FoodNet

The gourmet's guide to Europe

1903

Page 180

Presented as published in 1903. Historical recipes may not meet modern food-safety standards. Cook from the modern interpretation, not the original instructions.
Dinner is a mid-day meal at Carlsbad, and as you are not tied down to any particular hotel for your meals because you happen to be staying there, and as half the world lives in lodging-houses, the custom is to dine wherever your fancy pleases you. There is some little difference in the prices between the first-class restaurants and those not quite so high up in the scale, and there is a difference in the quality of some of the dishes. When the doctor has put one on very short commons, and half a chicken and a kompott form one’s mid-day meal, it makes a great difference whether the chicken is a majestic pullet from Styria, a bird which need not be ashamed to compete with Surrey or Houdan champions, or a chicken of the local breed, which to a hungry man seems no bigger than a pigeon, and which costs about half as much as the bigger bird. The best restaurants also get the pick of the partridges and the trout. The man or lady who has been .dieted by a Carlsbad 33° ^he Gourmet's Guide to Bur ope doctor is never allowed to run a finger at will down a Speisen-Karte. Eggs, lean ham, quite plain fish, boiled beef, roast venison or veal or mutton, partridge, chicken, kompotts and vegetables comprise the entire choice. Luckily most of these things are excellent at Carlsbad. Of the fowls I have already spoken. The Tepl, the brown stream which ripples down through many miles of pine-clad hills to fall into the Eger below Carlsbad, is full of excellent trout, and so are many of the other streams in Bohemia. These trout are generally cooked au bleu. Zander, the pike- perch, is always to be obtained ; and Fogash, a Lake Balaton fish with firm white flesh, is served grilled and is excellent. The partridges shot on the highlands about the Abbey of Tepl are fine plump birds, and partridge shooting in Austria com- mences a month earlier than it does in England. About 4 crowns is the price of a partridge at any of the best restaurants, and a medium-sized trout costs about 3 crowns. At all the restaurants a table d'hote dinner is to be found which is suitable for people who are not going through a cure. The price of this dinner varies from 5 crowns at the best restaurants to 3 crowns 50 heller at the more moderate ones. I take at random one of Weishaupt’s 5-crown dinners, and find that it con- sists of Creme de Riz , Sandre sauce Hollandaise , Saute de Veau Printaniere , Rost-beef roti (sic), Pouding aux fruit — all dishes banned to those on “ cure ” diet. Most of the little restaurants on the river and the hills have some specialty, generally of tarts or some other entremet. At Hans Heiling the Kaiser schmarren is a specialty, while at the Hunting Lodge the Apfelstrudl is especially delicious. Herr Pupp owns a very considerable portion of Carlsbad. His great hotel and restaurant and cafe and garden at the end of the Alte Wiese cover Austria 331