Pasta

Do you know what Italian company was single-handedly responsible for changing the texture of America’s pasta?

Barilla was founded in 1877 by Pietro Barillo Sr., who began the business as a simple pasta shop in Parma. The company is now on its fourth generation of family owners, and has been almost continuously privately owned, save for a gap in the ‘70s when Barilla was bought out by U.S. multinational W.R. Grace. In 1990, Barilla began aggressively expanding into international markets, through the acquisition of local pasta companies and the development of manufacturing plants abroad. This included the creation of the first American plant in Ames, Iowa in 1999, with a second plant following in upstate New York.

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.