Alsace / Choucroute
I know very little about my paternal grandparents, who both died before I was born, but here are some of the things I’ve gleaned: They came to the United States in the 1920s, emigrating from Toisan, a coastal city in Guangdong province that lies at the heart of the Chinese diaspora. They owned a Chinese restaurant in Fresno, California. They had more than ten children, some biological, some adopted. They were Catholic, but their ancestors may have been Muslim (the name Ma, which they changed to Mah to appear more American, means “horse” and is common among Islamic Chinese; it sounds like Mohammed). They spoke a regional dialect, also called Toisan, a derivative of Cantonese. They passed this language to their children along with a love of plants, a taste for bitter melon in black sauce, narrow feet, and a predilection for heart disease.
Here are some things I don’t know about my grandparents: If I look like them. If they missed China. If they were legal immigrants.
I’d been thinking about my grandparents ever since September, when I’d received a letter from the Office Français de l’Immigration et de l’Intégration, the French version of immigration services. As a diplomat’s spouse, I was eligible for French working papers, but—though Calvin’s job at the American embassy had smoothed my path considerably—I still had to navigate the application process.
The letter I’d received was a thin, photocopied sheet “inviting” me to a visite médicale, a medical examination, the first step toward exchanging my temporary working permit for official documents. And so several weeks later, on a crisp and bright October morning, I joined a line of people waiting outside a dreary office building in the eleventh arrondissement. The limp air of disinterested bureaucracy hanging over the block told me I was in the right place before I even read the sign.
Americans who move to France share two horror stories: acquiring a French driver’s license and obtaining a carte de séjour. The former necessitates buckets of cash, the latter reams of paperwork; both require infinite reserves of patience. But even forearmed with this knowledge, I was surprised by my experience.
Inside the office the process was a series of petite mortifications, from the obligatory educational video on laïcité, France’s policy of secularism, to the interview that assessed my language proficiency to stripping down and posing bare-chested for an X-ray meant to ensure that I wasn’t carrying tuberculosis. Thankfully, I understood the separation of church and state, spoke French, and was free of TB.
As the authorities poked and prodded, squeezed and scolded, I thought of my grandparents almost ninety years ago. Because of them I had grown up in California, the child of an American born in America, with all the confidence and hubris that implies. But today I, too, was an immigrant, stripped of familiarity and fluency, and the experience left me humbled.
My language interview was held in a plain, windowless room not unlike the warden’s office in a low-security prison. The fonctionnaire quizzing me had dark eyes and hair and a surprisingly warm smile. We chatted for a few minutes about my French studies, my work, and my husband’s post at the embassy. Then she spent several minutes printing out a series of colorful attestations—they looked like the participation certificates handed out to a children’s soccer team—and informed me that I needed to sign up to take the formation civique, a daylong class on French government, history, and culture.
“It provides knowledge of the principles of the French state,” she said.
“La formation civique?” A civic formation? “I’m already formed,” I joked.
She smiled faintly. “Désolée.”
But her apology had revealed a chink in her armor, and I tried to push through it. “Do I still need to take the class even though I’m only here temporarily? My husband is an American diplomat,” I reminded her. “His post ends in three years.”
I could feel her wavering, but then she shook her head. “Désolée. Tout le monde est obligé.”
Something in her voice told me that tout le monde was not obligated—that some people managed to slither out of it. Then again, this was a perfect example of French logic—all people are equal, therefore all people must take the formation civique (except those who don’t have to). It followed the same logic as the policy of laïcité discussed in the video I’d just watched: Religion and government must be kept separate (except in certain circumstances such as the calendar of public holidays, which is still guided by Catholic feast days). Who was I to argue?
