Much has changed in Australia's culinary scene since I was a childhood. I'm too young to remember pasta and capsicums becoming standard supermarket items but I recall very vividly the arrival of 'Asian greens' and packets of frozen 'stir fry' vegetables. I remember what the deli section of my local supermarkets--the Noble Park Coles and Springvale Safeway--looked like. You could get a few types of ham, all pretty much the same in taste. You could get 'little boys' or mini-frankfurters. You could get maybe a couple of types of salami. 'Hot' and mild. And you could get Strasbourg. Prosciutto? Pancetta? Chorizo? Forget about it. In delis, sure. Maybe. But not a supermarket in even a very culturally diverse low socio-economic suburb. Never. Half a dozen slices of straz, darl.
Somewhere along the line, all that changed. And sure, you'll still get a wider selection of deli products in supermarkets in Malvern than you will in Noble Park. Market demand and all that. In some areas, there just aren't enough people who'll pay $30 or $45 a kilogram for cured pork products.
One of the staples of my childhood diet was the Strasbourg sandwich. My mum, she'd take a couple of slices of white supermarket loaf. She'd place a slice or two of Strasbourg--loaded up, of course, with tomato sauce--in between said slices of bread. I must have had a million of those sandwiches as a kid. I don't recall having Strasbourg as an adult or even teen. At some point we just stopped buying the stuff.
Now, just so you understand, Australian Strasbourg is not the same stuff that's used in France. The Australian stuff is obviously based on the French one but whereas the French one is, well, sausage-shaped, the Australian one is a great brick of processed meat. You buy it by the slice. I'm sure if you read the bright red wrapper you'd find the words 'mechanically-separated meat'. This explains why I haven't had Strasbourg in a very long time.
Still, Larousse Gastronomique tells me I have to have Strasbourg at least once, so let's get this over with. An Alsatian sandwich is pretty much an upmarket version of that classic from my childhood: the sliced sausage on bread (the book suggests rye but I used sourdough) with grated horseradish. I've never seen fresh horseradish for sale outside of Queen Victoria Market and even if it was widely avaliable, it's not going to be in season for another two or three months. Enter the trusty jar of horseradish cream.
It's an okay sandwich. I'm not a big fan of Strasbourg but a tablespoon's worth of horseradish cream sorts it out.
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