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Just out, published by Betty Bossi Verlag AG Zurich and with editorial content produced jointly with the Swiss national tourism board MySwitzerland, is The Swiss Cookbook.
It’s a glossy, 312-page, ring-bound production, richly illustrated and in felicitously good English. As far as the translation goes, in a relatively superficial perusal the only false note […]

A recent op-ed column in the New York Times characterized Switzerland as a country ”occupied by lederhosen-wearing holey-cheese eaters.” The context was a piece about US health care reform, and actually the writer expressed very positive opinions about the Swiss health care system. Given the rabid nature of the debate in the […]

In the run-up to and immediately following Geneva’s Wine Harvest Festival in Russin on September 19 and 20, 2009, a few other countryside-themed events in Geneva caught my eye. But first: did you know that if you send in a picture you take at this year’s Russin festival you could win dinner […]

 
Zurich-based Martin Weiss is a Swiss journalist, writer, teacher and award-winning documentary film maker whose big publishing breakthrough started in 2005 with his Urchuchi series - four books (so far) about authentic Swiss cooking.
Urchuchi (oor-hoo-hee; pronounce the hoo and hee as if you were speaking Spanish) is a term, freshly-minted by Weiss himself, meaning original, […]

On the sausage trail through Switzerland - that’s the title, as translated by me for the purposes of this blog, of a German-language book I’ve just discovered.
Published in 2006, this richly illustrated 136-pager by Fritz von Gunten is full of salient facts. Did you know that per capita the Swiss eat six kilos of sausage […]

One of the biggest joys of summer are all the herbs growing in the garden - or if you’re like me and living in a city apartment right now, on the balcony.
At the garden center, it’s amazing what you can buy for around 100 francs, it fills the balcony (assuming said balcony is […]

I got to know Alan Parkinson through his bread. He brought some to a pot-luck lunch we were both attending. It was a splendid fat oval braid (see photo below), still warm from the oven. I noticed during the meal that the mostly French guests kept breaking off just one more little […]

Eating flowers may be ultra in at the moment, but it’s hardly new. Without realizing it we routinely eat many flowers, like broccoli, cauliflower, and artichokes.
A classic side dish in Italy is zucchini flowers, dipped in light batter and deep-fried. (This dish is also delicious when the flowers are stuffed with a herby […]

Last Sunday morning, out jogging early in a virtually deserted Geneva City, I came across four English-speakers walking in the middle of the street. Drunk out of their minds, they were apparently staggering toward some reference point they could still manage to hold on to in what remained of their consciousness, perhaps a […]

Recently I read that great chefs around the world, when asked what they’d have for their last meal, never said something like salt-grilled sea bream with balsamic caramel or other sorts of things they cook. Instead, depending on where they were from, they’d say pasta, baguette with cheese, fish and chips, a hamburger, etc. This […]