I joined a group of people in a dingy waiting room, all of us struggling to wrangle the unwieldy film of our chest X-rays. While we waited to see the doctor who would proclaim us fit or unfit, the people around me chatted in quiet voices, a soft carpet of languages I didn’t recognize. The institutional atmosphere felt universal to waiting rooms around the world; I recognized the smell of stale coffee, the fluorescent-tube lighting, and scuffed linoleum from the DMV in California, the jury-duty room in lower Manhattan, a bank in Beijing. But then a number would be called—cent quatre-vingt-douze!—and I would be jolted back to Paris. Not the Paris of lacy wrought-iron towers and toy boats sailing in marble fountains but a grittier, gutsier city, one of new beginnings and pinched pennies and endless stacks of paperwork.
I was the last person to be called that morning. I waited, fidgeting as the room emptied, reading the pamphlets on HIV that the X-ray technicians had thrust upon me. My stomach began a quiet rumble, which grew louder as the minutes ticked toward noon. To distract myself I started speculating about the people who had been in the waiting room with me. Where did they come from? Why had they moved to France? And, perhaps most interestingly, what were they going to have for lunch? I imagined noodle soup perfumed with basil and cilantro or fine-grained couscous spiked with harissa.
Like all cuisines, France’s did not develop in a vacuum. It absorbed flavors and techniques through its porous borders, via age-old rivalries with Italy, Spain, Germany, and Belgium (to name but a few), and by way of its former colonies in North Africa and Southeast Asia. A walk through Paris was like a stroll among the regions of France and her interests, the Savoyard restaurants near the rue Mouffetard that served fondue and raclette, the thirteenth arrondissement’s fragrant bowls of phô—a Vietnamese word possibly derived from the French pot-au-feu—the Corsican épicerie that emitted a whiff of powerful cheese and dried sausages, the bakeries in the nineteenth selling tiny honey-soaked pastries, the bright Alsatian brasseries with their oversize goblets of beer and metal platters brimming with cured pork.
It was the last one that gave me pause now, as my stomach began its slow growl toward lunch. I thought of the region of Alsace in eastern France, a producer of fruity wine decanted into long-necked bottles, and the home of choucroute garnie: finely sliced, fermented cabbage (which looked an awful lot like sauerkraut) topped with sausages and ham. The dish stood between two cultures—was it French? was it German?—a culinary witness to a region that had changed hands several times in the span of only a generation. With each change in power, Alsatians were forced to swtich allegiances and languages, becoming strangers in a familiar land.
How does a cross-cultural seesaw affect a person’s identity? Perhaps if I learned more about Alsace and its cuisine, I could better understand what might happen to me, an American of Chinese ethnicity who changed countries every three or four years. By the time my number was called, I had decided to travel east, to the Rhine River, to the border between France and Germany—to Alsace.
* * *
Alsace is nestled between the Vosges Mountains and the Black Forest, a protective topographic sandwich that shelters the region from harsh weather. It also means that when the fog settles in, it lingers, blanketing the plain in a chilly, swirling mist that seeps through the bones like an unhappy ghost. During my four-day visit in October—carefully timed to coincide with the end of cabbage season—the fog never lifted. It hung in the air, dulling the fall colors into a muddy blur, spurring my imagination to run wild with thoughts of battlefields haunted by phantom soldiers—relics of a land that has suffered more than its fair share of carnage.
Instead of abandoned battlefields, however, I found actual fields, the agricultural kind. And instead of ghosts, they were filled with cabbage—acres and acres of it, planted in orderly ranks that stretched far into the distance. Piles of even more cabbage broke the horizon, heaping mounds that loomed over the farm equipment.
The amount of cabbage shouldn’t have surprised me. After all, I had come to the village of Krautergersheim, located in the center of the Alsace region, because it is called the capitale de la choucroute. Twenty percent of all the choucroute produced in France is grown here—about twenty thousand metric tons a year. Even the village’s very name refers to its livelihood. “Kraut is the German word for cabbage, heim means ‘home,’” René Hoelt, the village mayor, told me.
With their rich and moist soil, the fields surrounding the capital of choucroute have produced beautiful cabbages for centuries. A crossbreed of the local variety, Quintal d’Alsace, the heads are heavy and robust, with wide, tender, spongy leaves that absorb flavor and shred into long, fine strands.
