Oven baked the Alsatian way and washed down as the king might

Here we are in Spain, but I’m glad to say that neither Danielle nor I have completely lost our connections to our roots. In her case, they go deep into the rich soil of Alsace, in far eastern France though, on more than one occasion in history, others have disputed that claim and argued with some force – literally – that it is in fact in Western Germany.

One of the great culinary traditions of Alsace, at least the equal of the better-known sauerkraut, is the Bäckeofe. Anyone familiar with the German language might wonder about the origins of that word. Might Alsace not be just a bit German after all, whatever the French might claim?

Literally, the word could be translated as ‘oven bake’. A bit of a tautology. But not perhaps a bad description for a dish whose main characteristic is that it is slow-cooked in an oven.

The principal ingredients of the most traditional version are lamb and beef, mixed with potatoes, carrots and leeks. There’s garlic (hey, whatever the Germans may say, it’s a French dish) and white wine (ditto), and the seasoning includes cloves and bay leaves and thyme.

Nearly ready for the oven
Note the dough ring being put in place

I’ve seen a recipe that adds pork, which strikes me as a bit over the top, and in any case runs sharply counter to the deep origins of the dish (see below).

The whole thing is cooked for ages in the oven. And when Danielle made one the other day, our guests were delighted with the results, as were we.

The roots of the tradition go back to a standard practice in relatively poor communities, way back in time. That’s the ones that were wealthy enough to have meat, but not so wealthy as to be prepared to waste any ingredients. Whatever you hadn’t used in other dishes, you threw in a great pot at the end of the week and turned into stew. 

The Jewish version of this was called ‘Hamin’.

But Jews weren’t supposed to cook between sundown on Friday and sundown on Saturday. That’s the Sabbath or Shabbat. 

Besides, in the middle ages and renaissance, owning a large oven was a bit of a luxury and certainly not within the means of everyone.

Someone who did have an oven was the village baker. So the local Jews would prepare their dish and take it down to him before sundown on Friday. He’d bake his bread next morning and when that was done, but the oven was still hot, he’d pop in the pots that had been brought to him. They’d slow cook away for the rest of Shabbat and be ready and delicious by the evening.

The Christians quickly caught on to this idea. After all, they were just as likely not to own ovens. And they too had a religious obligation over the weekend, even if theirs came on Sundays. So they started taking their pots down to the baker’s too, before going to Mass.

They may have been the ones who introduced the slightly excessive, and certainly not kosher, variant, of adding pork.

They’d collect their dishes on the way home from church and have a fine, filling and highly satisfying meal.

Ready to cook in its traditional Alsatian pot
and with the dough seal in place

A final touch was that it was a bit risky to leave a pot of your food, turning into an excellent meal, unsupervised with the baker. What was to stop him or his mates helping themselves to a spoonful or two?

So another tradition was born: a ring of dough would be set around the top of stewing pot, and the cover then pressed down into it. That would form a seal during the cooking. If you turned up and that seal hadn’t been broken, at least you knew no one had nicked any of your fine Bäckeofe.

Well demolished
Note the broken dough seal

We served ours with a wine we particularly enjoyed, a red called ‘Dehesas del Rey’, or ‘The King’s Meadows’. I guess it’s more likely to come from a vineyard than a meadow but, hey, we have to allow some artistic licence in the labelling of wines.

I’d love to be able to say that we found this wine by tracking down some lonely vineyard in a remote corner of Spain, which produces just 800 bottle a year of the stuff. I’m afraid that isn’t how it happened. I saw the wine in a local supermarket and thought, “that’s about the price I’d expect for a wine I’d enjoy, and it comes from a region I trust, so let’s see what it’s like”. 

In other words, there was nothing clever or intelligently guided by our discovery of the wine. It was pure serendipity. But that didn’t stop us enyoing it.

The experience did remind me of a story of a friend of mine. We’ve got a few minutes, so let me tell it here.

I’ll call him ‘Frank’, since that’s his name. He lived and worked for many years in Hong Kong. While there, he and his wife discovered a Spanish restaurant which served a wine they decided they very much liked. It was expensive – the equivalent of 40 euros a bottle.

They now live in Valencia, in Spain, our local city, which is how we came to meet. 

On an early restaurant visit after they moved here, they were delighted to discover the same wine on the menu, and found it as good as they had in Hong Kong. It added to their pleasure that it was a lot cheaper: just 20 euros a bottle. 

That set Frank thinking. Might he not be able to buy the wine himself? He checked out the supermarkets and found it in one of them – at just eight euros a bottle.

But you don’t just buy wines in restaurants or shops. As often as not you can go direct to the winery and buy it there. Which he did.

At four euros a bottle.

So just ten per cent of what he was paying in the Hong Kong restaurant. 

Which says something about the premium different distributors add to the cost of the products they sell. To say nothing of the financial impact of geography. 

And on that note, let me just raise my glass and wish you all the best of health. 

Your very good health
from the King's Meadows