Across the Rhine, Sauerkraut Is Even Sweeter  By R. W. Apple Jr.
New York Times, January 5, 2005
STRASBOURG, France -- In the colder months my mother put sauerkraut on the table once a week. And why not? It was cheap, filling, nutritious, easily stored and true to the culinary heritage of German-American families like ours. "It will put roses into your cheeks," she would tell us kids, and we believed her. We relished every bite.

But it tastes foul, you protest. It smells. It gives you heartburn. Not, I can assure you, when my mother made it, lavishing as much attention on those heaping bowls of steaming preserved cabbage as she would have paid to a prime T-bone or a fine partridge, neither of which appeared very often chez Apple during the Depression.

Sauerkraut, I discovered years later, uses an alias in France. There it is called choucroute, and there it reaches its apotheosis, chiefly in Alsace, the province just across the Rhine from Germany. There it is milder because it is rinsed, then cooked in wine (or occasionally beer), and there it is far more richly embellished.

It is also more copious. Seasoned with cumin seeds, bay leaves, coriander seeds and juniper berries, simmered slowly with sliced onions, veal stock and local white wine (preferably a fruity yet bone-dry Riesling), crowned with a half-dozen assorted sausages and sundry other porky tidbits - a couple of slices of ham or a smoked pork chop or a few rashers of bacon or a pig's knuckle, or maybe all of the above - it would stymie a hungry stevedore or an N.F.L. tackle.

Choucroute garnie, the whole shebang is called. Only the Alsatians would dare call such a parade of pig products a "garnish." It is, of course, a peasant dish, but if the cabbage is cooked just slightly crunchy, neither acidic nor watery, neither fatty nor greasy, and if the sausages are not too pink (a sure sign of excessive nitrates), it is as noble in its own way as foie gras, another of the area's traditional gastronomic delights.

"A first course is not necessary," one Alsatian restaurant comments with enviable understatement on its menu, but few of its customers pay any attention. The people who live in these parts are France's acknowledged, uncontested Big Eaters.

The classic meal in a Strasbourg winstub or wine bar like the Muensterstuewel, a handsomely converted butcher shop, or Chez Yvonne, where Jacques Chirac and Helmut Kohl once dined together sitting elbow to elbow with the neighborhood regulars, consists of headcheese or an onion tart, an epic choucroute and a gooey, spectacularly stinky wedge of Münster cheese produced in a Vosges mountain valley.

Steamed (or occasionally mashed) potatoes come with the main course, lest anyone forget that the origins of this feast are Teutonic, however much the subtler techniques of La Belle France have softened its rough-and-ready nature.

Alsatian winemaking records go back more than 800 years, and most Alsatians drink white wines with their choucroute, either the refined local rieslings or the spicier, more aromatic gewürtztraminers. They are served in special glasses, unique to the area, with clear bowls and green stems.

But some local trenchermen prefer a stein of draft beer, and because most of the big French brewers, or brasseurs, are based in Alsace, including Kronenbourg and Mützig, their Paris outlets, called brasseries, have always specialized in Alsatian food. So when you tumble out of the Folies-Bergère and repair to the Brasserie Flo, or head for Bofinger after the opera, or meet friends at Lipp for a hearty feed on Sunday, as Pierre Salinger often used to do, your best bet may well be choucroute. (Contrary to its dire reputation, it makes a delicious, readily digested late-night meal.)

For grand occasions the Alsatians douse choucroute with Champagne and call it choucroute royale. For variety they serve it with liver dumplings or frogs' legs or smoked goose or even fish; several restaurants in the region offer it with salmon, and the world-famous Auberge de l'Ill, a sumptuous Michelin three-star inn south of Strasbourg, numbers among its specialties choucroute with velvety smoked sturgeon.

Michel Husser of Le Cerf, a two-star family-run roadside establishment west of Strasbourg, demonstrates choucroute's versatility as well as anyone. He mingles textures and flavors to thrilling effect in a gratin of oysters and choucroute: warm Marennes d'Oléron sitting atop tart little heaps of crisp, creamy fermented cabbage.

It may sound weird, but it tastes great, as does his luxurious take on choucroute garnie. He stews freshly made choucroute in duck fat for two hours or more with an innovative mix of spices that include cloves and serves it with tiny cinnamon- and nutmeg-flavored blood sausages, a slice of gently smoked pan-fried foie gras and succulent bite-size morsels of suckling pig edged with chewy crackling.

Something similar to choucroute has been eaten in Europe since ancient times. The Küchenmeisterei, a 15th-century German-language cookbook, mentions salted cabbage. In the 17th century, says the British food writer Sue Style, the local monks ate it regularly, as did the grand families of Strasbourg, for whom it often formed the centerpiece of gala Sunday lunches as well as wedding feasts.