The word “choucroute” is a combination of French and German that translates literally as “cabbage cabbage”; in the Alsatian dialect, it’s called Sürkrüt. Cabbage has been documented in the local diet as early as 1673, a reliable source of vitamin C during long, cold months lacking fruits and vegetables.
Every fall a craftsman called the Sürkrüthowler, or Sürkrüt schneider, traveled between farms, slicing each family’s cabbage harvest with a lethal mandoline. The family gathered the cored and chopped cabbage into a wooden barrel or a stone vat, then liberally salted, pressed, and covered it and left it in the basement to ferment. Throughout the course of the winter, they dipped into their stash, which grew more acidic as the months progressed.
Industrial choucroute production came to Krautergersheim in 1874, when Martin Dell, a Swiss entrepreneur, saw profit in the fertile cabbage fields and opened the first factory. In the industry’s 1960s heyday, there were fifteen producers; today only five remain. They still make choucroute in the traditional way, the cabbage cored, grated, salted, weighted, and fermented for two to twelve weeks, depending on the weather—the warmer the temperature, the shorter the period of time.
“It’s the ancestral method,” said Jean-Luc Meyer, the director of the choucroute producer Meyer Wagner. “The same one my great-grandfather used when he started the business in 1900.”
I got lost on my way to the Meyer Wagner factory, despite Krautergersheim’s small size and the small number of choucroutiers in town. I couldn’t keep my Weber straight from my Adès Weber, from my Meyer Wagner. I finally found the factory, a vast boxy building on the village outskirts, surrounded by fields. Outside, a conveyor belt delivered cabbages straight to the mouth of an open door. Inside, the immense space hummed with machinery and smelled of cut cabbage, a raw, lingering scent that wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
Meyer led me on a tour, showing me the machines that sliced and salted, the cement fermentation vats sunk deep into the floor, before pausing at another, discernibly warmer section of the factory that fogged my camera lens with steam. Here choucroute simmered in giant vessels, the uncooked, fermented stuff becoming soft and pliable in its warm bath of wine, water, goose fat, and spices. Once the pride and provenance of Alsatian housewives—each with her own secret recipe and tricks for producing the tenderest, most aromatic cabbage—the choucroute-cooking process has today been taken over by the factory.
“Most people don’t have the time or inclination anymore,” Meyer said. Though the company still sells a small quantity of raw choucroute, the majority of their business is done in flat, sealed, plastic packages of the cooked stuff, ready to reheat and serve. Sometimes the traditional meat accompaniment—ham or cured pork belly—is even included inside.
It seemed a little sad to me, this disappearance of the cast-iron Staub pot of choucroute bubbling away gently in Granny’s kitchen, but Meyer seemed perfectly cheerful about it. “In the mid-1970s or early ’80s,” he said, “the local producers had to decide whether or not to buy the equipment to cook choucroute.” Today Krautergersheim’s five remaining choucroutiers all sell it cooked. It turns out that cooked cabbage saved the industry.
* * *
During our conversation Meyer offered me a bit of linguistic instruction. I had been calling the dish “choucroute,” but, as he pointed out, that refers only to the preserved cabbage. The official name is “choucroute garnie,” or garnished choucroute. The “garnish” means—inversely—the sausages, salt pork, smoked bacon, and knack, or hot dogs, that make up the caloric bulk of the meal.
At Charcuterie Muller, a small shop located on the main street in Rosheim, the pretty, half-timbered village where I was staying, I inspected a long glass case stuffed with cuts of pork in varying shades of pink: smoked, freshly salted, fully cured, squeaky lean, or striped with fat. There were sausages fat and thin; white; black; some made of liver, heart, or blood. There was a mound of crimson ground liver, used to make poached quenelles, or dumplings. The shop clerk—a dark-haired woman who politely refrained from asking me any questions despite my appearance, accent, and avid curiosity—patiently explained all the different cuts and cures, the pieces that should be cooked with the choucroute and those that needed to be cooked separately. We spoke French together, but when an older couple entered the shop, they addressed her in Alsatian, and she snapped into the other language without dropping an umlaut.
