Vienna’s beloved and beautiful sachertorte is served in cafes all across the city, and even sparked a lengthy legal battle.
Not one crumb is out of place on Café Sacher’s sachertorte. A slick of smooth apricot jam is sandwiched between two layers of neat chocolate sponge, the whole thing cloaked in a precisely 4mm-thick layer of chocolate glaze before it’s cut into perfectly neat wedges. And it ought to be perfect; this is, after all, a cake so precious to Viennese culinary culture that for years it was at the heart of a legal battle.
Dating back to 1832, the recipe was created when a 16-year-old court kitchen apprentice named Franz Sacher found himself having to create a dessert fit for royalty. Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich had requested an impressive finish to a meal for his esteemed guests, and with a poorly head chef, the task fell to young Franz. It’s said that Prince Metternich expressed hope he wouldn’t be ‘disgraced’ by dessert — and he wasn’t. The cake was a hit, and it soon garnered fans beyond the royal court.
Nearly two centuries later, I’m sitting on a red-trimmed banquette at Café Sacher — aquintessentially grand Viennese coffeehouse, within Hotel Sacher. I sip a coffee, taking in the crystal chandeliers, high ceilings and gold accents while I wait for my slice of ‘original sachertorte’ — aname backed by both legend and law. Franz Sacher may have created this dessert, but his son, Eduard, honed the recipe during an apprenticeship at Vienna’s Demel confectionery. After Eduard opened Hotel Sacher in 1876 with sachertorte on the menu, the cake’s popularity soared. Over the decades that followed, however, the question of which establishment — Demel or Hotel Sacher — could lay claim to the ‘original’ version turned into a long, drawn-out legal battle, ending in an out-of-court settlement in 1963.
“It was a good day for Hotel Sacher,” Mattias Winkler, CEO of Sacher Hotels and head of the sachertorte baking facility, tells me. “There are probably millions of different Sacher cakes on this planet, but there’s only one original.” Demel, meanwhile, is permitted to market its version as the ‘Eduard Sacher Torte’.
A precision-cut piece of cake is placed in front of me and I hear a neighbouring diner squeal, “Oh, it’s so good!” as she tucks into her own slice. I pick up my fork and break the silky surface, and for this first bite I forgo the unsweetened whipped cream that accompanies any classically prepared sachertorte. The sponge is yielding and moist; there’s a subtle note of apricot and a rich chocolate flavour.
With such controversy surrounding it, it seems only fair to try the sachertorte at Demel, too, a short, scenic stroll fr
