by Diccon Bewes
Successful advertising aside, there is a much stronger reason why the Swiss eat so much locally made cheese: they are fiercely protective of their country, its traditions and everything it produces. Any products, from fresh fruit to hand-carved wooden toys, that are Swiss in origin are always clearly marked to that effect. Farmers, manufacturers and retailers all know that’s the quickest way to a sale. Swiss strawberries or cherries may be twice the price of Spanish imports, but when they’re in season, the Swiss ones are the only ones in demand. It’s the same with cheese. To the Swiss mind there’s little sense in eating something French or British when you can buy something made just down the road.
And that really is the point. Switzerland is a small country with small cities, so that no one lives very far from the country side, with all its rich produce and traditions. In his heart, every Swiss man (okay, and woman) is still a country boy, no matter if he was born and grew up in Zurich. Cow beauty contests and yodelling competitions may be ridiculed by some city folk, but they are an integral part of country life. And I suspect that even the Swiss dismissers secretly love the fact that such traditions still exist. They’re what make Switzerland the way it is, different from any other country. And that’s something every Swiss person is intensely proud of, and rightly so.
SWISS WATCHING TIP NO 8: THE PERFECT GUEST
When it comes to eating with the Swiss, there are three crucial factors to being a good guest: the invitation, the present and the participation. Swiss people rarely welcome outsiders into their homes, so when you are invited for a meal it’s most likely in a restaurant. A Swiss invitation means that the guest pays nothing, and it’s not the done thing to suggest contributing something. Going Dutch in Switzerland is only an option when both parties have agreed to meet for the meal, rather than one inviting the other.
To Swiss people, this is all clear and logical; to outsiders, it can be a social minefield. Say it’s your birthday and you’d like to celebrate by eating out with friends. In Britain, it’s the norm for everyone to divide the bill so that you, as the birthday boy, don’t pay anything even though you organised the meal. In Switzerland it’s the exact opposite: you pay the whole bill. It’s quite a shock for a Swiss person to be invited out for a British celebration, only to realise that not only does he have to pay for himself, he also has to pay for a share of the host’s meal. It’s an even bigger shock for a foreigner to invite his Swiss friends out and end up paying the lot. A Saturday night out can be a pricey affair if you don’t phrase the suggestion correctly, and birthday celebrations can run to hundreds of francs.
Balancing this culture clash isn’t always easy. For example, the first time my parents went to Liechtenstein to meet Gregor’s family, all 18 of us were invited out for lunch by Hans, Gregor’s father. My father wanted to split the bill with Hans as a way of thanking him for three days of hospitality, but we told him he wouldn’t stand a chance. Hans had invited everyone, so he would pay and my father wouldn’t even notice when it happened. Sure enough, the bill was paid as if it had never existed and my father knew nothing until it was too late. That’s how it’s done in Switzerland.
If you do actually get invited to a Swiss home for a meal, don’t forget to take a present. Nothing too hard about that, except that the present says everything about you, your host and the level of invitation. So going round for coffee or tea might warrant a little something from the patisserie or chocolate shop. Move up to an Apéro and you could take a bottle of wine (preferably Swiss) or some flowers. Either would also be fine for a dinner party, though you might upgrade the value, but if that dinner involves any sort of celebration, the world is your oyster. As hosts we have received all manner of gifts, such as a tea set, cinema tickets, espresso spoons, books, luxury mini food hampers, even a cuddly toy. All this is partly because the Swiss are generous when thanking you for opening up your home to them; it can also be a substitute for reciprocating that invitation. No one expects a thank-you note for the gifts; but as a host, you rarely receive a post-party thank-you either. After all, you have already been thanked with a present on the night.
The last part of being the perfect guest is remembering to be just that. Guests do not help in Swiss homes. Never set foot in the kitchen, never refill drinks, never clear the plates from the table. You can offer to help once, which will be politely declined, then you must sit back and relax, or at least appear to. A second offer, or helping unasked, implies that the hosts are not sufficiently organised and cannot cope on their own. Do that and there won’t be a second invitation, even if you waited months (maybe years) for the first one. But perhaps, at some point in the future, your initial offer of help, given half-heartedly because by then you know the answer, will be accepted. Then you’ll know that you are accepted. You are in. All you have to do is make sure your table manners are up to scratch, but that’s a whole separate minefield.
