Two Sides of the Sacher Torte

Over the summer I made friends with a lovely young person named Christina Reis.

For all the years that I’ve lived in my current apartment building, I haven’t had friends my age. Finally, for the two months that I spent at home during the internship, I met Christina! And made many memories with her.

Christina and I

Christina just finished her undergraduate studies in Renewable Energy in Vienna, Austria, and came to Bangalore to do her semester-long internship with ZED Homes, the green architecture firm that built my apartment building.

Over the two months that we spent time together in the building, we had several fantastically loaded conversations about sustainable food, sustainable energy, and Christina’s increasing interest in the concept of bio-mimicry as the technology of the future! When her brother - a nutritional scientist - visited, we also exchanged several talks on entomophagy – it was great to meet a fellow insect-eater!

Towards the end of our summer together, one of my favorite memories is of making Sacher Torte with Christina.

Christina spreads apricot jam on the cake

I top the cake with chocolate ganache

Sacher Torte is a classical Austrian confection, made of chocolate cake, apricot jam and chocolate ganache. In the past year I’ve studied about it’s history and invention by Franz Sacher, an Austrian pastry chef, in my Bakery and Viennoiserie class at college. I even sold several elaborately garnished slices of the cake at Nutmeg, the pastry shop at ITC Windsor, where I spend a few days of my internship as the sales girl. And I always saw it as something exotic and foreign -- a delicate and fancy European gateau.

Delicate and Fancy European Gateau (Source)

When I made it with Christina it was something different. It was her family’s recipe -- the way her mother and grandmother make it. It was big, and honest and homely. It carried with it, not the historical tale of an Austrian pastry chef, but stories of her grandmother’s homemade apricot jam! It felt warm.

Apricot Jam on the chocolate Sacher sponge --
back home Christina uses her grandma's homemade apricot preserve!

Our little neighbor cutting the Sacher Torte at Christina's farewell dinner

It’s fascinating to see foods from different perspectives; to explore and sometimes challenge your notion of a certain food by seeing it from someone else’s eyes, or from another side of it’s story.

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Side note: I’ve explored this idea in other posts too:

• Curries of the World, Unite!
• Konkani Ghashi has a Malaysian Counterpart?
• Ghashi's Long Lost Sibling? Part 2

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A lot of my evenings chatting with Christina revolved around food – even her surname, Reis, means Rice in German! I’ll miss her, but I’m sure we’ll meet again, perhaps in India, or Austria, or maybe somewhere in between!