ABSTRACT
According to Fodor’s guide to Vienna and the Danube Valley, Vienna is a city that immediately conjures up images of ‘operettas and psychoanalysis, Apfelstrudel and marble staircases, Strauss waltzes and Schubert melodies’. 1 By juxtaposing apple strudel with music, architecture and psychoanalysis, this guidebook seems to suggest that food enjoys an elevated cultural status in Vienna. This idea is reiterated in the title of the guidebook’s introduction, ‘Beyond the Schlag [whipped cream]’, which implies that only the most intrepid tourist will experience the city in terms of anything other than layers of sweets, pastries and whipped cream. So pervasive is this image of Vienna that, in modern literature, many descriptions of the city abound with references to the aforementioned whipped cream. For example, John Irving’s novel, Hotel New Hampshire, which is partly located in Vienna, not only features a detailed description of the Hotel Sacher, home of the Sachertorte, but also plays to the stereotypical connection between high culture and food by entitling one of his chapters ‘A Night at the Opera: Schlagobers and Blood’. 2