NINE
WHERE THE CHOCOLATE COMES FROM
Anational dish is so much a part of a country’s image, both at home and abroad, that it becomes an integral factor in the stereotyping of every country. England has fish and chips, Spain its paella, while it’s haggis in Scotland and a hamburger in the States. For Switzerland it’s fondue, which is so popular with the Swiss that they don’t just have the cheese-and-wine variety. There’s also fondue chinoise, where thinly sliced beef is dropped into hot broth to cook and eaten with a variety of sauces; on high days and holidays, it makes a popular Swiss family meal. Or there’s fondue bourguignonne, which uses hot oil not broth to cook the meat. But while others love fondue, I fon-don’t. Except for one, chocolate fondue, where pieces of fruit or cake are used for dipping. The ultimate Swiss dessert is the perfect combination of the national dish and the product for which the Swiss are possibly most famous. After all, milk chocolate is a Swiss invention, and for that we have Daniel Peter to thank. In my book he should be a saint, so I decided to make a pilgrimage to his home town.
WHERE MILK CHOCOLATE WAS BORN
Vevey isn’t the sort of place you associate with a creation that has improved moods around the world for decades, or with being the headquarters of the world’s biggest food company.1 It’s just a small town on the north shore of Lake Geneva, not far from Montreux (see the map of Romandie on page 184), with a huge market square and views of the French Alps. In fact, apart from being the worldwide HQ of Nestlé, Vevey does have one other claim to fame: it’s the last resting place of Charlie Chaplin, whose statue graces the lakeshore promenade. The funny thing is that he isn’t the only great Briton to be buried in the tiny cemetery of Corsier-sur-Vevey. His neighbour is James Mason and across the road is Graham Greene, making this a corner of Switzerland that will be forever England. I wonder if they all liked milk chocolate or just the sunny climate and lake views.
The biggest building in town isn’t the prettiest but, considering the size and scope of Nestlé, it isn’t a corporate monstrosity either. Founded by German immigrant Henri Nestlé in 1866,2 the company initially specialised in condensed milk and infant milk powder, a product that still causes it grief from campaigners. These days Nestlé owns so many brands it’s practically a one-stop supermarket: Perrier, Mövenpick, Maggi, Felix and Buitoni to name a few. In the late 1980s it swallowed Rowntree, one of Britain’s oldest confectioners, 60 years after Daniel Peter’s chocolate company had suffered the same fate. That was perhaps rather apt, given that the invention of milk chocolate was the result of Peter and Nestlé being neighbours.
The son of a butcher, Peter had been a candle maker until he got sucked into the world of chocolate when he married the daughter of François-Louis Cailler, who already owned a chocolate factory locally. In those days chocolate wasn’t the creamy, silky delight so loved today, but essentially cocoa paste mixed with sugar. And it wasn’t cheap. Peter’s brainwave was to add milk, making the chocolate more palatable and reducing costs. With no colonies Switzerland had to buy the necessary sugar and cocoa, but it had gallons of milk ready and waiting. P
eter’s first trials failed because ordinary milk is too watery, but luckily he had Nestlé next door with his thicker, condensed milk. A match made in heaven, or at least in Vevey in 1875.
The next few decades cemented Switzerland’s reputation as the producer of the best chocolate in the world, helped by well-heeled tourists from abroad taking it home. Much like tourists today, though in far smaller quantities. Messrs Cailler and Peter, long since merged into one firm, were joined in Neuchâtel by Mr Suchard and in Bern by Mr Lindt3 and Mr Tobler. Of all these brands, Tobler’s is perhaps the most famous. There can’t be a duty-free shop anywhere that doesn’t sell his triangular creation, its shape inspired by a pyramid of dancers at the Folies Bergère.4 Every single one of the seven billion triangles of Toblerone produced annually is still made in Bern,5 even though the company now belongs to US food giant Kraft.
