In Praise of Old Fashioned
There’s much I love about the French region of Alsace, tucked up alongside the Rhine between the pine-covered Vosges and the Black Forest of Germany. For a start, it’s the only place I know where electric pistachio can be considered a subdued choice of colour to paint the entire outside of your house. The villages are that colourful.
There are other characteristics – clichés, even. It’s a tidy place. I swear I’ve seen people send their kids out after rain storms to scratch away between the paving stones in the courtyard with toothbrushes. Or perhaps I had too much riesling at lunch and was imagining things.
Either way, it’s a happy place, a land of milk and honey, well known – and rightly so – for its food, wine, gastronomy and produce: plentiful fruit, sweet wines, pungent cheeses, fertile soil, rivers full of fish. Like some kind of biblical promised land. In such places, traditions grow and thrive, and the seasonality of the soil melds with the religious and secular calendar to create a kind of ever revolving cascade of sweetmeats and treats that’s special to the moment, this village, that festival, this time of day. Like I said: a land of milk and honey.
So how do the Alsatians go about enjoying their own Alsatian cuisine? Well, in all sorts of ways, of course. With a bountiful basket like theirs, they have a pretty good answer to most questions your belly might ask. Bar snack? Pretzel. Need a slice? Tarte flambée. Ravenously hungry? Baeckeoffe. I could go on; my point is that 0n the spectrum from munchies to Michelin, you could stick to Alsatian and not want for much. When the gasoline runs out, I hope I’m somewhere pretty near Strasbourg.
Up and down that spectrum, one note holds true: they have no fear of the old-fashioned. The good-old old-fashioned. The unimproved, because unimprovable, old fashioned. That can apply to the simplest of pastries, or the grandest of banquets, but the object of my old fashioned praise today is the family-run mid-range village auberge. It’s the old fashioned of gothic script menus printed on a half-acre of thick card, in a restaurant whose light fittings predate the telephone let alone the microchip.
I’m preconditioned to enjoy these old places, but they do have to be actually good. And in Alsace, more often than not, that is the case. They’ll be family run, which is how the strong line of tradition holds steady: no one dares change the menu because that would mean facing the wrath of Granny, still on hand for every service, with a sort of smile/glower that oversees proceedings like an eagle. And they’ll be excellent, because every last member of the family apprenticed at the Auberge de l’Ill under Paul Haeberlin, who is to cream, sauce and delicious what James Brown is to rhythm, soul and funky. The man.
I ate in just such a place on Easter Friday. It was perfect, something I never say that about a restaurant. On the contrary, mostly I’m disappointed by restaurants (I’m sorry to say). Too often, the menu is a mashup of the latest reinventions of dishes that didn’t really need reinventing, modernised by removing the sauce that used to make them tasty. Sometimes it’s food I could cook at home; more often it’s food I just wouldn’t cook at home even if I had the time and the tweezers. Sound familiar?
By way of analogy, when I fire up Spotify, occasionally I’m on the hunt for new music. But mostly, not. I go to the classics. Songs I know so well I can hear them in my sleep, whose guitar solo I’ve had perfectly memorised for 30 years – and they still move me. Well then, that was my lunch at the Auberge de l’Aigle D’Or in Osthouse. If you click on the link, note the electric blue outside walls.
Three generations of family welcomed us and fussed around us, with the kind of sheer capable hospitality skill that you kind of have to be born into. There was nothing on the menu that I would cook at home; neither was there anything so fussy that I didn’t really know what it was. Just the greatest hits of French and Alsatian cuisine for me to smile and settle into.
Yes, these guys must have a butter budget like you can’t imagine. And yes, if you ate here 5 times a week, you’d probably put on a pound or two. So don’t! Meals like this are a treat. Everywhere has its own version of this old-fashioned food, and it’s not intended to be slimming. No one goes for southern BBQ while counting their calories. Counting calories is fine; it’s just that it’s a battle for another moment.
Instead, allow yourself to take note of just how delicious the food is, how truly expert is the execution, how you’re not missing molecular cuisine, or whatever is this year’s fashionable herb. How perfectly cooked is the fish. Fail, like me, to resist wiping your plate with your finger to get that last drop of sauce.
A sauce in which the smooth creaminess is held in acrobatic tension by a barely perceptible tang of acidity, cooked as if to harmonise in a different dialect with the elegant structure of the rich golden glass of dry Riesling standing to attention alongside, and worn like a tailored suit by the plump flakes of fish which holds centre stage.
Stop. I’m starting to go poetic. My message is more prosaic: meet the craft, care and constancy of these old-fashioned places head on and you’ll find there’s much to value in the unfashionable.