I eavesdropped on their conversation, straining to catch the meaning. Sometimes, if I listened carefully enough—and if the interaction was about food—I could pick out a few words of a local dialect or even other Romance languages. But this was impenetrable, a thick wall of sounds that, to my tin ear, sounded indistinguishable from German. I could recognize only two phrases, “Ça va” and “Ja, ja, ja.” They repeated them often.
The Alsatian dialect, I later discovered, is linguistically close to Swiss German, a hearty tongue that’s still spoken widely in the region, especially among Alsatians d’un certain âge. It has noble roots—in the Middle Ages it was the literary language of troubadours—and in the nineteenth century Napoleon grandly tolerated it, saying, “Who cares if they speak German, as long as their swords speak French?” Its vowels and low cadences color the names of towns and villages, making them difficult for non-Alsatian speakers to pronounce (which causes much glee among the locals).
This Germanic influence has also left its stamp on the region’s gastronomy, with its encyclopedia of sausages and dishes like Baeckeoffe, a casserole of layered meat and potatoes, traditionally cooked in the baker’s oven by housewives occupied with the weekly laundry. It’s evident in the soft, fat pretzels, called bretzels, stacked on hooks at the boulangerie; in the elegant, long-necked bottles of local Riesling and Gewürztraminer; in the robust sweets like Kougelhopf, a tender, yeasty cake studded with dried fruits and nuts.
As I wandered the old-fashioned center of Strasbourg—the region’s capital and a seat of the European Parliament—I felt drawn into another era, one of gas-powered streetlamps and half-timbered taverns, of pretty canals lined with Renaissance gingerbread houses in La Petite France, the city’s heart-stoppingly charming historic neighborhood. Another era? Perhaps rather another place, another country distant from France. The street signs in Alsatian; the young families bicycling politely along marked paths; the pastry-shop windows filled with Black Forest cake and tarts of quetsches; the Plätze, or places, named after German icons like Gutenberg; the cozy pubs, called Winstubs, that beckoned with promises of vin chaud—all of it combined to make me feel as if I’d entered into a foreign land.
Later I described Strasbourg to a French friend as feeling like “nowhere,” but that came out sounding much harsher than what I wanted to express. No, rather it felt to me like a different dimension—not a mix of France and Germany but another creation altogether—a city of Mitteleuropa where I could communicate perfectly and yet understand almost nothing.
* * *
On a chilly, late-autumn evening in Paris, I went to a farewell party for some departing American friends and drank one too many farewell glasses of Champagne. It was a perfectly innocent mistake—innocent, that is, until the next morning when I overslept my alarm, woke up late with a tongue that felt pickled, and had to dash through a dense fog to the northeast corner of Paris. My formation civique—the obligatory class that would teach me about French history, culture, and values—was scheduled to begin at half past eight.
I raced through the métro, up the stairs, and along a wide boulevard in the twentieth arrondissement, dodging mothers pushing strollers, veiled women carrying heavy sacks of groceries, and groups of men smoking and chatting outside cafés. At the address marked on my letter of invitation, I found a modern cement building, the windows covered in blinds, the door locked.
The door was locked.
I glanced at my watch and double-checked it against my cell phone. According to both, I was three minutes late and thus fully deserving of having the door locked against me. Still, I struggled to contain my rising concern. What was I going to do? How could I reschedule my class? Was I even allowed to reschedule?
I stood on the street, buffeted by a sharp wind, berating my own stupidity. I was learning the first lesson of being an immigrant: Never be late for any meeting relating to your situation. I rattled the door with increasing desperation, barely registering the man who had dashed to my side.
