If you want to know more about Haider and his influence, it’s easy to find those praising his career and hey, no surprises there, conspiracy theories pinning Haider’s car accident on the Mossad, the Israeli secret service. (Nice. Blame the Jews. No one has never done that before.) There are plenty of detractors too, those that acknowledge the tragedy of his death while still decrying his politics.

Haider’s star had faded somewhat, he was recently lifted from more local politics to promote his party – and was successful at doing so. During my time in Austria, he was in the news regularly and I struggled to process what it meant to have this anti-immigrant, anti-EU expansion, anti-Turkish and anti-Semitic leader rising in popularity. Haider himself never troubled me as much as those who made him popular, the anonymous residents of Austria who I might see in the supermarket or out skiing or on the way to Vienna for a bit of culture.

My questions about Haider were met with a dismissive “Dude, he’s crazy” kind of attitude, as though he wasn’t worthy of my brain cycles. I could never get there, finding the history of Austrian politics too personal to over look anti-minority attitudes. I used to make idle threats about how, when faced with rabid anti-auslander commentary, I planned to present myself at the desks of those politicians,and say, “I’m here for my deportation!” I realize the absurdity of it, but indulge me in a little dramatic anger. I wanted to go to campaign rallies waving a big sign saying “I’m an immigrant too!” Cooler heads prevailed. And now, I’m back in the US.

I wish I could say that Haider’s passing means the demise of Austria’s populist far right, but if it were just the mad rantings of one man, there would have been no party in the first place. The people who stood behind him will find someone else to carry their banner. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that no good will come from his loss.

From an Austrian blogger:

Jörg Haider introduced a new kind of politics, something that had not existed before but that now has become an integral part of the Austrian political life. He has lowered the inhibition threshold and he has made things acceptable that should never have been made even thinkable, certainly not in a country with our history, a country that should know better. The witch is dead, but there is no return to Kansas.–The Daily Photography of Andreas Manessinger

So again, I fill my blogging dedicated time slot with seasonal recycled material – this time from January, 2003. Enjoy.

I spent most of the Christmas holidays in bed. I had a nasty cold. The worst part of it was not missing the holiday festivities, though I was pretty bummed out by that. The worst part was the feeling that I had a baseball lodged in my head, somewhere between my tonsils and my Adam’s apple. I’ll spare you the gory details about what the back of my throat looked like.

This went on for about five days. I missed yet another family dinner. Apparently those present at the New Year’s Eve meal took this time to discuss my treatment, as the husband came home with a solution to all my problems. It was a package of topfen (an Austrian hybrid that’s somewhere between ricotta and cottage cheese) and some bandages. “You’re going to get a topfenwickel,” he said.

Now, I thought he said ‘topfenweckerl’, which is one of my favorite bread products, a roll that’s made with topfen as a main ingredient. I love those things. They’re sort of nutty and have a lot of seeds stuck all over the outside. They’re great toasted with butter and cheese on them. I wasn’t very hungry but a topfenweckerl seemed okay. I could eat one, I guess.

He sent me to bed. He stood at the head of the bed and started spreading the cheese on the bandages.

“What the hell are you doing? I can’t eat that!”
“You’re not supposed to eat it. I’m going to wrap you up in it and you’re going to lie here for an hour. It’s to suck out the infection.”
“Is this some kind of a joke? Did you sit around at dinner making up jokes to play on the foreigner?”

‘Wickel’ was the word of the day. It means bandage and it’s no joke. The husband applied the cheese-topped bandages, cheese side down, to my embattled throat. Then he threw on a bunch of extra blankets and left me there for an hour. Or two. Or more. It seemed like an eternity. As much as I like topfen, I prefer it in my bread roll or my strudel. It’s not as appetizing when it’s applied to your skin with the requirement that you lie still for an hour, stinking of cheese.

A cold, they say, goes away in seven days if you do something about it, and a week if you don’t. By the time day seven arrived, I was feeling a lot better and was up and about again. I can neither confirm nor deny the effectiveness of the topfenwickel. I can, however, attest to fondness of the locals for wacky, homespun treatments.

