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Swiss Eats: Cheese, Chocolate and…Pasta?

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Clockwise: Beef carpaccio and Swiss cheese rolls with olive oil and rösti from the Cafe de Paris (Interlaken); luxemburgerli from Confiserie Sprüngli; raclette with potatoes, pickles and pickled onions; confections to celebrate Swiss National Day (Aug 1)

“I might be done with cheese after this week in Switzerland,” I joked to the waitress. She looked at me with consternation. “Oh no, I could never be done with cheese!”

From soft to extra-hard, holey to solid, in all shades of white, amber and yellow, the Swiss love their cheese and produce about 450 different varieties of it. Whether melted in fondue pots or simply sliced in thin sheets and eaten atop bread, cheese is ubiquitous on menus and the core of most traditional Swiss dishes. Fondue is fairly common in the US so I bypassed that, but for a (relatively) less intense cheese option, you can order raclette, which is both a type of cheese and a dish featuring this cheese. The cheese round is heated, then scraped (from French racler, meaning “to scrape”) onto the diner’s plate, and usually served with boiled potatoes, pickles and pickled onions. Another popular Swiss dish is rösti, or grated, fried potatoes similar to hash browns. Be warned that if you order rösti, you will often get an entire plateful of potatoes, in the shape of the frying pan. The rösti can come topped with cheese, speck, onions or other condiments.

For those craving a sugar high, Switzerland’s other strong suit is their chocolates and sweets. If you are traveling in Zürich, be sure to grab some luxemburgerli, a confection produced exclusively by Confiserie Sprüngli. The luxemburgerli are delightfully airy, and look like miniature macarons about 1″ in diameter, with a sugar-based biscuit top and bottom, and creamy filling in the center. Traditional flavors include chocolate, vanilla, champagne and cappucino, and you can also get seasonal variations like lemon and raspberry. I tried the hazelnut and cassis (currant), and both were delicate flavor bombs, chock full of fresh, natural ingredients. Confiserie Sprüngli also produces fine chocolate products; don’t forget to try the Truffes du Jour.
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Food in Pop Culture Through the Lens of Marshmallow Peeps

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“You might be too distracted to notice the first time through, but there is actually a lot of food imagery used in the Telephone music video.” And so, for the first time, I scrutinized a Lady Gaga video not for the outrageously skimpy outfits, but for the usage of food items. At the end of the ten minutes, our class was taken aback at the number of product placements in the film short. “It’s just a big ad for Virgin, Honey Buns and Polaroid, isn’t it?” The video makes frequent use of ersatz, convenience products like WonderBread and Miracle Whip. “Lady Gaga is well aware of her status as a highly commercial icon, and makes no pretense of acting otherwise. In a sense, she has tricked you into watching a 10-minute long ad masquerading as music video, one that you will now send to all your friends.” And what’s with the Diet Coke can hair rollers? In modern society, the panopticon of body image compels women to diet and lose weight, even without explicit pressure. She is trapped by both an interior and exterior prison.

Our professor was Fabio Parasecoli, from the department of nutrition, food studies and public health at NYU, and he deftly guided us through the semiotics of food symbolism and a post-structuralist analysis of consumer body image perceptions. Power relations are negotiated through the acceptance or refusal of food, and race and sex differences are mediated through cooking and eating food. Food embodies the person who prepared it, as seen in the rejection of the “AIDS Burger” in True Blood, and it can be used as cultural capital to differentiate yourself or elevate your social status. At the consumerist extreme, food is produced for a society of spectacle, with much of food programming on TV designed for people who will never pick up a knife or walk into a kitchen.
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