Swiss
Schweizer Küche / Cuisine suisse
Alpine dairy cooking in three languages: cheese melted over heat, potatoes crisped in butter, veal in cream, and oats soaked overnight.
Herders on summer pasture made hard cheese to store milk and melted the ends over a fire, which is where raclette and fondue come from. Rösti fed Bernese farmers before dawn. The cities of Zurich, Basel and Geneva added veal, cream and French refinement; Ticino cooked like Lombardy. In the 1930s the Swiss cheese union promoted fondue into a national dish, and a Zurich doctor's breakfast cereal went round the world as muesli.
Rich but not spiced: cheese, butter and cream carry most dishes, cut with white wine, kirsch, pickles and a little nutmeg. Potatoes are grated, pressed or boiled in their skins rather than mashed. Portions are hearty; seasoning is restrained. Sharing from one pot or one grill is normal, and the ritual of the table matters as much as the food on it.
Countries and regions
German-speaking cantons · Romandy · Valais · Ticino
Dishes 5
- 30 min
Cheese fondue
Käsefondue / Fondue au fromage
Gruyère and Emmentaler melted into white wine with garlic, kirsch and nutmeg, kept bubbling over a burner for bread on long forks.
SwitzerlandEasy
- 13 hr
Rösti
Bernese potato cake: par-boiled potatoes grated coarse and fried in butter into a crisp brown disc with a soft middle.
SwitzerlandEasy
- 35 min
Zürcher Geschnetzeltes
Zurich's sliced veal in a white wine, mushroom and cream sauce, cooked in half an hour and served only ever with rösti.
SwitzerlandMedium
- 50 min
Raclette
Raclette cheese melted and scraped over boiled potatoes with gherkins and pickled onions, at the table over two unhurried hours.
SwitzerlandVery easy
- 8 hr 10 min
Bircher muesli
Birchermüesli
Overnight oats the Swiss way: soaked oats stirred with yoghurt, grated apple, lemon and toasted hazelnuts. Nothing is cooked.
SwitzerlandVery easy