Moosbeermiasl (Tyrolean Bilberry Schmarrn)

The first time I ate Moosbeermiasl I was eleven years old, sitting on a wooden bench outside an Almhütte above Innsbruck. Gretel had taken my grandmother Eva and me on one of their annual pilgrimages through Austria, and that summer we went walking in Tyrol. The hut cook made it in a blackened iron pan over a wood fire. The batter was thick and heavy, nothing like the airy Kaiserschmarrn I knew from Eva's kitchen in Kent. It was packed with wild bilberries that had burst in the heat and turned the whole thing a deep, almost violet purple. She tore it apart with a wooden spoon, dusted it with sugar, and set it down on the table with a glass of cold milk. I ate the entire portion and asked for more.

Moosbeermiasl is not Kaiserschmarrn. I want to be clear about that because people see the word Schmarrn and expect something light and pillowy. This is mountain food, Almküche, the cooking of the high pastures. The batter has no separated eggs, no whipped whites, no air folded in. You mix flour, eggs, milk, and sugar together into something thick and almost porridge-like, stir in handfuls of bilberries, and fry the whole mass in far too much butter until it forms a crust on the bottom. Then you tear it. The pieces are dense and chewy where the batter held together, crisp and caramelized where the butter found the edges, and stained purple everywhere the berries touched.

Tyrolean cooks call the berries Moosbeeren. In standard German they're Heidelbeeren, and in English you'd say bilberries or wild blueberries. They're smaller, darker, and more intensely flavored than cultivated blueberries, and they stain your fingers, your lips, and your kitchen cloth a colour that doesn't come out in the wash. If you can find real wild bilberries, use them. If you can't, use the best fresh blueberries available and press a few of them with a fork before adding them to the batter so they release their juice. The colour won't be quite the same but the spirit of the dish will survive.

This is the kind of cooking that doesn't translate well to Instagram. It looks rough and purple and torn apart. It tastes like standing on a mountain with butter on your chin and not caring who sees you lick the plate.