The atlas · A cuisine · Alsace — north-eastern France, between the Vosges and the Rhine

Alsatian

Also Alsace, Cuisine alsacienne, Elsässisch
One of French cooking's regional kitchens · all 7 side by side

French and German at once: sauerkraut and pork, yeasted cakes and bread, fresh cheese and cream, cooked with the dry white wines of the Vosges foothills.

Where it comes from

Alsace is a narrow plain between the Vosges mountains and the Rhine, and it changed hands between France and Germany several times between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Its cooking shows both: pork, cabbage, noodles and yeasted cakes close to those across the river, handled with French cream, butter and wine.

It was a rich farming country of grain, cabbage, pigs and vines, with a strong baking tradition in town and village alike. Strasbourg's pâté de foie gras is usually said to have been developed here in the eighteenth century, though the story of who first made it is told more than one way.

Much of the cooking is slow and made for gatherings — pots left in the baker's oven, cakes baked for Sundays and Christmas. The winstubs, Strasbourg's wine taverns, still serve it much as it was.

Where in it

  1. Strasbourg and the KochersbergThe capital, its winstubs and its Christmas market — choucroute, pretzels and bredele — with the Kochersberg's farm villages just west, often called the home of tarte flambée.Choucroute garnieTarte flambéeBretzelBredele
  2. Colmar, the wine road and the Munster valleyHalf-timbered villages along the Vosges foothills, the heart of the wine road, where kougelhopf is baked in fluted moulds — and up the valley behind, Munster cheese from mountain pastures.KougelhopfFleischschnacka
  3. The SundgauThe rolling far south towards the Swiss border, a country of fish ponds where carp are raised and fried — there's a carpe frite route through its villages.Carpe frite
  4. Northern AlsaceForest, farmland and the potters' villages of Soufflenheim and Betschdorf, which make the earthenware dishes that baeckeoffe and kougelhopf are cooked in all over Alsace.Baeckeoffe

How it cooks

Braising in white wine
Sauerkraut and meat cooked slowly in Riesling or Sylvaner, with juniper and lard, until the cabbage is soft and mellow.
The baker's oven
Pots sealed with dough and left in the cooling bread oven — the old way to cook a baeckeoffe while the family was out.
Wood-fired and fast
Tarte flambée baked in seconds in a blazing oven, so the dough blisters and the edges char.
Yeasted baking
Brioche-like doughs rich with butter and eggs, proved slowly and baked in fluted earthenware moulds.
Fresh cheese
Fromage blanc and cream spread, stirred or baked into everything from tarts to dips for potatoes.

Always in the kitchen

sauerkrautsmoked pork bellyStrasbourg sausageslardfromage blanccrème fraîcheMunster cheeseonionspotatoesjuniper berriescarawayRieslingkirschfresh yeastalmondsraisins

Cook from it

Tonight, with what's good in October

Its classics

AlsatianChoucroute garnieSauerkraut braised in white wine with juniper, then heaped with smoked and salted pork, sausages and boiled potatoes.No one here has made it yetAlsatianTarte flambéeBread dough rolled paper-thin, spread with fromage blanc and cream, scattered with onion and bacon, and baked in seconds in a blazing oven.No one here has made it yetAlsatianBaeckeoffePork, lamb and beef marinated overnight in white wine, layered with potatoes and onions in an earthenware dish sealed with dough, and baked for hours.No one here has made it yetAlsatianKougelhopfA tall, fluted ring of buttery yeasted dough with raisins soaked in kirsch, an almond set in each fold, dusted with icing sugar.No one here has made it yetAlsatianSpaetzleSoft little egg noodles made from a thick batter pushed through a board or press into boiling water, then tossed in butter.No one here has made it yetAlsatianBretzelA knotted bread dipped in a lye bath before baking, so it comes out deep brown and shiny, scattered with coarse salt.No one here has made it yetAlsatianCarpe friteCarp cut into thin slices across the bone, coated in fine semolina and deep-fried, eaten with mayonnaise, lemon and chips.No one here has made it yetAlsatianBredeleSmall Christmas biscuits baked by the tinful — butter shapes, anise, cinnamon stars, spiced and almond ones — through Advent.No one here has made it yetAlsatianFleischschnackaFresh pasta spread with minced cooked beef, onion and herbs, rolled up, sliced into spirals like snails, and browned before simmering in stock.No one here has made it yet

Cooked here

No one here has cooked Alsatian yet.