Low in calories, rich in potassium and calcium, it is an excellent source of vitamin C, which is why mariners like Captain Cook carried barrels of the stuff on their expeditions. Like limes, it helped to keep the dreaded scurvy at bay and thereby made much longer voyages practical.

Much of the best choucroute consumed in France comes from a village called Krautergersheim, which is surrounded by fields of a choice variety of cabbage called quintal d'Alsace. Idling along a pretty back road one day a few years ago, admiring the mistletoe in the trees and the storks in their nests, my wife, Betsey, and I came upon signs heralding the "Capital of Choucroute." The boosters needn't have bothered; the pungent aroma in the air made it clear how the village earned its living.

Preservation, not flavor, was the name of the choucroute game in the days before canning, refrigeration and freezing. Just as cheese preserved milk and pickles preserved cucumbers through the crop-poor winter, choucroute offered a way to enjoy a green leafy vegetable - and its indispensable vitamins - on the long, dark, bleak days when the fields are draped in snow.

Production at companies like Wagner begins about the first week of September or before. The green outer leaves are peeled from the heads, which can weigh up to 15 pounds. The white inner leaves are finely shredded and layered with salt in crocks or barrels, then left for three or four weeks until fermentation begins. The kraut is best when still young and crisp; if it has turned yellow, it is past its prime.

"Sometimes it is necessary to add a little water," as Ms. Style explains in her authoritative book "A Taste of Alsace" (Hearst Books, 1990), "but generally the lactic acid released by the action of the salt on the sugars in the cabbage is enough to cover and to preserve it through the winter."

All September long, festivals are held to celebrate the arrival of the choucroute nouvelle. Geispolsheim's comes first, then Meistratzheim's, then Petersbach's and then, at month's end, Krautergersheim's.

When Betsey and I returned to the region for several days late in 2004, I called an old friend, Jean Hugel, whose family has produced some of the region's greatest wines since Louis XIII. A bluff, charming man of 80, he immediately suggested lunch at an unpretentious little
place called Au Bon Pichet in the market town of Sélestat. You can't miss it, he said: "it's right in the middle of town, in the Place du Marché aux Choux" - the Cabbage Market.

Naturally I ordered choucroute, which came to the table white and sweet smelling, deliciously adorned with smoked bacon, cured bacon, breast of pork and two kinds of sausages: knackwurst and cumin-flecked Montbéliards. Naturally, we sampled Hugel wines. And naturally, talk turned to choucroute, then and now.

"My grandparents made their own," said Mr. Hugel's wife, Simone. "There was one rabot, a kind of plane used for shaving the cabbage, in each village. Now we buy it ready-made, in vacuum-packed plastic pouches, from the butchers. We eat it only when it's cold out, like oysters, in the months that have r's in their names."

Even then, Mr. Hugel added, "we eat it only once a month, less often than we eat pasta, I guess." Prosperity and more frequent foreign travel have changed habits, but tradition thrives in Alsace, one of the most fervently folkloric of the French provinces. Choucroute remains the symbol of the region and the long-standing French-German traditions that set it apart from the rest of France.

You can't escape from it, in the villages or in Strasbourg, the regional capital, which is the sixth largest city in the country and one of three capitals of the European Union. This has been a crossroads since the medieval era, as its name suggests (strasse meaning street in German). The politicians and diplomats who congregate here throng its restaurants, from the temples of haute cuisine to the bistros, and they eat a lot of expense-account choucroute.

A favorite of mine is Chez Yvonne, a winstub hole in the wall paneled in dark wood, with gingham curtains and paisley tablecloths. Yvonne Haller has retired, but the staff is still joviality personified, the choucroute is still tempting and the wines, whether ordered by the bottle or the half-liter pitcher, are unfailingly satisfying.

Another evocative spot is the Maison des Tanneurs, a restaurant installed in a half-timbered building dating from 1572, full of odd angles and creaking floorboards. It is among the most picturesque structures in Strasbourg's most picturesque neighborhood, known as Petite France, with flower boxes overflowing with scarlet geraniums that are reflected in the placid waters of the little River Ill just underneath them.

It serves choucroute in all sorts of combinations, including one garnished with particularly well-made
weisswurst, mild white veal sausage. Appropriately, or at least so it seemed, we devoured ours looking at a still life of cabbages.

I'm a hefty fellow, seldom at a loss for appetite, but I couldn't get through the choucroute strasbourgeoise at the Maison Kammerzell, a Gothic showplace fitted out with antique murals, wood sculptures and heavy leaded windows and owned by the self-crowned King of Choucroute, Guy-Pierre Baumann. It came to the table, a daunting platter with no fewer than eight kinds of hot, glistening meats clinging to the sides of a perfect Alp of cabbage, accompanied by waxy, perfectly boiled potatoes.

"This we recommend for normal appetites," the waiter said with a straight face when he saw me blanch. "If you're hungry, there are larger versions.`