“Formation civique?” he asked. At first I thought he was a security guard, come to shoo me away. But then I noticed his rolling accent; the color of his skin, toffee, as if he’d come from warmer climes; the note of panic in his voice that matched my own; and I recognized him as a fellow émigré. I had observed at my medical examination that almost none of us were white, myself included. Evidently he identified me by the same criterion.
“C’est fermé à clé.” I gestured at the door.
He shook the handle, and when the door didn’t budge, he did what my blushing, ladylike, middle-class American sensibility prevented me from doing: He started to pound on it, hard enough to make the windows shake.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
He paused, and we turned our heads to listen. Nothing.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. Still nothing.
He raised his fist again, but before he could continue, we heard the sound of a bolt turning in the lock. A woman sporting a dark suit and a disciplinary air stood before us.
“Formation civique?” the man said again.
She puffed up her cheeks and blew them out again, the epitome of French exasperation. I took a deep breath, prepared to argue until she let us enter, but she merely asked for our documents, looked them over, and then allowed us through the door, pointing wordlessly toward a classroom. Inside, fluorescent bulbs lit the eyes of about thirty strangers, who watched as I hunted for a seat.
Our instructor was another woman, wearing a similar dark suit and air of authority. She was d’origine tunisienne and born in France, she announced, and today she would teach us about this decentralized republic of twenty-six regions. We went around the room and introduced ourselves. Of the thirty people in the room, I was one of two Americans—the other was a female rock musician who spoke exquisite French and sported tattoos and dark eyeliner—and among a minority of women. The rest were men, many from Africa, places like Tunisia, Algeria, or Mali. Mauritius. Eritrea. Later, when I got home, I looked up these last few places on the map.
The lecture began, our instructor careening wildly among topics that I expected—presidential term limits, the French judicial process—to those that in a million years I would have never dreamed she’d raise: female genital mutilation, polygamy (both illegal in France, in case you were wondering). During the breaks half the class rushed outside to smoke while the other half stood about in the drafty hallway. The men gathered in clusters, chatting and laughing, already united by common acquaintance perhaps, or a mother tongue, or simply gender. The women sat silent on the edges, blown aside by the testosterone in the room.
Around noon lunch arrived on cafeteria trays, but I slipped out to a local café and escaped into my book. Fifty minutes and a croque-monsieur later, I made my way back to the classroom—the door was unlocked this time—where I found my fellow classmates looking as sleepy as I felt. We settled in for an afternoon of lectures, maybe some discreet dozing. But then our instructor appeared, vibrating with renewed energy, as though she’d spent the past hour lifting weights and popping cans of spinach. She announced we’d be taking a true-or-false test and started to read the questions aloud.
“Vrai ou faux. Homosexuals have the right to marry in France.”
From my seat in the front row, I heard a collective intake of breath behind me.
“Faux,” said a man in the back.
“Oui, faux,” said the instructor. “But two men can join in PACS, a pact of civil union recognized by the state.”
“Only a man and woman should have the right to marry,” said another man.
“Tout à fait!” called out another voice. Exactly.
The room erupted in lively debate, with those in agreement facing off against the instructor, who shouted paragraphs from her manual. It continued so loudly for so long that we had to take another break for everyone to calm down.
After ten minutes of more weak coffee, more idle cell-phone scrolling, more hurried smoking, we reconvened in the classroom for another question.
“Vrai ou faux—” The instructor paused. “Women must obey men.”
“Vrai,” said someone, and a few of the men in the room laughed.
“Vrai? Why do you say that? In France men and women have the same responsibilities and rights. Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been saying all day?”
“Oui, mais chez moi, c’est chez moi.”
“Would you let your wife go to a café alone?” the instructor asked.
“Ma femme? Jamais.”
“Women can go to the café here in France. If they want to go alone, and order a coffee, sit and read the newspaper, that’s their right. They also have the right to go to school, work, vote, and inherit property—the same as men. C’est. La. Loi. Vous comprenez?”
“Chez moi, c’est chez moi,” he repeated.
