Choucroute

Like most overcelebrated regional specialties, choucroute is almost always inauthentic and unsuccessful. The word is some kind of French accommodation of a German word for cabbage, kraut, tacked onto the French word for cabbage, chou. This is the kind of mongrel word that mortally annoys French language purists, when they ought to be pleased with the creative absorption that takes place almost every time that some outlandish alien term gets swallowed up by the French language. I know