Schnitzel Happens

Not long ago, following an exhausting and not-prosperous work trip, my flight home from Bilbao was delayed seven hours by a terrible wind storm that shut down several European airports. I spent five of those seven hours stuck in a line of hundreds, while two overwhelmed workers at the Lufthansa desk ever-so-slowly attempted to reroute 300-plus passengers. As the line trudged forward, I watched the board helplessly as flights departed, one by one, to Paris, to London, to Madrid, to Lisbon, all connections that would have gotten me home. I had an important meeting in the morning, and then my son’s first soccer game, which I’d committed to coach. As the hours passed, I knew I would miss both. By the time I reached the front of the line, there was no way across the Atlantic until the next day, and I was assigned an evening flight to Frankfurt. I was given a handwritten voucher for a hotel, and another voucher for a free dinner. 

When I arrived, it was dark and rainy, and a taxi took me to a hotel in the middle of an industrial park in a suburb called Mörfelden. After checking in and explaining to my son that I would not be home in time, and hearing my boss’ dismay at my absence, I slumped down to the hotel’s overlit restaurant and grabbed a menu. I was a wreck. My career had suffered some recent blows and this trip was supposed to help turn things around; but it hadn’t. In any case, I badly needed some comfort food, and the first item that called out to me was wiener schnitzel. “Yes, please, may I have some wiener schnitzel,” I said, and presented my voucher. The stern waiter sneered and pointed over to a pathetic buffet: some stale rolls, a congealed soup, and a platter of rubbery chicken that had been sitting out for hours. This, apparently, was the Lufthansa Stranded Passenger Special that my voucher covered.

I waved the waiter back over. “Please sir,” I pleaded. “Please. I’ve had a very long day, and what I really need is to eat this wiener schnitzel.”

“It’s 21 euros,” he said. “That food over there is free.”

I had kept cool and zen all day long, but I suddenly had the urge to scream or cry. “Look, I don’t care what I have to pay for it,” I said, my voice rising. “I just need you to bring me this wiener schnitzel. Right now. Please.” Something in the stern waiter’s demeanor seemed to change, empathy washed over his face. He nodded, wrote my order and whisked away the menu. A few minutes later, he brought a plate with the schnitzel. And along with it, a bottle of Rheinhessen riesling.

“Sir,” he said. “I am so sorry, I cannot honor the voucher for your meal. But please. I asked my manager, and he said I could pour you this dry riesling in exchange for the voucher.”

I ravenously tucked into that schnitzel, and took a long drink from the wine glass. It wasn’t the greatest schnitzel or riesling, but for some strange reason, my eyes started to well up and tears ran down my cheeks. The waiter reappeared and said, “Is everything okay, sir?”

“Yes, yes,” I said. “Thank you very much. Everything is quite okay.”

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Some of you reading this are probably offended by the aforementioned comfort food dish that I ordered on that long day, the wiener schnitzel — the breaded veal cutlet. Around my more, how shall we say, enlightened food friends (of which there are many) it makes me vaguely embarrassed — or at least uneasy — to admit that I eat veal. When I do, um, reveal this fact about my veal consumption, I usually downplay it significantly. “Yeah, I’ll eat veal maybe once in a blue moon,” I might say. Or I’ll feign a cosmopolitan yawn: “Veal? Meh, maybe if I’m in Italy or something, I might try some.” Or maybe I’ll mumble something aware but noncommittal, such as, “Well, it’s just so hard to find a shop that sells humanely raised veal around here.”

All of these approaches conceal the truth. Because the truth is: I love veal. I do. Breaded veal cutlets are among my fondest foods of memory, and one of the only I’ve consistently eaten from childhood through my first travels abroad as a young man up through today. I grew up in New Jersey in the 1970s, which may be the cultural epicenter of the Italian-American favorite, veal parmesan. Everyone ate veal parm where I lived. Even my mother, who grew up in West Virginia, learned how to make veal parmesan when she moved to New Jersey. It became one of her specialties.

Fifty years ago, Americans ate, on average, something like four pounds of veal per year. Now? Well, how much veal did you eat last year? The average is less than a half pound. Of course, people have legitimate reasons for not eating veal. Commercial veal producers over the years have not done veal lovers any favors by the way they raise and treat their animals, and so I do look for good, conscientious producers as much as possible.

But as you’ve probably gathered by now, this is a piece about wiener schnitzel. If veal is a problem for you, I will tell you that you can always make a very nice schnitzel from pork tenderloin. And if you don’t eat meat at all, this is probably not an article for you. That’s about as far as I’m going to wade into this issue. For me and my family, there will always be veal, and that may mean you don’t like me. I apologize.

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Recently, I took my two boys, 12-year-old Sander and 9-year-old Wes, on a different work trip to Austria. Sander and Wes know that if they’re willing to wander through a winery or two, or to sit quietly and play Candy Crush while dad meets with a few winemakers, that the rest of the week we will have an amazing trip. And so we did.

My boys love culinary quests, and so we hopped from café to café, searching for the best strudel and torte in the city (the sour cherry strudel at Gerstner being my personal favorite; the boys favored the krapfen at Aida). We enjoyed the gulasch and the knödel and the sausages, and I loved the heurigen, the simple wine taverns that open so local wineries can sell new on the outskirts of Vienna when the weather gets warm.

One evening, as we walked down an alleyway, Wes pointed to a sign of a hand holding a plate with a gigantic schnitzel hanging over the edge. “What is that?!” he asked.

“That, my boy, is a schnitzel,” I said.

“What’s a schnitzel?” they asked. This is how we found ourselves inside the local institution Figlmüller, which dates to the early 20th century and the end of the Austrian Empire. Yes, Figlmüller is for sure a little bit touristy. But it also makes some of the best schnitzel in the world, and the period decor fit in well with the Habsburg historical tour we’d be making the next day.

The schnitzels were thin and larger than the kids’ heads. “A schnitzel should swim,” said the waiter, as he handed us lemon wedges (which I assume is a canned line). I paired my schnitzel with classic young zweigelt and blaufränkisch, one of those match-made-in-heaven pairings.

We don’t eat a lot of veal at home. So I told the boys about my mother’s veal parmesan. And then I told them of how I used to eat the Italian version of schnitzel, cotoletta alla Milanese, while I studied in Lombardia as a 19 year old student. That discussion led to my explaining that Milan, like a lot of Europe had fallen under the rule of the Austrian Empire. In fact, there is some debate over which dish came first, the wiener schnitzel or the cotoletta alla Milanese. For years, legend had it that famed Field Marshall Josef Radetzky had brought the recipe back from Italy after his battle triumphs in the mid 19th century. We also talked about why some people don’t eat veal, and to respect their feelings.

Later, as we wandered the Vienna streets back to our hotel, I thought about history and tradition, about how empires fall, and about how, amid change and upheaval, small anachronistic joys persist. Veal is not comfort food for everyone, but many of us look upon it fondly, just as many feel a nostalgia for the strange and incoherent Habsburg Empire. Veal, on the one hand, seems like a silly thing to argue over. Yet on the other hand, it seems like exactly the kind of thing we should always be arguing about.