THE SOUND OF SUNDAY

For many of the years that I have been in this country I lived in a flatblock, or rather in a series of four different flatblocks, where, curiously enough, I was always on the fourth floor. But a numerological analysis of any significance that this may have will have to wait till the portents are more favourable – today we have other fish to fry. Or rather schnitzels.

Pretty much every Sunday morning in those places I used to hear these rhythmic thumping noises, and I spent the longest time in a mix of ignorance and curiosity about them. DIY enthusiasts? Victorian disciplinarians giving it laldy with a running shoe? The kind of ardent lovemaking that has the bed doing a circuit of the room and to hell with the headboard and the walls? When I finally did find out it was, of course, something infinitely more prosaic – it was actually just chunks of lean pork being whacked with a big hammer to tenderise them.

There are a couple of competitors for the title of the nation’s favourite dish. Roast pork with cabbage and dumplings is one of them, but the schnitzel surely has to be another hot choice, whether as Sunday lunch, a regular on pub and canteen menus, or the discerning train traveller’s snack of choice, usually between a couple of chunks of bread and wrapped up in a paper napkin. Here's one, found at Die Österreichische Küche:


A lot of the Czechs I know, in that rather self-deprecating way a lot of them have, point out with a wry smile the fact that it’s somehow typical that an Austrian import should take such a central role in their eating habits. But actually, they’re not right about it, and nor are the Viennese who insist on putting the name of their city before the word ‘schnitzel’. Like so many other things in this part of the world it’s more complicated than that. This traditional Czech dish with an Austrian name is actually from Italy and was brought to Vienna by…a Czech. And not just any Czech either, but one with one of the best-known pieces of music ever written in Austria named after him.

In the middle of the nineteenth century there was war between the Habsburg monarchy and the Italians, who were fighting to unite their country. (Incidentally, and purely as an aside, the classic pizza margherita, with its red, white, and green celebrating the colours of the Italian flag, has its origins in the same conflict.) When the general who defeated the Italians came to Vienna in triumph after his victories, he brought his favourite dish with him. In its native land it was, and still is, better known as an escalope milanese. The Viennese gave him a hero’s welcome, which involved not only their adopting his favourite dish with enthusiasm, but also the penning of Opus 228 by Johann Strauss. You probably know it as the Radetzky March, named after Joseph Radetzky von Radetz, a native of Bohemia. Here he is, taken from here:


They are fond of saying in Vienna that “every true Viennese has a Czech grandmother”. But there is, as far as I know, only one true Viennese dish that has Italian parents and a dancing Czech general for a midwife.