Welcome to my first food adventure in Austria! Food can tell us a lot about a place: its history, the people who live there and the traditions they share. One of the reasons I was excited to study and teach in Austria was the country's wonderful food culture, especially its beautiful cakes and pastries.
I am living in Vienna, Austria's capital city. Austria has nine federal states, called Bundesländer, which are a little like the individual states in the U.S. Each region has its own specialties, but Austrian food has also been shaped by the country's history.
For centuries, Vienna was the center of the Habsburg Empire, a powerful European monarchy whose lands included many different peoples and cultures. At its height, the empire connected the places that are now Austria, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Croatia, Slovenia and parts of several other countries. People traveled to Vienna for work, trade and life at the imperial court, bringing their recipes and cooking traditions with them.
You can still taste these connections today! Hungarian cooking helped shape Austrian Gulasch, a rich stew seasoned with paprika. From Bohemia, in what is now Czechia, came baking traditions and sweet pastries.