For Christmas, my mother-in-law bought me a month at the local fitness club. This place is, most of the time, a henhouse. It’s full of chatty, sixty-ish ladies who seem to find my accent hilarious. They’re really nice; please don’t think I’m making fun of them when I say that they remind me an awful lot of that scene in Chicken Run when Rocky the Rooster is running the girls through fitness training. The guy that runs the place, Adi, is a former body-building champion with a certain Sigfried and Roy quality about him. He stands up front leading the ladies in calisthenics, joking with the girls while they chatter on and wave their free weights around, all while asking me things like “How do you say, “that guy Adi is a total joker” in English?”

For the last week or so, the husband has been laid up with a variant of my Christmas cold. Two days ago, he developed a nasty cough. I saw his mom at the gym yesterday and she asked me how he was doing. She ran out to buy some herbal tea for me to take home and brought it back to me while I was upstairs in the weight room. The ladies were running through their paces, with Adi in the lead. Naturally, they asked what was up and I stumbled through explaining that the husband was at home with a nasty cough.

“You have to pack him in onions,” Adi said, and the ladies clucked in agreement.
“Any special KIND of onion?” I asked. I pride myself on having just enough German to be a smart ass.
“No, no, any kind will do,” he said, ignoring my tone. “Slice them up, lay them out on his chest, wrap him in towels, and put him in bed.”
”Yes, yes,” agreed the ladies in the background. “And pack him in lots of extra blankets,” they clucked.“Right. Okay then. Onions.” I shook my head. “Okay.”

I finished up my weight circuit and wished the ladies and Adi a good day. “Don’t forget,” he said. “Onions. And NO lovin’. You can stroke his hair and say ‘poor baby’ but that’s it.”

“Lots of blankets!” the ladies shouted after me, as I headed down the stairs.

I came home and told the husband about this. He seemed unsurprised but declined to let me pack him in onions. He told me that there are lots of these home remedies and everyone uses them. They’re better, everyone thinks, and cheaper, than the chemical solutions provided by a visit to the doctor. He told me that for fever, you’re supposed to wrap the hand and feet of the afflicted in vinegar soaked towels. For diarrhea? Eat dried blueberries. Headache? Chamomile tea. And sage leaves for an irritated throat.

Maybe the sheer annoyance of being sent to bed with something smelly applied to your body is enough to get you over whatever is bothering you. I can’t say. I do know I’m suffering no ill side effects from being wrapped in cheese and that the smell of onions all over your sweetheart just about guarantees there will be no lovin’.

I did go to the doctor here last winter when I’d developed a nasty sinus infection. He sent me away with a bunch of prescriptions but no grocery list. I recovered in about a week. I remain unsure about which approach would have provided the better solution.

[tags]home remedies, Austria[/tags]

Now and then I go fishing for something that I’ve written and find it out there on the web. I haul it over here to Nerd’s Eye View from it’s old dusty corner on the Internet. This post is from January, 2003, my pre-Blogger days, even, when I was not the nerdalicious WordPress blogging madwoman I am today. A-hem. Anyhow, enjoy.

I really did think that I had topped out when I discovered the Wiener Fachertorte at the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna. In case you’re curious or you, by some miracle, have not heard me go on and on and on about this incredible baked confection, let me take a moment to describe it to you.

The Fachertorte (translated it means “Fan Cake”) is a triple layer decadence wrapped in a bready sort of dough that’s a cross between brioche and shortbread. The lower layer is comprised of hazelnuts, butter, ground up pound cake, and whole milk. The next layer is poppy seeds, honey, again the ground up pound cake, butter, and whole milk. Above that there’s a layer of sliced apples tossed with cinnamon, raisins, and a little lemon juice. A single slice of Fachertorte probably contains enough calories to fuel a transatlantic flight but that has never deterred me from finishing the entire portion.

I wrote to the museum when I got back to the US to tell them that I had fallen hopelessly in love with their cake and could they please tell me how to make it myself at home? They forwarded my letter to the bakery, one of those venerable bakeries from the former Empire, and the bakery responded with both timeliness and a full recipe. I had to read it over a few times because I could not quite believe they intended me to simmer ground up pound cake in butter and whole milk.

A friend who is a spectacularly skilled baker and I decided to undertake the replication of the Fachertorte in my Seattle kitchen. She prepared the wrapper dough and I went shopping for the rest. I guess that in the Empire days, pound cake was always piling up about the palace and the Imperial baker had to figure out what the hell to do with the leftovers. I had no such stockpiles and bought an Entemann’s ready made at my local supermarket.

