For the most part, Austrian food is refreshingly earthy.
In the Lyonnais region of France they may boast that they have made the pig "the King of Base Beasts" and found some culinary use or other for every one of its organs, but in public places, at least, a more refined approach reigns: veal, turbot and lobster contrive to dominate the menu.Austrian food is very Austrian. I may have spotted a Chinese restaurant in the astonishingly rustic region of south Burgenland, and there are plenty of Italian restaurants in Vienna, but anyone who goes into a "Beisl," the place where most Austrians fill their bellies, will see that foreign influences are few and far between.
It's no place for vegetarians: even the carnival doughnuts are fried in pork fat and every menu is a lesson in porcine anatomy.
One of my favorites is the "Beuschl" - "heart and lights." In the best places it will be delicately presented in a wine and cream sauce with an obligatory "Serviettenknodel" (a dumpling steamed in a napkin). In such cases it is often veal, rather than the more bona fide pork.
The use of veal often verges on false gentility. The textbooks will tell you that the Wiener Schnitzel is made from veal escalopes. In reality you must intone, loudly and clearly, "vom Kalb," if you desire such a thing.
The usual schnitzel is pork, and the Viennese test its quality by counting the bumps and bubbles in its breadcrumb coat.
The Winzerteller is a porky anthology: black pudding or "Blunzen" is flanked by fat bacon or "Speck" and a "Grammlknodel," a dumpling the size of a tennis ball filled with pork scratchings.
Out in the country the food in the rural inns is often cold: brawn and Speck, black pudding and Grammlschmalz, where the same scratchings are set in the bowls of dripping you spread on the rye bread or rolls.
Most Austrians are proud of their food and are happy to give you details for its preparation. In West Styria recently I was obliged to write down the recipe for Verhackert, a hard, fatty spread made from pork back fat hung up to dry.
Only once have I been defeated by an Austrian dish, and that was the "Hirn mit Ei" I ordered in a Viennese Beisl. It turned out to be a brain omelette: the texture of the brains melting into that of the softly fried egg mix. It needed an element of crunchiness. As it was, it was too cloyingly soft.
On the southeastern fringes of the country there is a fondness for soured cream of a pungency unknown in our supermarkets. At a new hotel in Bad Tatzmannsdorf in Burgenland I was overwhelmed by the smell of rotten milk emanating from my soup bowl. It tasted pretty good, however.
It would be wrong to suggest that Austrian food was totally closed to innovation, both good and bad. An example of the latter, which must have drifted south across the German border, was a dish of lobster cooked with mint and white peaches, which a wine maker in Gottlesbrunn told me he had experienced in Vienna recently. Wine soups were possibly invented in the Wachau. They combine wine of an aromatic grape variety with good stock and cream and can be astonishingly effective.
Styrian food enjoys a great reputation in Austria, but it is hard to experience in restaurants in the region, which are few and far between, and often shy away from some of its more rustic tenets.
Not so Steirereck, generally agreed to be Vienna's best restaurant. This is the place to experience fattened goose livers done in an Austrian style; a superb Kalbsbeuschl; calves liver and tongue in (a rather to sweet) orange sauce; or even a Wiener Schnitzel (admittedly vom Kalb).
Being Austria, the puddings are a tour de force: they come in waves like infantry assaults. Only one disappointed me on my last visit: the Mohnnudeln. These were little spaghetti-like strips of potato flour pasta dressed with butter, sugar and poppy seeds, and way, way too refined.
Anyone who seeks to know the best Mohnnudeln must go to the modest Stadthotel in the old walled town of Eggenburg in the Waldviertel.
There is no question of elegance here: the dish is visually unappetizing: it looks like so many fat worms under the contents of an upturned ashtray, but the taste is wonderful.
This is no-nonsense, earthy food such as you rarely find in our over-sanitized society.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)