Vienna's Naschmarkt Has a Schmaltz Problem and I'm Here for It
There is a jar of rendered chicken fat in the back of my fridge right now. It has been there for two weeks and I keep finding reasons to open it. Roasted potatoes on a Tuesday. A quick sauté of onions that I told myself was just for soup. A smear on dark rye because I was curious whether it would hold mustard. It holds mustard beautifully, for the record.
The reason that jar exists at all traces back to one afternoon standing in front of a delicatessen counter at Vienna's Naschmarkt, watching a vendor slice cured goose breast with the same reverence most people reserve for aged Parmesan. There was schmaltz involved. There is always schmaltz involved in Vienna, if you know where to look.
What the Naschmarkt Actually Is (And What It Is Not)
Most travel guides describe the Naschmarkt as a charming open-air market and leave it there. That description does the place roughly the same justice as calling a Viennese coffee house "a place that serves coffee." The Naschmarkt stretches about 1.5 kilometres along the Wienzeile, a double-laned road that runs above the buried River Wien, and it has been feeding the city in various forms since the 16th century. Over 120 stalls operate there on any given weekday, three rows deep, with one lane dedicated to restaurants and the other two to vendors selling produce, cheese, meat, spices, oils, and enough pickled things to last through a hard winter.
The name itself has a slightly murky origin. The market was once called the Aschenmarkt, or Ash Market, possibly because the site was built on a former city landfill, and possibly because early milk containers were made from ash wood. By around 1820, people had started calling it the Naschmarkt instead, from the German verb naschen, meaning to nibble or snack on sweets. That shift makes sense given what the stalls were selling by then: sugared orange zests, dried dates, early exotica from trade routes that reached Vienna through the Ottoman Empire. The city's location on the Danube made it a clearinghouse for ingredients from the eastern Mediterranean, which is why you can stand at one end of the Naschmarkt today and smell cardamom and tahini before you smell schnitzel.
The River That Brought the Flavours In
Vienna did not develop its layered, international food culture in isolation. It sits at the meeting point of Central and Eastern Europe, and for centuries goods that arrived by boat along the Danube funnelled directly into the city's markets. From 1793 onwards, all fruit and vegetables not transported by river had to be sold at the Naschmarkt specifically, which concentrated the city's food supply and its food culture into one long corridor.
That corridor eventually reflected where the city sat geographically and politically. Hungarian paprika, Bohemian dumplings, Balkan sausage, Ottoman sweets, Italian vinegar: Vienna absorbed all of it and made it somewhat its own. Today you can eat your way through a version of that same journey by visiting river cruise cities across Europe along the Danube and Rhine, from Budapest to Amsterdam, each one adding its own layer to the way Central Europe has cooked and traded for centuries. The Naschmarkt feels like the compressed, walkable version of that whole corridor.
Saturday is the day to go if you want to see the market at full noise, when a flea market extends from the western end and the stalls are packed with locals doing their weekly shop. Weekday mornings are quieter, which is when the vendors have time to hand out samples without a crowd pressing in from behind. The standing rule is to accept every sample offered. By the time you reach the Turkish and Middle Eastern section, where towers of baklava sit next to bins of dried apricots and mountains of pistachios, you will have already eaten the equivalent of a light lunch.
Where the Schmaltz Comes In
Vienna had one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe before 1938, numbering close to 200,000 people and representing around 10 percent of the city's total population. That community shaped Viennese food culture in ways that are not always labelled or credited at the point of sale. Schmaltz is one of those ways.
The word Schmalz in German means rendered animal fat of any kind, including lard and clarified butter. In English, the word came through Yiddish, where it referred specifically to rendered chicken or goose fat. For Ashkenazi Jewish cooks across Central and Eastern Europe, schmaltz was the practical solution to a specific constraint: kashrut prohibits combining meat and dairy, which ruled out butter for meat dishes, and lard, which comes from pork, was never an option. Poultry fat, rendered slowly with onions until it turned clear and golden, became the cooking fat of necessity and then of preference. The crispy bits of skin and onion left in the pan after rendering are called gribenes, and they are worth knowing about separately, because they are essentially Central European crackling and every bit as addictive as that sounds.
At the Naschmarkt, you will find schmaltz sold at delis that specialise in Ashkenazi-influenced foods, often alongside chopped liver, cured goose, and sliced rye bread. The goose schmaltz in particular is worth trying on bread with a pinch of salt. It is richer than chicken schmaltz, with a deeper flavour that works in the same way duck fat does when you roast potatoes, except it tastes more specifically of bird rather than of neutral richness.
The Fat That Got Unfairly Sidelined
There is a broader story here that connects back to the kitchen, which is that rendered animal fats spent several decades being treated as dietary villains based on research that has since been substantially revised. A meta-analysis published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found no significant evidence that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease or cardiovascular disease. Separately, research published in the journal npj Science of Food noted that moderate consumption of animal fats does not adversely affect glycolipid metabolism, and that the proportion of fatty acids in lard, for instance, is more balanced than its reputation suggests.
The irony is that the fats that replaced schmaltz and lard in the mid-20th century, namely partially hydrogenated vegetable oils and margarine, turned out to contain trans fats with documented negative health consequences. The processed alternative was worse than the original. That realisation has quietly sent chefs and home cooks back toward animal fats over the past decade, which is partly why duck fat fries became a restaurant menu staple and why schmaltz is showing up in American delis again with something approaching pride. If you want to understand this shift from a home cook's perspective, cooking with natural fats is one of those practical topics that keeps resurfacing because it speaks to how we actually feed ourselves versus how we were told to.
How to Use It When You Get Home
The best thing to cook in schmaltz is potatoes. Cut them small, get the schmaltz hot in a heavy pan, and do not move the potatoes around until the cut sides have developed a crust. The rendered fat makes them crispy in a way that olive oil simply does not replicate, because the smoke point is higher and the flavour compounds interact differently with starch at high heat. If you add onion to the pan for the last few minutes, you are very close to a traditional Jewish side dish that has been cooked in Central European kitchens for centuries.
Chopped liver is the other canonical use, and it is worth making at home at least once even if you are not sure you like liver. The schmaltz does most of the work by softening the sharpness of the organ meat and binding the whole mixture into something spreadable and genuinely savoury. The trick is not to overcook the livers: they should be just barely cooked through, still slightly pink in the centre, before you take them off the heat.
For a more unexpected application, try using schmaltz as the fat in a vinaigrette for roasted vegetables. Warm it slightly so it stays liquid, whisk it with white wine vinegar, a bit of Dijon, and salt, and use it immediately over roasted carrots or parsnips. It reads as rich without being heavy, and if you have added the gribenes on top as a garnish, you have something that looks far more deliberate and finished than the effort it actually took.
The Thing Worth Knowing Before You Go
The Naschmarkt is open Monday through Saturday, with stalls operating from 6am. Most food stalls and vendors close between 6 and 7pm, though the restaurants and bars stay open later. The flea market runs on Saturdays only, from early morning until around 2pm. The U4 subway line stops at Kettenbrückengasse, which puts you at the market's western end, while Karlsplatz drops you at the eastern end near the older traditional stalls. If you are visiting Vienna for the first time and trying to decide where to spend a morning, the Naschmarkt gives you a more accurate picture of how a city actually eats than any restaurant reservation will.
Bring a bag. You will buy things. You will almost certainly buy schmaltz.