We had moderate success. The Fachertorte baked in my oven for nearly two hours but still came out a bit runny. I was impatient and when I cut in to it, the poppy seed filling ran out on the counter. That didn’t stop us from lumping great servings of our less than regal but still delicious copy on to pasta plates and eating it in the garden. It wasn’t bad and after it had set overnight, it was an even better facsimile of the cake at the Kunsthistoriches Museum. Still, it wasn’t quite the same; maybe if I add a marble rotunda to my little apartment the cake will seem more authentic.

At any rate, the Fachertorte has retained its mythic proportions in my head and has held up on second and third tries, to its credit. However, a new contender is edging the Fachertorte out for the Baked Good Obsession of 2003 award.

There is a chain of roadside restaurants in Austria by the name of Rosenberger. They’re buffet style places. You pick up a tray when you go in, walk past the salad bar and the soup counter, stop at the grill to see what they’re making, and you know what? The Rosenberger’s aren’t bad. The food is fresh and hot and pretty much homemade. I like the Rosenberger because it’s one of the few places that have a nonsmoking section and you can eat your meal without coming out smelling like you’ve just spent four hours in a seedy bar. Plus, it’s pretty cheap. You can get a decent Austrian style meal for two for under 20 dollars.

We stopped at the Rosenberger in Semmering on our way to Vienna two weeks ago. I dreamed of the Fachertorte that would await me in the café that occupies the marble rotunda of the Kunsthistoriches Museum, but I was hungry and needed a little coffee. And there, next to the coffee bar by the cash register, was the pastry that was to cause me to question the primacy of the Fachertorte in my affections: The Kurbiskern Ecke.

The name Kurbiskern Ecke means pumpkin seed corner. This triangular delight has an odd greenish color imparted to it by the natural oil of pumpkin seeds. The pastry layer was again that mysterious something that sits between brioche and shortbread, only this time there seemed to be pumpkin seeds ground in to the dough. The triangle of buttery, flaky, crispy and cake like at the same time pastry was topped with roasted pumpkin seeds. This doesn’t sound that great, I know, but the whole thing had a flavor as though it had been soaked in honey and orange water. It was nutty and sweet and just plain amazing, a kind of Austrian baklava, if you will.

We questioned the lass at the register, of course. “What IS it?! Where is it from?! I MUST KNOW OR I WILL GO MAD WITH DESIRE!!!!” I shouted at her, but she responded in that typically friendly but spare Austrian manner. “It’s a secret recipe,” she said, as I beat my fists on the floor and wept. It did not help and quietly, I plotted my return to the Rosenberger on Semmering.

Off we went to Vienna. The café at the Kunsthistoriches Museum was out of Fachertorte by the time I arrived at the cool glass of the pastry case, but I just shrugged. No matter, soon we would stop at the Rosenberger again and I would unlock the delights of the Kurbiskern Ecke.

I was not disappointed. We bought three pieces, one to eat and two to go. Again we questioned the barrista. “It’s a local lady down in Gloggnitz that makes them,” she said. “Typical Styrian pastry, with the pumpkin seeds and all. No, she doesn’t have a bakery; she just makes them in her kitchen. No, I don’t know who she is. It’s a secret recipe, you know.”

My mother in law, who is a fine baker in the traditional Austrian manner, seems to think she can deconstruct the Kurbiskern Ecke and reproduce it. But I am obsessed. I have taken to walking the streets of Gloggnitz at all hours, tearing at my clothing and confronting strangers. “The Kurbiskern Ecke baker! The Kurbiskern Ecke baker! I must know who she is! I must find her!” Sometimes they lock me away for a few days and I forget the Rosenberger, forget the pumpkin seed baklava, and I ask for a slice of Fachertorte. They let me go. When my wits return to me and the drugs wear off, I remember my quest. I find my way to Gloggnitz with a jam jar full of change. I enter the phone booth just across the street from the post office. I open the phone book to the page I was on when I was last there – I have marked it very carefully – and I start calling. “Hello, are you the Kurbiskern Ecke lady?” I ask. I will not be deterred.

Check out the site. It’s a good way to find out what it’s REALLY like to live abroad.

[tags]expatriate[/tags]