Letters from Vienna #189
Letter to Baron Bethell #12
A virtual guided tour of Vienna, Part 12,
Of Restaurants and the Famous Wiener Schnitzel
Dear James,
There are innumerable wonderful restaurants in Vienna, some very old and full of atmosphere such as the Maxingstüberl, which dates from 1805 (where both Johann Strauss and the Emperor Franz Josef dined),
some relatively old, such as Eckerl, which dates from 1901 (one of Thomas Bernahrd’s favourite restaurants)
or Gutruf (1906),
which was where the likes of Helmut Qualtinger, Fritz Wotruba, Alfred Hrdlicka, the painters Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Josef Mikl and Markus Prachensky, the poets H. C. Artmann and Reinhard Priessnitz, the caricaturist Erich Sokol, and the composer Gottfried von Einem were to be found, and some, which are comparatively new such as Zweitbester
or the simply amazing Die Metzgerei.
As a serious historian you’ll doubtlessly do research of your own but according to what I’ve read: “As early as 1790, an East Tyrolean manuscript from Prägraten describes a breaded veal schnitzel. The earliest German-language recipe is probably from 1774 by the Munich cook Jean Neubauer, who called it “Gebachenes in Flemish” – which could allude to the Habsburg Netherlands. Not to mention the “Hünlein”, which are baked in Hagger’s Salzburg cookbook in 1719 with “beaten eggs, meat and breadcrumbs” (or)... Josepha Kraft’s “Baked veal” from 1835, which is “cut into thin schnitzels, washed, salted, put in flour dipped in a beaten egg, wrapped in breadcrumbs and used to bake lard” – possibly the first Viennese recipe for what later became Wiener Schnitzel.”[1]
For the best schnitzels two restaurants in particular are to be recommended:
Zum Weissen Rauchfangkehrer (“The White Chimneysweep“) (1848)
and
Figlmüller (1905)
Best,
Michael
[1] p.92 Kulturgeschichte der österreichischen Küche. Peter Peter