The trouble with choucroute is it’s not sexy. It has an image problem, not least when it labours under the name of Sauerkraut.

The name (whether in French or German) refers to both the raw material - shredded, salted, fermented cabbage, put up in the autumn - and to the famous brasserie signature dish on which it is based. 

For the latter, all too often the cabbage comes in an unappetising shade of sludge-grey. Plastic-pink, frankfurter-style sausages and slabs of smoked and fat belly pork are draped lasciviously over it. It reeks of calories, and cabbage. The menace of heartburn hangs heavy in the air.

Enter the Confrérie de la Choucroute, formed a few years ago in southern Alsace by a group of local chefs and a choucroute producer in order to promote the venerable vegetable and to improve its image. I was recently invited to join the ranks of the Confrérie. My first task was to identify the component parts of a classic choucroute garnie displayed before me. Having successfully scaled this hurdle I was then required to swear solemnly to eat or to serve choucroute at least once a week, and to leave no stone unturned in my efforts to promote the noble product. 

Then came the raison d’être of the whole evening: a superb dinner at which the vegetable was served up in many different - sometimes surprising - guises. The feast, prepared by chef Domique Kassel at the Restaurant Jenny in Hagenthal-le-Bas (near Basel), featured a salad of raw, newly fermented choucroute with tiny apple dice bound with crème fraîche and topped with a slice of pan-fried duck foie gras, a delicate white fish with potato ‘scales’ set on a bed of lightly cooked choucroute and a succulent slab of roast piglet served with – yes, you guessed it.

But the chef who has most effectively and enthusiastically set about making choucroute chic is Michel Husser at Le Cerf in Marlenheim, west of Strasbourg. About 10 years ago, lamenting the impossibility of finding a decent choucroute - even in Alsace, spiritual home of the dish - not to mention the lack of interesting, creative recipes involving the unloved vegetable, Husser created his choucroute à ma façon.  

For this now classic dish, the new season’s freshly fermented cabbage is gently stewed in duck fat with masses of onions and garlic, seasoned with bruised juniper berries, coriander and cloves, moistened with stock and a little wine (not too much, for fear of excess acidity). A piece of smoked bacon is buried in the pan for extra flavour. Two hours later the cabbage emerges, fragrant, glistening and golden, ready to receive its accoutrements: a slice of lightly smoked, pan-fried foie gras, a pair of diminutive boudins noirs (black puddings) the size of cocktail sausages, redolent with cinnamon and nutmeg, and a selection of crusty-skinned morsels of pale-fleshed sucking piglet. 

This is Husser’s version of the traditional choucroute garnie, served as a main dish. There are also a couple of exciting starters based on choucroute. By special request, and during the winter months only, you can have his huitres gratinés à la choucroute, a startlingly successful dish of plump, warm Marennes d’Oléron oysters on a little mound of creamy, crunchy choucroute set on a bed of seaweed – forget sexy, this is seriously aphrodisiac. Another candidate is Husser’s rich fricassee of eels from Rhine fisherman Adrien Vonarb, served with local snails and a vivid green butter sauce with a smidgen of choucroute juice to sharpen things up. 

Back at the homestead, there are few better winter supper dishes than a quiche of choucroute and bacon, as in this recipe from chef Roger Fischer at the Restaurant Studerhof in Bettlach:

• Line a 30cm quiche tin with 200g puff pastry
• Fill it with a mixture of 800g well-drained, cooked choucroute and 200g diced, fried bacon
• Mix together 300ml milk, 200ml cream and 4 eggs
• Pour this over the filling
• Bake in a hot oven for about 45 minutes until golden brown and bubbly
• As a delicate and delicious variation on the theme, you can substitute diced fresh or smoked salmon for the bacon