Austrian Cooking and Baking

by Gretel Beer

"So much to choose from. Get a copy today." — Texas Kitchen and Garden and More
Austrians like to eat well, and what they like to eat best is dessert. After a delicious cauliflower soup, and a great Wiener schnitzel with nockerl and cucumber salad, they always have room for an incredible dessert — Sachertorte, apple strudel, or Guglhupf, just to name a few. For this cookbook Gretel Beer has collected authentic recipes for these and many other dishes and gathered them together in just the right proportion — 171 dessert recipes and 131 recipes for everything else.
For your soup and entrée, you can choose from such favorites as beef broth with dumplings, potato soup, carp in aspic, baked pike, stuffed breast of veal, Kalbsgulasch, four kinds of schnitzel, boiled beef, sauerbraten, roast pork, stuffed green peppers, Backhendl, and more, as well as vegetables, salads, sauces (horseradish, dill, etc.), and dumplings. Then try your best to choose a baked pancakes with vanilla cream, apricot dumplings, rice pudding, Kaiserschmarrn, hazel nut pudding, bishops' bread, butter rings, filled honeycakes, sour cream strudel, poppyseed crescents, ring cake, Schnecken, fruit loaves, Alpenbuttertorte, Dobos torte, strawberry gateau, Linzertorte, meraner torte, Muerbe torte, and much more.
Gretel Beer's family comes from just outside Vienna, and she has included many old family recipes in her cookbook as well as others she has discovered herself. This is good Austrian home cooking, and the simple, easy-to-follow recipes will work just as well in your home.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking

224 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1975

Reviews

[Richard Newbold · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gretel Beer, the author of this useful basic recipe book, was for many years cookery writer for the Daily Telegraph, originally coming to the UK as one of the Kinder Transport refugees in 1939, but clearly keeping an Austrian kitchen thereafter. This book is quite ancient, being a reprint of a 1954 work (British pounds and ounces throughout), and totally without illustrations. This is no problem with the excellent chapter on soups and their accompaniments - one knodel looks pretty much like another, but for the sweet dishes and cakes it's a serious disadvantage, given the visual attraction of typical Austrian patisserie and kuchen. Interesting to note how much of Austrian cuisine is imported and adapted from Poland - given the proliferation of Polish delicatessen, food markets and supermarket counters recently, the perennial problem of sourcing ingredients is lessened somewhat. Good for the basic recipe but need to google for a picture for many of the more intricate sweet stuff.

[Jessica Hicks · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading through this book. For example, I was amused to learn that they call vegetable soup “phony soup” while meat broth is “real.” I also liked everything I made! BUT I’m pretty sure this book is for people who already know how to make Austrian food. I had to ask my Austrian friend for help and consult pictures and other recipes online to try to figure out what to do because this book has no pictures or cook times! I think maybe in Austria they are better at cooking from the heart and passing recipes down through the generations. I need explicit instructions!
🇦🇹
Here’s what I made:
⭐️ Cinnamon Stars (Zimtsterne)- even with help, this dough stuck to my counter like all other gluten-free doughs do. I later found out from a German friend that “sugar the counter” meant to use powdered sugar on the counter 😑. Then in the oven the stars lost their shape and I had to cut them out all over again. They taste really good though! Like apple cinnamon granola.
🥔 Potato Soup (Erdaepfelsuppe)- my Austrian friend warned me celeriac is gross but I liked it! This soup was great! The recipe said to push all the vegetables through a sieve which seemed like a terrible idea so I used my immersion blender instead.
🧅 Potato Goulash (Erdaepfelgulasch)- simple and tasty. It’s basically just sausage, potato, and onion but it really works!
🥞 Pancakes (Palatschinken)- I was grateful that I’d taken a crepe class recently so I knew how to fix this recipe to get the right thickness of the pancakes. Very good though! I learned Austrians love their apricot jam so I filled them with it and it was such a great combo!