Robin Garr wrote:Okay, I'm working up a recipe on this dish, one of my German favorites, for for a quarterly California Wine Club presentation, and I realize that I know enough about the dish to love it, and to come up with a pretty fair American-made imitation.
But there are a couple of things I don't know, and wonder if any of you do.
1. Where in the heck does that name come from? "Tafelspitz" appears to literally mean "table point," but what in the heck does <i>that</i> mean? My intuition is that "point" refers to the purported sharpness of the customary horseradish sauce and "tafel" just means it's food for dinner, but this is pure guesswork. Anybody actually <i>know</i>?
2. Is it originally Austrian (Viennese) or German? Both countries seem to claim it.
3. Again I have my own ideas, but any useful comments about why the whole red-wine-red-meat issue pretty much goes away when it comes to matching German/Austrian fare with Riesling. It <i>all</i> seems to go with Riesling. What's up with that?
My gut tells me to accept this term just as you would accept "pork butt" or "Rocky Mountain Oysters." It is, however, defintely Austrian in origin and borrowed primarily by the geographically proximate Bavarians. But, hey, it's all German.
If you want one Germanic (ex-)linguist's view (mine), I would guess that
Tafelspitz may be related to a fancy way of folding a napkin. This is also a
Tafelspitz:
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Fancy meat for a fancy table! Which came first the meat or the napkin I do not know, but it is a nice folksy etymology.
If that doesn't get you chased off the podium then you might consider that
Spitz can also mean
tip and may have a function in this word analogous to the
tip in
tri-tip. The piece of meat is cut from a muscle in the rump which narrows to a point. Now, this leaves
Tafel open to discussion, but perhaps somewhere along the line this part of the cow was referred to as the
Tafel or it simply translates out as "beef tip for the table" as opposed to parts not meant for consumption.
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As to your third point, German white wines can be broken down pretty simply into
herb or
higher in acid,
mild or
not too acidic, but not too sweet, and
süß or
sweet. When ordering by the glass in a restaurant, that's pretty much all a simpleton like me needs to know. And I think it's because the importance of the acid-sugar balance in German wine is so characteristic and stressed (to the exclusion of things like tannin, oak, earthiness etc.) that it is easier to find food-friendly whites regardless of the dish, especially Riesling. It's simple to pair in whatever way you care to: sweet with sweet, acidic with acidic, sweet with acidic. And if you look at the flavor profiles of German whites which basically tend to move from minerally to citrussy to fruity and floral you can see how all of these flavor directions tend to be fairly universally "pair-able." I also find that the bulk of traditional German cuisine is prepared by methods which are white-wine-friendly with white-wine-friendly herbs and spices.
Last edited by Gary Barlettano on Wed Jun 27, 2007 12:32 am, edited 2 times in total.
