaurant attached to a winery on the outskirts of the city:

The latter turned out to be pretty startling, an amazingly familiar taste.  It had all the lardy richness of the black puddings of my youth in Yorkshire, a really similar flavor profile, as we say.  Was it the breed of pig?  The amount of fat?  The seasonings?  Possibly all the above.  And for contrast, some white sausage:

There was some Landjager (the “walking sausage” of legend) bought at a supermarket and eaten in my hotel room:

There was some debreziner, eaten with breakfast at the Café Hummel, a spicy sausage with all the heat right at the very end as you swallow:

There were also a few frankfurters, and a Bosna from a Wurstelstand in the city center.  Everyone says that these sausage stands are manifestations of democracy and equality, frequented by all kinds of people, rich and poor, plebs and Bourgeoisie, and even a few posh folk.  No doubt some are more democratic than others, and some are certainly more architecturally interesting than others, but on a brief acquaintance the legend appeared to be essentially true.

On the non-sausage front, there were, of course, cakes – Vienna being famous for it’s cakes Sacha Torte and Apfelstrudel and whatnot.  There were these - punsch krapfen, fruit cake inside, and that icing on the outside is so sweet it starts attacking your teeth before it even gets to your mouth.

There was also some of this – Preiseelbeer tartlet - Preiseelbeer is cranberry, though not exactly the kind of cranberry I was used to; but they were sour enough to satisfy my lack of sweet tooth:

         But I the best single thing I ate in Vienna, and I’m tempted to say one of the best things anybody’s ever eaten in Vienna, or possibly anywhere else, was this “Hintere Schweinsstelze Frisch vom Grill” with all the trimmings, potatoes, horse raddish, sauerkraut (really not all that sour), and mustards:

This was eaten at the Schweizerhaus, in the Prater, the big permanent fairground, just downwind from Harry Lime’s Ferris wheel – (where as a matter of fact you can eat dinner in one of the revolving cabins).

The Schweinsstelze was absolutely great, but I was initially unclear about what I was eating.  The word is variously translated as pork knuckle, pork shank, and pork hock.  I would not have thought these terms were synonymous, but it seems they are.  The body part in question is marked on the diagram below.  Since this was “hintere” I suppose we’re only talking about the back.

As for how the thing is cooked, some online recipes seem to involve braising and then delvering a blast of heat at the end to crisp up the skin, but as far as I can tell ours were roasted, possibly spit roasted: you don’t get pork crackling like that any other way, surely.  And in fact I’m not sure how you get crackling like that full stop. I imagine something like this but on an industrial scale:

The flesh was tender and delicious and very good, but really it was the crackling that made it.  Lord knows I love crackling, and lord knows my attempts to cook good crackling are a hit and miss affair, but these guys at the Schweizerhaus have got it down so perfectly it almost makes me want to stop trying.  Almost.

Once home I dug around in the Psychogourmet Memorial Food Library and found my copy of Time Life’s, The Cookery of Vienna’s Empire – no recipe for Schweinsstelze there (nor in the German volume either), but I did find this remarkable picture.  The things on sale are sweets, made of marzipan, made to resemble sausages.  Austria – my kind of country.

And many, many thanks to the blessed Del Barrett for organizing the Vienna trip, and being a guide through the city’s food labyrinth.

LADIES WHO LUNCH

Are you watching Feud – the mini-series about the rivalry between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis?  I thought the first episode was pretty creaky and I just didn’t buy Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford.  But Susan Sarandon seemed to really capture something of Bette Davis – at least as we imagine her to be.

I’m not sure if modern actresses are allowed to drink – all those calories.  But we know that both Joan and Bette liked a tipple.  I found this wonderful, if ludicrous and scary, thing from Joan.  It’s hard not to have affection for a woman who adds a splash of vodka to everything.

It seems that Bette preferred whisky to vodka.  Robert Vaughan’s autobiography contains a wild account of being summoned to Davis’s house for lunch, so she could check him out and see if he was suitable for a project she was doing.  He staggered out at 4 o’ clock drunk, unfed, and barely able to stand or see.  He didn’t get the part, which I think is a great shame.  I’d have liked to see them together.   I think they’d have had more chemistry than Bette and Robert Wagner.

SORROW TEARS AND CEVICHE

You must have read one of those articles that crops up every few years: some university department has researched what music “goes best” with which kind of food.  You know, “Acid jazz really enhances the taste of monkey brains” kind of thing.  Well …

On Saturday, it being my birthday, I went to a restaurant called Los Balcones (1360, Vine Street, Hollywood).  It used to be called Balcones de Peru – but they obviously decided they need something snappier.  “It is our mission to share our love for Peruvian culture, cuisine and of course the national spirit pisco.”

I think it’s a pretty reliable place and it always feels just a little bit special, without raising expectations too high.  And I’d been having a jonesing for ceviche, so I ordered some Ceviche Mixto – “striped bass, shrimp, octopus, squid, lime juice, onions, choclo, rocoto pepper” (though to be honest with you I couldn’t spot any octopus in there).  The choclo is the puffed up sweetcorn on the right.

