Switzerland

Death by fondue

Switzerland is gorgeous, but melted cheese? No.  

By Nick Louth

July 2005

Switzerland is clearly defined in the tourist mind: Mountains, ski-ing, chocolate, watches and punctual railways. Some of its cultural exports are more forgettable, though. Take fondue for example. Households all over the world have larders stacked with dusty boxes bearing the classic cheesy paraphernalia of heavy pots, spirit burners and long forks, trendy in the 1970s and now seldom used.

Except in Switzerland itself. Here, the pure cheese meal with bread for dipping is going as strongly as the 1980s self-assembly furniture and orange and brown décor that still adorn its chalet hotels and pensions. While fondue is tasty, most of the credit belongs to the white wine and kirsch which goes into it. The lingering aroma of boiled plimsoll reveal the dish’s origins; a way for Swiss farmers to use up hard cheese and stale bread at the end of the long winter months.  

The Swiss dairy heritage deserves better. Cheeses such as Gruyere, Vacherin Mont D’or, Vacherin Fribourgeois, Bündnerkäse, Emmentaler, Sbrinz, Appenzeller and Tilsiter run the gamut from soft and creamy to a pungent, crystalline crunchiness. To melt them is akin to drinking a good wine while pinching your nose. Fondue, like its cousin raclette, a slice of melted cheese served with boiled potatoes and silverskin pickled onions, are the only let-downs in a dairy tradition that preserves the best of taste and quality. 

A summer train journey through the Berner Oberland from Montreux to Interlaken illustrates the Swiss dairy economy from its roots. Between gorgeous towns and villages like Zweisimmen and Saanen, the train passes endless hay meadows. In the high summer, many are cut by hand mower, and in the steepest places by scythe. Farmers still rake up the grass into heaps, eschewing the modern baler. As the train trundles across innumerable level crossings, milk churns are visible stacked alongside traditional barns or loaded into open-topped trucks. The train, with frequent blasts on its faux-steam whistle, passes close enough to kitchen gardens for passengers to identify the onions and potatoes, lettuce and beans being grown there. Meanwhile the cattle themselves, having overwintered in barns in the valleys have been taken into the high pastures where they wander amongst orchid-strewn meadows eating their fill.

Rustic tradition has benefits here too. Most of these alpine pastures are not manured and so the grass has not smothered the flowers which prosper on such nutrient-poor soils. Instead of a grassy monotony, there are common spotted and fragrant orchids, martigone lily and harebells, birdsfoot trefoil and endless varieties of colourful vetch. The cows, free to wander, eat just what they want, sometimes selecting a  single flower with a deft curl of the tongue. The result is a milk of astonishing richness. In many places farmers still offer a glass of fresh and often still-warm milk to passing walkers for a franc or two. The creamy draught is utterly refreshing, and nostalgic for those whose childhood began before the homogenised emulsion we now buy from supermarkets. At one farm, high above the winter resort of Gstaad, we sat at an ancient wooden table and ate home-made meringues with whipped cream while listening to the distant clang of cowbells. 

Someone has to pay for all this quality though, and being outside the EU the Swiss never had the luxury of Common Agricultural Policy payments. It must instead be the wealthy banking and insurance industry which take the strain, because in some regions, each cow receives a SFr 2,000 (£900) public subsidy per year, more if taken up to the high pastures. This is just part of a multi-billion  annual support programme for the dairy industry. No wonder that even the scythe-wielding farmers still drive Audis and BMWs. These cows are clearly precious. In the town of Kandersteg I was told that only those local farmers whose herds have had an accident-free summer are allowed to follow the tradition of garlanding their cattle in flowers on their return from the pastures in the autumn. 

Like many mountain towns, Kandersteg’s pastoral economy complements tourism wonderfully. Though the almost vertical valleys that enfold the town are too steep for ski-ing, they offer challenging summer walking and draw hikers from across Europe. Well-laid paths, adequately but not intrusively signposted, snake up beneath dripping mossy crags, and are bathed in the spume of tiny waterfalls high above. The trails meanders through narrow sunny glades and dark, resin-scented  stands of evergreens, each twist and climb offering a new vista of the valley beneath. After a tiring two hour climb beneath the peak of Doldenhorn, the land opens up into wide meadows cut with bubbling rills, and there on open pasture are a herd of brown and white cows. We have no idea how they got up here, but we’re glad they did.

Sidebar:

The railway to the skies

For most nations, merely building a mountain railway that took passengers to the base of the north face of the Eiger would be enough. Not the Swiss. Having reached 2,061m (6,447’) they then bored an incredible10 km (6.2 mile) tunnel into the rock face, beneath a glacier and hauled passengers to a pinnacle called Jungfraujoch which sits on the shoulders of two huge peaks, the Jungfrau and Mönch . No excuses about “the wrong kind of snow here”, the railway operates year round, using a rack and pinion system and six different kinds of brakes, and takes half a million visitors to a literally breath-taking 3,454m (11,329’) terminus, with views across the glaciers some of Switzerland’s highest peaks. Most amazing of all, this technological marvel began with 19^th century ingenuity. The railway was first planned in the 1870s, construction began in 1896 and it opened in 1912. Now visitors can stop and look out from the base of the Eiger’s north wall before heading up to what is effectively a subterranean shopping centre under the Jungfraujoch itself. If you suffer from vertigo on the viewing platform, you can go back in to a choice of eateries including a Japanese noodle bar, a curry house and the biggest novelty of all, a reasonably-priced Swiss restaurant.

Perhaps the best refreshment, however, is a little further on. A 40 minute slog across the glacier takes you to the cosy mountaineer’s hut at Möchsjochhutte. Despite being supplied solely by helicopter, you can get steaming hot gulashsuppe  and a mug of beer for little more than it costs in the valley. My wife considered the walk well worth taking if only to feast her eyes on a group of tanned and rugged Italian mountaineers who were using the hut as a base. I thought she was taking her time getting her breath back.

Fact file:

·        Nick Louth flew from East Midlands to Geneva with EasyJet for around £100 including taxes. Lower fares with many airlines are available for early or late departures, or out of season. Flights to Berne or Zurich tend to be more expensive.

·        A train pass is easily the most relaxing way to see the country. A two week pass costs around £170 and gives free travel all but the high cog railways, where the discount is 25 per cent. The pass also gives a discount of around 50 per cent on most cable cars.

·        Switzerland is expensive. Accommodation is about 30-50 per cent above equivalent U.K. rates. Restaurants even in non-tourist areas boast London prices. Expect to pay about £70-£100 for a mid-range three course meal with wine. Prices are stable, however. In one restaurant we were handed an elaborate embroidered menu where the descriptions and prices were cross-stitched by hand. That’s all you need to know about Swiss inflation.

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