The instructor’s eye caught mine, and she rolled hers slightly, as if to say, Men! I was too startled to respond. Two things surprised me: First, it had never occurred to me that going to a café by myself could be considered improper. Second, my life had been so sheltered I had never before encountered such overt chauvinism. Until now I’d only seen sexism lurking like a shadow, the transparent glass ceiling, the unspoken bias. Now here it was, a hulking mass standing defiant in the center of the room. Not even four years in China had prepared me for its ugly muscularity.
I twisted around in my chair to get a glimpse of the man, expecting to see a stature that matched his opinions. Instead I found someone nondescript, neither big nor small, with a beard covering most of his face.
“D’où venez-vous, monsieur?” asked the instructor.
“Eritrea.”
“Things are different here in France. Vous verrez.” You’ll see. It sounded like a promise—or a warning.
Later, after the class had ended, after the instructor handed out signed certificates of participation, after I had returned to my pretty, privileged corner of Paris, I continued to think about the formation civique and my fellow classmates. I could guess at the reasons that had brought them to France—Eritrea alone is desperately poor, with one of the world’s worst human-rights records—but I would never completely understand them. Now they had entered into a brave new world, one that upended their stature, along with their traditional values. How would they accept France? And, just as important, how would France accept them, if at all?
After a year in Paris, I still flinched when I heard people described by their race: le cafetier maghrébin, le plombier roumain, la petite chinoise. This last referred to me, no matter that I was born, raised, and educated in the United States, as American as my second-generation (but white) husband. Roots traveled deep here, a tangible marker considered acceptable in polite conversation, unlike religion or work. In the United States, race and nationality are separate; in France you are either French—with all that implies—or a citoyen français, with all that does not.
In the refined sixth arrondissement where I lived, I sometimes pretended to be a local, at the bakery joking with the cashier about the weather or at the market when my favorite vegetable vendor slipped a few extra lemons into my basket. But I was obviously an étrangère, a fact made evident by my accent, the shape of my eyes, the darkness of my hair, the briskness of my walk. For me it didn’t matter; I was just a guest, after all. But what of the real immigrants? The ones who wouldn’t—or couldn’t—return home? The complicated truth was this: They would spend the rest of their lives in France, yet they would never become French.
* * *
I had come to Alsace with the intention of eating choucroute at every meal. But whenever I sat down in a Winstub, the same thing happened: I looked at the menu, resolved to order the choucroute garnie, summoned the waitress, and asked for . . . something else. I was cheating on choucroute with tarte flambée.
Despite its fiery name, tarte flambée is not a pie filled with burning embers. It’s a sort of pizza with crisp edges, topped with crème fraîche, onions, and bacon, cooked in a wood-burning oven. In Alsatian it’s called flammeküeche, or “flame cake,” and was traditionally a plat du pauvre, prepared every two weeks on bread-baking day, when the village’s communal wood oven was lit.
“They made it before they baked the bread, while waiting for the temperature of the oven to cool,” Lydia Roth told me.
At L’Aigle, Roth’s sprawling tavern in Pfulgriesheim, a village outside Strasbourg, she still prepares flammeküeche using the recipe of her grandmother, Mamama Anne, who opened the restaurant in 1963. A lump of dough is rolled thin, spread with luscious crème fraîche, strewn with slivers of raw onion and bacon, and singed golden in the kitchen’s ancient wood oven. “It only takes one minute to cook,” Roth said. The restaurant also serves a nontraditional version, sprinkled with grated Emmental cheese.
I ate both the plain and gratinéed varieties under Roth’s watchful eye, savoring the contrast of tangy cream against the luxuriant salty-sweetness of smoked bacon and onions. Roth brought them out one half at a time, waiting until I’d finished the first to produce the second. “It’s best eaten hot!” she admonished me when she caught me photographing my food instead of eating it. And when I had finished both, she wanted to know which I preferred.
“The first one, without the cheese.” The flavors had been cleaner, the crust a little crisper.