  
There were Platanos Fritos there too: “Peruvian plantain fritters, baby greens, goat cheese dressing,” like this:

And Huancaina – “baby potato salad, boiled egg, creamy huancaina sauce. “

Anyway the food was really good – and if you dipped some of the sweetish plantain into the sour marinade of the ceviche you had a very good thing indeed going on.

But OK, so what music would you expect to accompany this Peruvian feast?  Have as many guesses as you like and I think you wouldn’t come up with Fela Kuti – but that was the soundtrack here, and it made me wonderfully, perhaps incomprehensibly, happy. I’ve been trying to find some connection between Fela Kuti and Peru and I’ve failed, so I suppose it was just the personal taste of somebody on the staff.

Looking at his physique when he was healthy (and of course he became extremely sick at the end of his life) it’s hard to hard to imagine him being much of an eater, though I did track down a website with an article from Ovation Magazine by one Mike Osagie which described Fela’s eating habits like this: “Fela was a voracious eater who ate like a lion.  He could pay any amount for a great meal.  For example, among his women only about two or three cooked for him.  The queen of whom was Fehintola ... who was rumoured to be Fela’s favourite because of her cooking talent and sexual prowess.

    “A champion of pastries and different brands of sweets, Fela was also crazy about good snacks like cupcakes and custard.”

     Who’d have guessed?

MOLE AND TANDOOR

I had lunch last week at Loteria (6627 Hollywood Boulevard) – a place I like a lot, and it seems very successful, though I somehow feel it doesn’t quite get as much love as it deserves.  I ordered a couple of enchiladas, one cheese, one chicken, with mole poblano.  It looked like this:

It was so dark and intense it seemed to absorb the Los Angeles daylight - which has much to do with the chocolate it contains, of course – and the result is something Huysman might have approve of.  It was great, if frankly a bit intense for lunchtime.

And then as I was leaving, a fellow from the restaurant asked me casually if I’d enjoyed my lunch, since he’d seen me take the photograph of it.

It was the cheery fellow above, Jimmy Shaw, the begetter of Loteria – born in Mexico City, he renounced a career in advertising to become a chef.  He said he’d seen me in the restaurant before, and I said sure, I come fairly often, and it’s a great place to have in the neighborhood.  He obviously knew what I’d ordered, and he said, and this may not be an exact quotation but something very like, “Mole is to Mexico as curry is to Asia.”

It sounded fair enough but when I got home I realized I wasn’t sure I knew exactly what a mole was, so I did a little digging.  It some ways it seems to be just another word for a sauce, but that doesn’t really say much.   And I found this evocative, if faintly excessive, description in Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen.  “When it’s made from scratch, no matter what regional variation you’re tasting, the sauce will offer the fullness of a 20-piece dance band, the intricacies of a Persian rug and the intensity of a Siqueiros mural.”  Though frankly I’m not sure that any dish could be quite as intense as this  Siqueiros mural, especially not at lunchtime.

And then, life being what it is, I opened my Sunday New York Times Style Magazine yesterday and there's an article titled "Mole In Mexico" and I thought I probably ought to read that.  So I read the opening line, "The word 'mole' doesn't translate into 'infinity,' but it feels like it should."  Seems that mole plays havoc witha man's prose style.

Fortunately I also found a couple of online interviews with Jimmy Shaw.  In a piece on chefsinsight.com he said his mole has 27 ingredients, and then, “Mexican food is truly fusion food of centuries. If you think about today’s mole poblano, you think 'that’s truly a Mexican recipe.' But mole was made originally by Spanish nuns for a viceroy to showcase indigenous and Spanish cuisine together. We’re talking about 500, 600 years ago.”  This story is much repeated in the annals of mole – in some versions an angel is involved.

Well it so happened I went to another restaurant the next night – Animal (435 North Fairfax), which cooks the kind of food I love (sort of post-Fergus Henderson nose-to-tail) without necessarily always cooking it quite as well as I might wish.  With curry on my mind, I ordered the “tandoori octopus – tamarind, yoghurt, kumquat.”  It looked like this:

And when I got home I realized I wasn’t sure I knew exactly what a tandoori is.  I mean, I know it’s a clay oven, but not much more than that, and I’m not sure that Animal actually has one of these:

Still, looking it up in Alan Davidson, he tells us the tandoor is a bread oven originally found in the middle east.  But, and now be prepared to set your face to stunned, “Tandoor meat cookery has been popular since 1948 when a Kashmiri restaurant named Moti Mahal became a fashionable dining spot for politicians in New Delhi.  As a result Indian tandoori restaurants have sprung up all around the world.” 

Only since 1948?  So - tandoori cookery is quite the Johnny-come-lately of Indian cookery, and the man behind Moti Mahal was one Kundan Lal Gujral.  This is him, another cheery fellow, apparently:

Moti Mahal Delux is now a global chain with 120 franchises.  The picture below is from their website – uncaptioned so I can’t really tell you what’s going on, but I'll bet the dialogue was lively.

And I have no idea whatsoever of what's going on in this one: