🚀 go-pugleaf

[The setting: After a research visit to Paris, I moved on to visit a
colleague in Germany, in an uninteresting town in the Saarland. For a
break, I took a day trip by train to Strasbourg, in France but close
to Germany. One of the "classic French bistro dishes" that had caught
our imagination when researching the Paris trip was "tete de veau", or
calf's head. We were unable to find it in Paris, and Strasbourg was my
last chance. I finished my sightseeing by late afternoon, and...]

It was getting time to think of dinner. I had found an Academie de la
Biere with Flammkuchen (an Alsatian specialty, like a pizza made with
creme fraiche and bacon) and some interesting beers, and I figured I
could eat there early (I wasn't really that hungry, after a big lunch
of choucroute garni -- various pork cuts and sauerkraut, another
Alsatian specialty) and catch the 6:38 train, which according to the
information in my colleague's schedule was the last train to
Saarbrucken.  But in my wandering I found a restaurant called Au
Pigeon which had...  tete de veau! But no opening hours listed. What
to do? Was there a later train, perhaps with a different connection? I
walked to the train station, noting the location of supermarkets and
patisseries, and waited with a numbered ticket for the information
counter. 

It turned out that I could take a 7:51 train to Metz (a third of the
way back towards Paris), change, and go to Saarbrucken; but the total
travel time was over an hour more. Would that suffice? Not if the
restaurant opened at seven as was the Parisian custom. I wandered back
down that way and noticed that they had put out a signboard to attract
tourists.  But no sign of the opening hours. Not knowing what to do, I
walked back up the street to the nearby square, which was Place
Gutenberg (he lived there for a while), near the cathedral, and was
where I had found my morning coffee. And right next to it was a
brasserie-restaurant with tete de veau on the menu, at 58FF. It was a
bierstube, with wooden tables covered with red checkered tablecloths
over which were paper covers, and a motley mixture of locals having
beer.

It was 5:00. I went in and asked if I could eat then, apologizing for
my gauche behaviour by saying I had to catch a train. I ordered a
frisee aux lardons (chicory salad with bacon) to start, the tete de
veau as a main course (the waitress said that if I was in a hurry this
was not a good idea, but I said I wasn't in that much of a hurry), and
a 1/4 pichet of a local white wine, whose name I have temporarily
forgotten. The frisee had more lardons and more dressing than it would
have had in Paris, but it was good and alarmingly filling. Had I made
a mistake ordering two courses?

The tete de veau arrived, to the apparent approval of the older folks
at the next table having a drink, though they wondered how I could eat
it so early. It consisted of many triangular chunks of fat, looking
like sections cut from a thick soccer ball, with globs of stuff
clinging to the inside. About what you'd expect tete de veau to look
like. No slices of brains or tongue. What little meat I could find had
a soft texture. On the metal platter, which was really embarrassingly
large, were slices of cornichon, a sprinkling of capers, and a couple
of boiled potatoes. A little boat of vinaigrette was served to the
side; not quite "sauce gribiche", but close. As I was struggling with
it, the waitress came back and put it on a hot plate, to keep it warm
while I ate.

I was done fairly quickly, without having made an appreciable change
in the pile of food. The triangular chunks seemed theoretically edible
but, having ventured one piece, I wasn't about to try more; the globs
of stuff, when they weren't obviously fat (the texture of chicken fat,
not of the type of fat that edges steak), seemed not "repellent and
gristly" (which the books warned was the drawback of a bad tete de
veau) but rather soft and uninteresting. I ate one potato, all the
cornichons and capers, and was quite full. But what to tell the
waitress? I peeked over and saw that she was eating her own dinner at
a side table, before the evening rush. Quickly I went over, apologized
and said I had to go, settled the bill, and left before I could be
further embarrassed.

I had time to make the 6:38 train. 





-- 
Prabhakar Ragde                             plragde@maytag.waterloo.edu
Associate Professor, Computer Science            DC 2119, (519)888-4660
University of Waterloo                 Waterloo, Ontario CANADA N2L 3G1