The forgotten food era of 'Blue Trout and Black Truffles'

Sister Madeleva Wolff, CSC (1887-1964), medieval scholar, educator, poet, and promoter of the arts and humanities, served as the third president of Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.

“Catholic literature is any literature that is treated as a Catholic would treat it,’’ she once wrote. “It is a literature in which there is discipline, the discipline of the mind and the will, the discipline of the supernatural life.”

I thought of that quote as I read Joseph Wechsberg’s “Blue Trout and Black Truffles: The Peregrinations of an Epicure” (Academy Chicago Publishers, $15.80). Great chefs follow an obsessive, all-consuming vocation: financially precarious, labor-intensive, grounded in the 24/7 discipline of the true believer. They sometimes wait decades for a wine to ripen. They can spend 30 years learning how to make the perfect beef bourguignon.

Wechsberg himself (1907-1983) was a Jewish Czech writer, journalist, and musician forced to flee with his wife in 1939 when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. His mother was murdered at Auschwitz.

You’d never know it from “Blue Trout,” first published in 1953, which begins like this: “Nowadays I travel hundreds of miles and don’t mind crossing international boundaries to lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, but I wasn’t always like that.

“As a child, I used to run away from food.”

Wechsberg is great fun. As a youth, he left his hometown of Ostrava and, at the behest of his parents, traveled to Prague to study law. But his heart was in music — he played the violin — and he soon found his way to Vienna. Here, he began to learn of great food: saddle of venison with cranberries, Wiener Schnitzel (“tender and so dry you could sit on it without leaving a fat stain on your pants”), and fine wine.

In Budapest, Wechsberg ate at the restaurant (still in operation today) of the world-renowned Charles Gundel: “a massive, towering, oaklike man of great dignity” who, as of 1948, had been through two world wars, two occupations, and two revolutions.

The meal was sublime, yet Gundel noted sadly, “People are too busy in these times to care about good food. We used to spend months working over a bonne-femme sauce, trying to determine just the right proportions of paprika and fresh forest mushrooms to use.”

There’s a whole chapter on Prague’s steaming, friendly uzenárny — sausage shops — that featured prominently in Polish social life before World War II wiped them out.

In fact, “Blue Trout and Black Truffles” is, among other things, the elegy of a bygone era. The formidable maîtres d’hôtel who had the clout “to accept or reject kings, socialites, nabobs, and playboys. … Nothing was impossible at Maxim’s during the belle époque.”

The truffle connoisseurs of Périgueux, and their magnificent homemade pâtés de fois gras. Monsieur Landèche, manager of Bordeaux’s Château Lafite-Rothschild, whose grandfather had been given a Murillo and a Paolo Veronese by Pope Pius IX.

“Grandfather used to send every year a few bottles of wine to Rome,” he noted. “The Holy Father surely knew what was good.”

Wechsberg tells a hilarious story about Meissl & Schadn, a Viennese restaurant known the world over in its heyday that specialized in a dish beloved by Austrian epicures: boiled beef. The restaurant raised its own herds of cattle on molasses and sugar-beet mash, and offered 24 varieties of its signature menu item.

The serving followed an elaborate and strict ritual. The cut was brought out in a covered silver plate by the commis. A piccolo — “an eight-year-old gnome wearing a tiny tuxedo and a toy bow tie” — ceremoniously presented such side dishes as horseradish, applesauce, mustard, and pickles. The dining room was presided over by the venerable octogenarian Heinrich, “a massive, corpulent man with the pink cheeks of a healthy baby and the wisdom of a Biblical patriarch.”

One of Heinrich’s favorite guests was the old, dignified Hofrat von B., who, for 27 years, at exactly 12:15, had come into the dining room of Meissl & Schadn for “his” Tafelspitz: “the narrow part of that special cut which almost, but not quite, touches another first-quality Viennese cut, called Hieferschwanzl.”

The fateful afternoon came. The Tafelspitz, unthinkably, had been overcooked. Heinrich, aghast at the kitchen’s dereliction, took the liberty of personally delivering to the table instead the rear part of the Hieferschwanzl, very close to, and very much like, the Tafelspitz. “There it was,” writes Wechsberg, “a large, beautiful cut, tender and juicy, sprinkled with consommé, as delicate and enticing a piece of boiled beef as you could find anywhere in the world.”

The Hofrat sat up stiffly, shot a single, shocked glance at the meat, and with a magnificent sweep of his hand, intoned, “My dear Heinrich. You might just as well have ordered me a veal cutlet. My hat and cane, please.”

Would that we were all as discriminating with respect to bad manners, bad art, and bad theology — both our own and that of others!

Wechsler’s love of food and life, the care he took in visiting and writing about the noble chefs he so admires, make his book Catholic in the best sense of the word.

In Sister Madeleva’s words: “Let us first be … profound lovers of Christ, ardent disciples of the Holy Spirit. Expression will follow. If we will become a generation of saints, I promise that we shall be laurel crowned.”

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