She nodded. “Moi aussi. La gratinée, c’est plus bourratif et moins traditionnel.” More filling, less traditional. It sounded like the slogan for a beer commercial. And then Lydia Roth whirled off into the crowded dining room, to deliver a stream of perfectly charred flammeküeches to her eager customers.
* * *
The village of Truchtersheim is close enough to Strasbourg to be considered a suburb, a small hamlet of half-timbered houses boasting steep-pitched tiled roofs. I parked my rental car and crept along narrow streets, feeling a little like Goldilocks among the bears, peering at the chinks of light escaping from behind closed window shutters. A heavy door opened, emitting a gush of warm air and a rush of voices—the Truchtersheim cooking club was waiting for me.
There were six of them, six women with short, graying hair, broad smiles, and old-fashioned names—Anne-Marie, Suzanne, Georgette, Andrée, Maria, Yvette—names that could have been German or French. They had gathered in Anne-Marie’s home, along with her son René, perching on the velour sofas of her Winstub, not a tavern this time but the farmhouse’s living room, a wood-paneled refuge stuffed with framed sepia photographs and bits of antique china. These women had known one another since childhood, their lives forever entwined by their village, first as schoolgirls, then as brides, mothers, wives, and now widows. For more than forty years, they had met once or twice a month, to eat good food and drink good wine, to prepare and enjoy a feast together. Today they welcomed me, too, to share a choucroute garnie, une vraie—or, according to René, loyal to his mother’s cooking, “la meilleure,” the best. The Choucroute among choucroutes.
At the table, Anne-Marie delivered The Choucroute, a casserole dish heaped with cabbage and meat, followed by two smaller platters of sausages and boiled potatoes carried by Suzanne and Yvette. Little murmurs rippled across the room, sounds of enthusiastic appreciation, as if these women hadn’t seen the dish for decades, instead of dining on it at least once a month ever since they could chew. Anne-Marie served each of us, dishing up all the classic elements: slow-simmered sauerkraut, plump sausages, fat-striped hunks of pork belly—both salted and smoked—rosy slices of smoked pork loin, and boiled potatoes. It was farm fare, honest and robust, eaten with a dab of mustard. I alternated bites of pine-scented, tangy sauerkraut with cured pork belly and the high-spiced savor of sausage, enjoying the contrast of tart cabbage against smoked meat.
“When I was growing up, every family had its own stone barrel of choucroute in the basement,” said Yvette, who was sitting next to me. “It was the only vegetable we ate for the whole winter.”
The others agreed with a chorus of “Ja.”
“But on the farm we didn’t have so many kinds of meat.” Georgette gestured at her plate. “Only pork belly.”
“I remember on Sundays,” said Andrée, “my mother would simmer the choucroute for hours. None of this precooked stuff.”
The table erupted in exclamations of horror, which René attempted to translate into French, because when these women talked among themselves, they did so in their mother tongue, Alsatian.
“I always add a glass of Riesling to the cabbage,” Suzanne said eventually.
“Only a glass? I add half a bottle!” said Georgette.
“My grandkids don’t like the taste of wine, so I use water,” said Maria. “You can’t tell the difference.”
Everyone else looked a little skeptical.
We continued eating The Choucroute. At one point Anne-Marie threw up her hands and exclaimed, “Oh, the knack!” and then rushed to the kitchen. She came back bearing a plate of skinny hot dogs, which she passed around the table. I declined—already I feared that I might have to discreetly undo the top button of my trousers, and we hadn’t even gotten to dessert—but she looked so disappointed that I took a half.
The conversation undulated between French and Alsatian, the two languages washing across the table. The women tried to remember to speak in French, but I could feel them struggling not to lapse into Alsatian. Sometimes they would stop midsentence, sifting their minds for a forgotten French word. “How do you say . . . ?” they’d murmur urgently. And then the word would appear: “Cloves!” they’d exclaim in a triumphant voice. “That’s the spice my mother always added to her choucroute.”