Despite Vevey’s place in chocolate’s history, there isn’t much of the old brown magic to see or taste. For that you have to go inland to Broc, the home of the oldest brand of Swiss chocolate still in production today, Cailler.6 To have a chocolate factory stuck out in the middle of nowhere northeast of Gruyères might seem a little odd, until you realise it has everything a Victorian chocolatier needed; except the cocoa beans, of course. Running water to power the mills, a train line and crucially lots of Gruyères cows with milk on tap. The factory, which opened in 1898, is still the primary producer of Cailler chocolate, and it’s well worth visiting.
Cailler is not a brand that’s exported very much, so abroad it lacks the name recognition of Lindt or Suchard, but for those with a discerning palate it’s apparently the best of the best. I have brought my family to this temple of chocolate heaven in the hope of seeing it being made. Sadly, the tour no longer includes any of the production process, thanks to health and safety concerns, but at least the whole place smells of chocolate. With the receptionist’s promise of a ‘wide disgustation’ at the end, we set off on our non-factory tour.
A rustically dressed woman guides us through the process of getting from cocoa beans to a bar of Cailler. Each year this one factory consumes 4 million kilograms of cocoa and 6.8 million kilograms of sugar, which gets mixed with 7.2 million litres of milk from 58 local farms. When you have a bite of Cailler you really are eating a piece of Switzerland. Interestingly enough, it is the only Swiss chocolate still made with fresh milk from local cows; the rest use the powdered variety. The milk, that is, not the cows.
For chocoholics there can be few better sights than a room of tables covered in massed ranks of chocolates. This is the ‘disgustation’, an all-you-can-taste buffet that puts most to shame, and we are momentarily stunned by the prospect. Two seconds later we descend on the first samples and savour each one. Every type of chocolate made by Cailler, from white bars to dark pralines, is here to taste, though after six or seven different sorts you do start to get a little queasy. Or maybe it was the fact that the eighth one was called Femina. It’s one of Cailler’s oldest brands of pralines (launched in 1902), but the name just doesn’t do it for me. It sounds like something you expect to buy in Boots the Chemist and certainly not something you’d want to put in your mouth. I skip the Femina in favour of Frigor, admittedly not much better on the name front and doing nothing to enhance chocolate’s reputation as a sex substitute. Any man would be well advised never to give a woman the two brands together.
A NATION OF CHOCOHOLICS
Cailler is but one of many brands in Switzerland, the country with the highest chocolate consumption in the world. At 12 kilograms per head, 1.1 kilograms more than the UK,7 it’s quite jaw dropping, though preferably when your mouth isn’t full of chocolate. Hidden with that headline – or waistline – figure are two interesting facts. Every year almost 30,000 tonnes8 of chocolate are imported into Switzerland, which seems rather like taking coals to Newcastle, but maybe it’s all of the cooking variety. Secondly, that 12 kilograms is a sales figure (no one has checked how much the Swiss actually eat), so it includes the chocolate visitors buy to take home. Having seen a group of Japanese strip a supermarket of every last bar, I think a fair share is bought by tourists. Or indeed, as the website of Chocosuisse9 puts it, ‘those who drive over the border just to buy Swiss chocolate’.10 All those Germans stocking up on Lindt for the winter. Perhaps that’s why Swiss supermarkets carry such a huge range. My local Coop isn’t that big and probably has few tourists as customers, but it stocks 84 different types. And that’s not counting the likes of Twix and Mars; that’s just normal 100-gram bars of the black, brown and white stuff.
Domestic consumption, however, only accounts for 40 per cent of Swiss chocolate, with the rest being sent abroad, where Germany narrowly beats Britain into second place11 (as always) as the primary export market. The world loves Swiss chocolate. Nevertheless, as iconic as it is, chocolate is really quite a small industry in Switzerland. It employs just over 4500 people, has an annual turnover of 1.8 billion francs and, most surprisingly of all, accounts for only 1 per cent of the world’s cocoa harvest.12 In this case size counts for a lot, and small is more beautiful.
