The Chocolate Dessert More Famous Than The 149-Year-Old Hotel It Comes From

Some culinary inventions are forever associated with the era, location, or person responsible for putting them on the map. Whether it's a Waldorf salad or eggs Benedict, some dishes can't ever escape their origins, however murky they may be. Yet the Sachertorte, a chocolate Austrian cake made famous at the Hotel Sacher in Vienna, Austria, has managed to become more famous than the 149-year-old hotel at which it was popularized.

The Sachertorte is an Austrian dessert you need to try at least once. It is a rich, dense, layered chocolate torte topped with a thick chocolate ganache. Between each layer is a semi-sweet spread of apricot jam. There are two different origin stories for this famed dessert. According to multiple accounts, it was created in 1832 by chef Franz Sacher. The Austrian State Chancellor, Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, was expecting special guests, but his pastry chef was ill. He asked Sacher, the 16-year-old apprentice chef, to fill in and design a stunning chocolate dessert. The torte was quickly hailed as a masterpiece, spawning countless reproductions. Sigmund Freud even declared it his favorite dessert.

However, in an interview Sacher gave in 1906, he said that he invented the tort in 1850 in Pressburg while employed at a local casino. No matter when and where it was invented, it was made even more famous by Sacher's son. Eduard Sacher helped the dessert gain a cult-like following in 1876 after opening Hotel Sacher. He trademarked the recipe and added it to the establishment's menu, laying claim on its official origins and recipe.

After the death of Eduard Sacher in 1892, his son facilitated the sale of the torte recipe to a nearby pastry shop, Demel. In 1934, Demel listed it on its menu as the Eduard Sacher Torte, while Hotel Sacher trademarked the name as the Original Sachertorte. Over the next few decades, the two rivals engaged in a public battle over the true ownership and recipe for the cake; specifically, whether it should have one layer or two.

In 1963, Hotel Sacher won the right to call its version the original, and eventually Demel updated its recipe to align more closely with the hotel's by including multiple layers of cake with jam in between. Dubbed "the world's most famous cake" by the Hotel Sacher website, the hotel lists its ingredients as dark chocolate, vanilla, butter, sugar, eggs, wheat flour, apricot jam, and whipped cream. Like a traditional torte (which is different from a cake), it contains no leavening agent and gets its unique texture from the addition of stiffened egg whites.

Though there are a few websites that have published modern recipes for the cake, they likely taste and look very different from the one originally created by Franz Sacher. As Max Miller of Tasting History discovered, most currently published recipes are actually from the 1950s and contain modern ingredients and measurements. However, he found one of the oldest known records of the tort's recipe, published in the 1897 edition of Katharina Prato's "South German Cooking." If you want try this worldly chocolate dessert yourself but can't afford a trip to Austria, it would be worth it to make it at home using Miller's instructions.