These women were old enough to remember the stories of their grandparents, tales from the late nineteenth century, when Alsace was ceded to Germany, part of the spoils of France’s humiliating defeat during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Under the new regime, any reference to France was banished, the language erased, school textbooks rewritten, street signs reprinted. Thousands of Alsatians sought exile in France or in her North African colonies in order to remain French. Those who stayed were required to become German in loyalty, manner, and speech. No matter that the region had been French for centuries or that it had, in 1792, inspired the French anthem, “La Marseillaise,” or that an Alsatian, Baron Haussmann, had redesigned the French capital.
Less than fifty years later, the entire process happened again—in reverse.
In 1918, France defeated Germany in World War I and reclaimed Alsace. Everything German became French: textbooks, street signs, the lingua franca. Germans who had settled in Alsace were expelled, Alsatians in exile returned home. France enfolded her lost region (but delicately—the government declined to impose certain laws, notably the 1905 edict that separates church and state; even today there is no policy of laïcité in Alsace). The members of the cooking club were born during this period into a bilingual world: French at school, Alsatian at home. Until World War II.
La guerre. I mentioned the words, and everyone’s eyes lowered a fraction. In 1940 the region switched back to German control when Hitler annexed Alsace. As girls, these women had seen German soldiers occupying their region, laying claim to their village, appropriating their crops, banishing French, forcibly conscripting their fathers and brothers to fight against France. The Alsatian soldiers were called the “malgré-nous”—against our will—and more than forty thousand of them died fighting on the Eastern Front.
“During the war we weren’t allowed to speak a single word of French,” said Georgette. “Not even behind closed doors. After the war I had to relearn everything.”
After World War II ended, Alsace shifted yet again, back to France and her language. German and Alsatian were banned from schools and discouraged at home. “When I was a boy in the 1960s,” René told me, “the teachers would punish you for speaking Alsatian. I still remember the slogans painted on the school walls: ‘C’est chic de parler français.’”
“What about today?” I asked.
“They teach Alsatian in school, but most young people don’t speak it,” René said. “My son doesn’t.”
“Ohhh, c’est français. Français, français!” the ladies chorused sorrowfully.
It seemed ironic that after surviving so many radical shifts in power—four in only seventy-five years—that the Alsatian language should begin to vanish now, swallowed up by the trappings and convenience of modern life.
“We’re a mix of two cultures,” Maria said to me.
The other ladies protested. “No, we’re our own culture,” said Yvette. “Not a mix of the two but something else, unique to us. It’s kind of like . . .” She hesitated, her eyes scanning my face.
“Like me,” I offered. “I’m ethnically Chinese, but I was born and raised in the States. And now I live in France.” Even as I said it, I realized it was true. I’d lived in all three countries, and each had left its mark on me—America most widely and deeply, of course, but also France and China, too. I would always define myself as an American, and I would always fold dumplings at Chinese New Year, and I would always enjoy a bit of cheese between my main course and dessert. The home that Calvin and I shared was its own cultural island, not uniquely of the country we lived in or the country we came from but a third place with its own identity. Like Strasbourg, our home was nowhere—and everywhere—to me.
Before we could get too philosophical, the front door opened and René’s son, Franck, appeared, a tall, thin young man with dark hair and a shy smile. A little frisson ran around the room as he stooped to greet each woman with two polite kisses.
“Are you hungry?” asked Anne-Marie, hovering by his side with grandmotherly concern.
“I’m starving. I just came from playing volleyball.”
“How about some choucroute? There’s tons left over.”
He hesitated. “It’s kind of late for a heavy meal. . . .”
Anne-Marie looked a little deflated.
“Bon, ben, vas-y . . .” he conceded. “Pourquoi pas?”
He went into the kitchen and came back holding a plate loaded with an enormous pile of choucroute and sausage. Everyone fell silent as he started to eat.
“C’est trop bon!” he exclaimed finally, his words muffled a little by the food. I felt the room exhale at his praise.
The Alsatian language may be disappearing, but love of Granny’s choucroute is still alive and well, at least in one tiny village in far eastern France.