Best Austrian Cookbooks?

[maggiethecat]

A buddy of mine is in Vienna, and has fallen in love with the cuisine. He asked me if I knew of any good Austrian cookbooks.

I've no clue, but I'm sure peeps here do. (And he can read German.)

[dougal]

Kaffeehaus?

[rickster]

It looks like it might be out of print, but I own and have used East of Paris by David Bouley. It takes a lot of traditional Austro-Hungarian recipes and updates them. Alot of the book seems to be by his #2 guy at Bouley, whose name escapes me but was Austrian.

[MaxH]

A buddy of mine is in Vienna, and has fallen in love with the cuisine. He asked me if I knew of any good Austrian cookbooks.

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Greetings Maggie, it's a big subject and I have only a moment here. (I have many of the standard cookbooks from there in German and English, and spent time studying the Viennese cuisine specifically (Wiener Küche) in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and more recently.) Gretel Beer's is the first book usually mentioned on this subject to anglophone readers, it's in English and is not bad (it's popular in Austria too) -- Beer got knighted or something a few years back, I read about it there, for spreading the word about the food culture overseas.

Here are links to in-depth public online discussions of cookbooks from there. I don't recall how complete they are (I had to do research more recently, and updated my sources) but they cover most of the well-known books. Note that Michael Pronay is a respected longtime food-wine editor there, formerly with the Vienna gastronomic magazine Falstaff. The links below are exchanges (sometimes light-hearted) among people in US and Europe experienced in this subject.

2004 wine-newsgroup discussion on Viennese cooking with many book references: http://tinyurl.com/dqjrz

2004 Tafelspitz thread, ditto: http://tinyurl.com/72qem

No North American reader at all interested in Central, or even Western, European cooking should miss Wechsberg's classic Blue Trout and Black Truffles (mentioned occasionally on eG) which would be on my short list of must-have books for anyone interested in good food. It includes possibly the most famous and entertaining essay ever written about Viennese cooking (and an unusual specialty, (Tafelspitz, related to the Northern Italian Bollito Misto). Excerpts, and more about the book's history I think, in reviews linked above. Wechsberg also edited the central-European volume of the classic US Time-Life series (widely available used), a few decades old and less authoritative than the Austrian authors, but it's not bad, colorfully illustrated and with entertaining non-food sidelights if I recall. Hope this is helpful -- M.

[MaxH]

PS Maggie, please urge your friend to check the thriving bookstores off the Stefansplatz area in central Vienna. It is a major book buying area by any standards, and the most convenient source for cookbooks of the region. I got most of mine there.

[OliverB]

One of the large German cookbooks should also make your friend happy, they usually cover the same dishes and then some. I just yesterday dragged out my copy of "Ich helfe Dir Kochen" (I help you cook) which is a really nice book. I'd also suggest the "Bayerisches Kochbuch" by Maria Hofmann, an old standard that I refer to often and the borders between Bavaria and Austria have been floating for centuries.

Your friend can also check out amazon.at and search for "oesterreichische kueche" which will bring up several interesting looking books, though I don't know those.

I love Vienna, one of those places where I could move to without hesitation!

[KatieLoeb]

Maggie:

Time Life Foods of the World series:

Cooking of Vienna's Empire by Joseph Wechsberg

The entire series is great, and the pictures are lovely...

[MaxH]

Thanks Katie, that is the Time-Life book I mentioned.

One of the large German cookbooks should also make your friend happy, they usually cover the same dishes

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Oliver, your big German cookbooks must be different from my big German cookbooks. (In Germany when I've seen Austrian dishes, they typically were highlighted as exotic. One of the big Berlin hotels has a restaurant that specializes in them. Frankfurt's most famous restaurant once featured a few dishes, but dropped them. My German cookbooks contain only occasional high points from the Wiener Küche.) However, plenty of traditional German cooking is worthy in its own right.

If the friend who asked is in Vienna anyway, the Viennese sources themselves are more accessible, as well as more authoritative than anything from US or Germany. A digest from threads I linked above:

Karl Duch's trilingual Hand-Lexikon der Koch-Kunst (German, French, English) is the professional-reference "national" cooking handbook, roughly the parallel of Escoffier. Die Österreichische Küche ("nach Rokitansky," ed. Istvan) is an edition of a regional classic including a valuable Austrian-German-Swiss food dictionary -- some items have different idiom in each! Examples: Backwerk / Kleingebäck / Guetzli; Indian / Truthahn / Truthahn. Hess's Wiener Küche is another classic as is Das Franz Ruhm Kochbuch. Nur Knödel (Helmreich and Staudinger, Vienna: Verlag Christian Brandstätter, ISBN 3854474350) is a playful 1993 bilingual (parallel German and English on facing pages) celebration of the dumpling-type foods of Austria, Bavaria, and Bohemia.

Among newer sources, Pronay, Vienna's own expert, recommends Werner Matt and Walter Glocker's Erlesenes aus Österreichs Küche. Modern Vienna restaurant families and star chefs have also been writing their own books including Lisl Wagner-Bacher's Meine Küche, Reinhard Gerer's Große Küche, the Obauer brothers, Plachutta and Wagner. These people all know their stuff and are passionate about it, I've talked to them and tried their cooking.

Classics explicitly in English are by two Viennese expats living in England: Gretel Beer's famous Austrian Cooking (1954), perennially in print, sold in many countries, I have three copies from different printings. And Rosl Philpot's Viennese Cookery (1965) with its sprightly side commentaries on the food culture there.

[OliverB]

Those are some nice looking books Max, I'll take that list with me to Germany later this year! I grew up in Bavaria but with a good dose of Austrian influence regarding food and we have a condo in Austria, so the food never was exotic to me, but yes, I'm sure in Frankfurt it is and in Berlin it's probably just as exotic as Asian food ;-p

It's actually quite interesting that such a small country has so many different dishes, most of them going way back in time.

I'm sure the OP's friend will find something locally, I just had dug out my German book two days ago and came across a lot of things that I'd consider Austro-Bavarian if there is such a thing. Things my grandmother used to make etc.

Now I'm off to amazon.de to put some things on my wish list, thanks again for that list :-)