Schnockeloch

And of course we ate. Of all the fine places we found (none, of necessity, very expensive), this was our favorite. My first experience with Alsatian cuisine. I claim no originality for considering it as fine as France has to offer. Always thought of sauerkraut as a rather coarse peasant dish. That was before Schnockeloch’s choucroûte garnie à la mode de Strasbourg. With their délice des Vosges a close second: an exquisite Alsatian variant on veal cordon bleu. Schnockeloch was on the rue Grégoire de Tours, in the Latin Quarter. You can’t see it in this picture, alas, but the street was maybe fifteen feet wide, curb to curb; upstairs, however, as you can see, the upper floors stuck out, so that the second-floor (first étage) windows were closer. A few doors to the left (northish) was another favorite, a student hangout called the Crèmerie, open for business unpredictably and specializing in cheap plates of decent spaghetti and yummy individual baked-to-order egg, cheese, ham, and whatnot casseroles. Dining at the Crèmerie one evening, several of us missionaries were treated to an unexpected floor-show, as a uniformed sailor, clearly drunk, got on the nerves of the madam in the house across the street, and she threw him through the second-story window. As he fell to the street, he brushed against the little window-box outside the window where we were sitting. Picking himself up off the pavés, he staggered away, apparently not seriously damaged.

A comparative digression on French and Belgian cooking Please don’t get me wrong: I yield to nobody in my general admiration of French cuisine (it’s their word, after all). Particularly the wonderful downscale regional varieties that you can find (or at least could, back de mon vivant1) in workingmen’s rural cafés and little concession eateries in small-town train stations. That said and truly said, candor obliges me to report that the French really don’t know how to make ice cream. Nor what we almost oxymoronically call French fries. The Belgians do both jobs at a celestial level. I always found French glace to be watery, overpriced, and served with unbecoming stinginess. And the less said about French frites,2 the more nearly charitable. 1“When I was alive.” The kids in Rennes got a huge kick out of my use of this expression. They’d go to correct my unidiomatic French and then do a double-take, as it dawned that I meant it ironically. 2The French pronounce it “freet.” Their pathetic product (nearly as bad as its American counterpart) doesn’t deserve the same name as the supernal Belge “fritt,” cooked in hot beef fat and pronounced with the Germanic short-i sound that Metropolitan French doesn’t have. Wallon French in and near Belgium, on the other hand, cherishes its own phonology. Liège in 1963 was blessed with crowds of pushcart “fritt” vendors, where for ten Belgian francs (about a dime) you could obtain (to your waistline’s detriment) a double sheet of newspaper, rolled into a cone, and filled with searing hot “fritts,”, fresh from the grease and topped with your choice of sauces. My favorite was always aïoli (hand-made, dark yellow garlic mayonnaise). They gave the name of “sauce américaine” to what seemed to be an odd mixture of mayonnaise and ketchup, with a bit of cayenne pepper.

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