Alsace, Saint-Hippolyte and Mulhouse, 3.6.2025: Choucroute Garnie and Singing Blackbird

View of Black Forest through barn in Saint-Hippolyte, Alsace, France

Writing now on the 4th. Yesterday’s itinerary (i.e., the 3rd) was to drive from Würzburg to Alsace. We left Würzburg after breakfast, at 9 A.M. The drive was a fairly easy one, though I say that, of course, as a passenger and not a driver. As with the preceding day, W. and K. alternated driving. 

Baden and Alsace 4.7.09 (2): Flammkuchen and Sudden Storms

From Haut-Koenigsbourg to Riquewihr, where we walked up and down the main street with its tawdry tourist shops and macaroon vendors, and too preserved, too self-conscious and perfect artifacts of medieval life. As we climbed the hill of the main street, a fierce storm suddenly blew up and we took shelter under the awning of one of the souvenir shops.

Rain poured from the skies, sluicing a sudden river down the main street, as miniature whirlwinds turned it into spouts rising up from the street several feet high. Adding to the excitement, one of the large table umbrellas of the café across the street took flight, hurtling through the air towards several hapless people who had sought sanctuary outside another shop.

When it was over, we found a nice, quiet little restaurant, where the four of us shared three flammkuchens, all delicious. The first had onions, cheese bits and bacon, and crème fraiche; the second, gruyere and munster with the crème fraiche; and the third, sheep’s milk cheese, tangy and fresh, atop the base of crème fraiche and gruyere. All with wonderful Alsatian white wine from the area.

After this, we stopped at a shopping area—centre commercial—outside one of the towns near the border, and marveled at the huge selection of good French food: seafood and fish, sausages piled atop sausages, cheeses to satisfy any taste, wines and crémants from all over France. We bought a local crémant and a sausage, as well as a box of sugar roses for Mary and a small handmade French pitcher for ourselves, pretty with its dark blue glazing and sprays of yellow and pink flowers on a green bough.

Everywhere we went, people seemed confidently trilingual, switching from French and German to English with ease. In the castle, we tagged along on tours in all three languages (the French being by far the most informative and dramatic, with a vivacious compact little man acting out the medieval method of battle, noting that one got one’s enemy down and then frapper! frapper! frapper!, arms gesticulating the motion of the pummeling halberd).

But when we bought ice cream at a café in the shopping center near the border, the waitress either did not understand Regina’s German or refused to understand, and switched immediately to French. So our drei Kugeln became trois boules, and we went away happy after having negotiated the linguistic maze and gotten what we had ordered.

At the hotel, a meal of delicious Black Forest trout in brown butter with almonds, parsley potatoes, and salad, and to bed for a very welcome early evening, with several hours in the company of James Hamilton-Paterson and his hilarious (and often disgusting) Cooking with Fernet Branca.

Baden and Alsace 4.7.09 (1): Moses from the Mountain, Fierce Village Storms

Another full day. We drove back to Buchenbach after breakfast, since a sign at the parish house door had said the priest would be in on Friday morning. His secretary greeted us at the door, ushered us inside, and then went to ask if Steve could see the Kirchenbücher.

We heard a deep voice in the bowels of the building—God giving Moses the Torah—but like the Hebrew children at the foot of the mountain, never saw the regal speaker’s face. The assistant returned to tell Steve that all the information he wanted was in the episcopal archives in Freiburg.

Steve said he’d checked church records on microfilm from there, but didn’t understand where the records prior to 1817 were held. The village church was built in that year, apparently.

As well as I could understand, the assistant, who spoke a pronounced Allemanish German, said that prior to then, sacraments and services took place in a small chapel on a hill nearby, and in people’s houses. The population was thin and widely dispersed, and churches were not built until later. But the records from this earlier period? She didn’t know.

The lady at the Shouphof had asked us to return that morning, so we did so. She met us outside, saying her husband had been called to an appointment (he works a day job and also farms), and had asked if Steve would email him. She shared with us a family tree someone had put together, and told us her husband’s uncle Oscar had compiled much family information and had given it to the Rathaus—which the Rathaus staff had not told us the day before, though Steve specifically asked about the Shoup family.

And so then to Alsace . . . . We drove first to Haut-Koenigsbourg, passing along allées of trees right at the roadside, something not found on the German side of the line, and fields of corn, asparagus, ripened grain, and pick-your-own flowers. The little villages were neat with pots of bright scarlet and pink geraniums beneath windows, houses painted in various pastel shades, and high hills full of vines around them.

At Haut-Koenigsbourg, we parked and then climbed up to the pre-12th century château, which has been rebuilt and added onto several times, and finally restored under Wilhelm II early in the 20th century. These old castles just don’t do it for me, any more than cathedrals do.

Perhaps I went through my medieval phase too early in life. I recall reading with tremendous fascination one book after another about the middle ages when I was 9 or 10 years old, and fantasizing about returning to that period of history for a look around.

But those fantasies falter in the face of the architectural evidence re: what life must have been like for people who lived in castles (and went to cathedrals). In such high places where a cool wind blows through every nook and cranny even on a hot July day, it must have been intolerably cold in winter.

The forbidding stone; the house-as-fort with its peepholes and execrable weapons all around; the overweening masculine cast of life, with little room for anything outside virtues of valor and honor: I can’t imagine living in such a world. Any more than in the one I must now inhabit . . . .