Although Swiss brands are some of the best known, do they taste better? I decide to conduct a taste test of six brands of chocolate, four Swiss and two British, to see if there’s a clear difference. Choco-snobs maintain that only the dark stuff (with 70 per cent cocoa) is worth eating, but given that three-quarters of all the chocolate consumed in Switzerland is milk,13 I stick to that. Alongside three Swiss brands (Cailler, Lindt and Frey) I include Coop’s cheapest own label, Prix Garantie, and two British brands, Dairy Milk and Green & Black’s. My 40 willing volunteers in Bern are mainly Swiss but about a third of them are expats, just to make things more interesting. Each chocolate is tasted blind (that is, without knowing the brand), then scored for flavour and texture. And the winner is...
Cailler, and by a clear margin. Obviously using real milk, not powdered, is a success because people really can taste the difference. Perhaps the more surprising result is that the Coop Prix Garantie chocolate comes second overall, the expats rating it as good as Cailler and the Swiss putting it on a par with Lindt. It’s a quarter the price of its rivals, showing that not everything in Switzerland has to be expensive to be good. As for the Brits, they fare badly in comparison. Despite a few Dairy Milk fans (including two Swiss people), both British brands come last, even among the expats.
IT’S CIOCCOLATA IN TICINO
Cailler failed to give me a Willy Wonka moment by seeing inside a chocolate factory, but finding an alternative isn’t that easy. Having closed its Neuchâtel factory, Suchard is now made in Germany, France and Austria, with milk coming from as far away as New Zealand;14 the purple Milka cow is definitely not Swiss. Tobler and Lindt don’t allow tours of their factories, for any one of a number of reasons. Just when it seems that all is lost, my golden ticket comes on the Chocosuisse website. Tucked away in its pages is a list of five possible tours, though one is at Cailler and three others are only for groups, or on Wednesdays, or with advance written permission. That leaves one last hope, so I get on a train and venture to the deep south. The great names of Swiss chocolate may be French or German, but I am on a four-hour journey from Bern to Lugano. A surprise, but a pleasant one as I will get to sample both Swiss Italian life and some cioccolata. Ticino here I come!
In a country full of anachronisms and contradictions, Ticino is perhaps one of the greatest. This southernmost canton looks, feels and sounds 100 per cent Italian but is very much part of Switzerland. You can tell it’s not Italy because the streets are clean, the trains run on time and the waiters speak German with some show of willingness. But spend a few hours here and you’ll realise it’s not totally Swiss. Your bus driver is likely to stop mid-route at a bar for a quick espresso; the newspapers businessmen read in the piazza cafés are Corriere della Sera not the NZZ; an early evening must is the see-and-be-seen passegiata or languid stroll through town; and every car driver thinks he really is Italian. This wouldn’t be a problem but for t
he fact that most of the pedestrians are from northern Switzerland and expect the rules to be the same. In the rest of the country pedestrians have right of way on crossings, but in Ticino it’s survival of the fastest – a culture clash that leads to many near-misses and a crash or two.
The German-speaking Swiss don’t come for the thrill of crossing the road or for the food, which they can get in their local Italian, but for the scenery and sunshine. As a Swiss German visitor, not only do you get palm trees, blue skies, great ice cream and shimmering lakes, you can still use francs, survive without speaking Italian and not worry about pickpockets. Most guidebooks call Ticino, or Tessin as it’s known by the rest of Switzerland, the Swiss Riviera but it’s really the Swiss Jersey: a safe bet for Swiss in search of a sunny break without dodgy food or funny money. The big difference is that you can reach Ticino by train.
From Lake Lucerne the rails turn south towards the rocky mountains of the Gotthard massif, with the valley narrowing as the hillsides get steeper and the train climbs steadily. You duck in and out of tunnels, sometimes coming out facing the other way, the train having curled round inside the rock. Then one long tunnel and you’re south of the Alps. The air seems clearer, the sun brighter and the houses more colourful, or maybe that’s just because you can start speaking Italian. All of that takes two hours from Zurich, thanks to the Gotthard tunnel, which was hailed as a modern marvel when opened in 1882. Come back in 2017 and the trip will be even shorter, as the Swiss are boring the world’s longest rail tunnel, the Neue Eisenbahn-Alpentransversale (NEAT).15 At 57 kilometres long and costing 12 billion francs,16 NEAT shows that when it comes to building tunnels, the Swiss don’t do things by halves.