Sachertorte

In 1832, Franz Sacher was a sixteen-year-old apprentice in the Vienna kitchens of Prince Klemens von Metternich when the head chef fell ill and Sacher was told to produce a dessert for the prince's guests. He baked a dense chocolate sponge, spread it with apricot jam, and poured warm chocolate glaze over the whole. Metternich's guests approved. Sacher wrote down the recipe and carried it for the rest of his working life.

The Sacher family opened the Hotel Sacher in Vienna in 1876, and the torte became its signature. A dispute that ran from 1954 to 1963 turned on whether the Hotel Sacher or the confectionery Demel held the right to call its product the Original Sachertorte. The Vienna Commercial Court ruled that Demel's version, which used a single layer of apricot jam only beneath the glaze, had to be sold as Eduard Sacher Torte, while the hotel's version kept the Original designation.

Torte came into German from the Italian torta, which the Romans took from Late Latin torta, a round loaf possibly connected to torquere, to twist. The surname Sacher is of uncertain origin and simply names the maker; the cake is one of the clearer examples in food language of a proper noun hardening into a common one. By 1900 Sachertorte appeared in German dictionaries as a category, not a brand.

The Hotel Sacher has shipped the torte in wooden boxes to over a hundred countries since the 1930s. Vienna's tourist board calls it the city's most recognizable export after Sigmund Freud and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Whether this ranking flatters the cake or diminishes the psychiatrist and the composer is a question Viennese people enjoy debating.