What do the Alps taste like? Not the rocks and snow, of course, but the dishes that are the products of an evolved and still evolving alpine culinary tradition. The answer, as Swiss ethnologist Isabelle Raboud-Schüle explained recently on the RTS radio broadcast Tribu, is anything but sweet.
Author of a chapter called “Quel serait le goût des alpes?” in a recent book on the feel, taste, smells, sounds and sights of Europe’s mightiest mountain range, Raboud-Schüle cautions that any talk of the Alps as a whole is bound to be a simplification. The Alps touch eight countries, many more dialects, and over a hundred long-inhabited valleys. Some areas that share flora and fauna may be divided by language; others that share a language may offer a variety of different local approaches to agriculture, animal husbandry and food production.
Acid rocks
But if we can generalize, then one of the strongest candidates for “the” taste of the Alps is acidity. Acidity not from citrus fruit, but from lactic fermentation. It’s one of humankind’s oldest tools in food preservation, dating back to long before we had refrigerators, frozen food shops or supermarkets, and used in preserving vegetables, milk, and making bread.
Cabbage, though today associated mostly with Canton Bern, was once cultivated all throughout the Alps, and locally preserved – or rather, transformed – into sauerkraut through lactic fermentation with the addition of nothing more than salt and water.
Lactic fermentation was also used in cheese production. While modern cheese production makes use of stable, industrially produced acids, in the past, whey – the liquid that separates from the thicker milk curd used for cheese – was allowed to ferment, resulting in an extremely acidic liquid used to make a cheese known as sérac in the French-speaking Alps, but perhaps more commonly known by the Italian name, ricotta.
Bread made from rye, a grain tolerant of higher altitudes and lower temperatures than wheat, was traditionally made in large quantities once or twice a year. Rye bread requires more time to rise than standard wheat breads, and during the process of rising takes on a distinctly sharp acidic taste. In modern times acidity has been toned down in industrial processing, but the true, traditional taste of the Alps has a surprising bite.
The blessing of bitterness
Another prominent taste is bitterness, most present in the many bitter alcohols produced in Alpine regions. The taste comes from the alpine flora, much of which produces pungent bitterness in its short growing season. These bitter plants have always been used medicinally, and with some good reason, as bitterness stimulates the stomach secretions and helps us digest. More recently, Alpine tourism has helped solidify the association between the mountains and their flora, as well as the marketing of bitter digestifs like Appenzeller Alpenbitter, which features the celebrated Berggasthaus Aescher-Wildkirchli prominently on the label.
And not only alcohols: Ricola herb drops are one of Switzerland’s most famous commercial exports, which the company says are made of 13 herbs including peppermint, sage, yarrow and horehound, whose Latin name, marrubium, is derived from Hebrew words meaning “much bitterness”.
Sweetness before sugar
And what about sweetness? Isn’t Switzerland famous for chocolate? In a way, bitterness is a part of that story, too. The raw material cocoa is incredibly bitter, as anyone who has tried Lindt’s Excellence line of dark chocolate with 85%, 90% or a mouth-puckering 100% cocoa will know. Gourmet dark chocolates like these are a step in the opposite from Lindt’s original innovation, milk chocolate, which depends then and now not just on the availability of milk, but of sugar. In Europe sugar only became inexpensive and widely available with the start of industrial sugar beet cultivation starting in the early 19th century.
But long before the Swiss began turning Mesoamerica’s bitter cocoa fruit into delightfully sweet milk chocolate, Alpine farmers were creating sweetness by other, if more limited, means. As Raboud-Schüle explains, concentrated juices of apple or pear, reduced to 10% of their original volume, were a thick, resinous source of sweetness throughout the year. Grapes, as well. Grape production in Switzerland goes back to ancient times, and those grapes not destined for wine, were sun dried as raisins or hung to dry slowly in barns until Christmas, when the rare treat could be used in crepes, cakes, or even crêpes au sang, essentially cakes made with the blood from a cow or sheep slaughtered at the beginning of winter.