Sausage

No cranberries. No pecans. And forget the canned pumpkin. Celebrating America’s most foodie of holidays while abroad certainly poses its challenges. But by jove, we were going to try our darndest. The email was sent out to the class: “The 4th Thursday of November is a national holiday in the USA, a day originally to remember and celebrate the hospitality that the Native Americans showed the pilgrims during their first winter. Without the Native Americans sharing their knowledge of native crops, of squash, corn etc, the pilgrims may not have survived. (Whether the Native Americans may have later regreted this generousity is another story.)” A list of suggested dishes was provided, with the invitation to choose one and bring it to the Thanksgiving potluck. Without giving it too much thought, I volunteered to make the stuffing. After all, the StoveTop version takes six minutes to make; how difficult can this possibly be?

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.