Swiss Watching: Inside the Land of Milk and Money

by Diccon Bewes

LSD In November 1938, Albert Hofmann was a mild-mannered Basel chemist working at Sandoz Laboratories, now part of pharmaceutical giant Novartis. He was researching rye fungi to find a cure for migraine, but accidentally discovered LSD, though it took him five years to realise its mind-bending qualities.

no wonder the Swiss watch industry is worth $19.9 billion in exports alone.22 And it’s all Calvin’s fault. In his quest to make Geneva the perfect puritan city, he banned jewellery in 1541, so forcing craftsmen to turn to a new trade: watches.

La Chaux-de-Fonds, the spiritual home of Swiss watchmaking

Le Corbusier,

It’s a traditional dish that’s been around for ever, but it’s usually a winter comfort food, their version of stew and dumplings or shepherd’s pie. It’s generally only tourists who eat fondue when the thermometer hits double digits, and in that the Swiss have got it right. Who wants to be eating hot cheese when it’s 30ºC in the shade? But much to the constant amusement of the locals, that’s exactly what hordes of tourists do.

Equally shocking, no doubt, is having to watch visitors break the three cardinal rules of eating fondue: Firstly, and most importantly, your fork should never touch your tongue, teeth or lips as you eat, purely because it has to go back into the pot every time. Secondly, don’t drink anything fizzy, especially sparkling water, as you eat, otherwise what is anyway a fairly indigestible meal will turn to lead. It’s more normal to drink white wine or black tea, by which the Swiss mean tea that isn’t green or herbal; in English, we just call it tea. Lastly, once all the fondue has gone, the bottom of the pot is encrusted with a layer of cheese hardened to a crisp by being closer to the heat. Never leave la religieuse uneaten, but don’t take it all for yourself. For most Swiss it’s the best part of the meal and is there to be shared.

Instead, my mouth was dazzled by this firm yet creamy cheese with a tangy, almost herby flavour. In my naïveté I thought I had found something special. Of course it was nothing new to our Swiss dinner guests, all of whom have been enjoying Appenzeller for centuries, though they politely let me relish my ‘discovery’. It left me wondering why the only Swiss cheese we get abroad is Emmental or Gruyère.

Mother’s Day in Switzerland is not the moveable feast it is in Britain, where it precedes and is linked to Easter so that it wanders around March like a lost lamb. Swiss Mother’s Day is always on the second Sunday in May and it’s a big deal.

haggis in Scotland

HQ of Nestlé, Vevey does have one other claim to fame: the tiny cemetery of Corsier-sur-Vevey is the last resting place of Charlie Chaplin, whose statue graces the lakeshore promenade.

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.

Not many Swiss German words have made it into the English language. Muesli is one, and is a good example of the Swiss German habit of ending words with -li. It’s merely a way of making the noun a diminutive, but apparently there are an awful lot of small things in Switzerland. For example, a Gipfeli is a croissant, a Wägeli is a shopping trolley and, my favourite, a Bitzeli is a little bit.

Basel’s most famous product is a hard spiced and iced biscuit, known as Läckerli

For the Swiss, the cervelat is a prerequisite at any barbecue and they consume 160 million every year.

Thurgau is ‘the orchard of Switzerland’,24 though Swiss Germans often call it Mostindien, from Most in Swiss German meaning apple juice and the canton being shaped like India, albeit a slightly deformed, pre-independence India.

Then there’s the third way, the practical, which is the choice of most foreigners when presented with a plate of ballooning leaves. For strict followers of Swiss lettiquette it’s verging on blasphemy as it’s so unrefined; for the uneducated it’s the easiest option.

But private companies took up the challenge and laid the lines, dug the tunnels and built the bridges that would conquer the Alps. Ironically enough, once the Swiss realised what an asset the railways were, they nationalised them. A referendum in 1898 approved the creation of the Swiss Federal Railways.5 British Rail wouldn’t be born for another 50 years, only to be abolished within another 50. Britain may have invented the railway, but it doesn’t know how to run one.

Rigi is not the tallest, the steepest or even the most beautiful mountain, but it’s been pulling in the crowds ever since visitors have been coming to Switzerland. Not for the mountain itself, but for the views. The ‘Queen of the Mountains’ sits like an island at the heart of Switzerland, surrounded on almost every side by the waters of Lakes Lucerne and Zug (see map of Lake Lucerne here).

Jass is similar to bridge, though with completely different cards, and is a national obsession, for young and old alike.

Café Schuh. It’s been delighting guests with its gâteaux since 1818, and shows no sign of losing its touch. True, the décor was modern when the Berlin Wall was still standing, and the live piano music can verge on being too schmaltzy-waltzy, but the cakes are divine. The summer terrace overlooks Interlaken’s vast village green, the Höhematte, a favoured landing spot for paragliders.

This is the Lauterbrunnen Valley, one of the most dramatic in Switzerland. For Tolkein it was the inspiration for Rivendell, the idyllic home of the elves,

Just before reaching the cliff top (and, as a result, car-free) Wengen, there’s the best view of the whole valley framed by towering mountains on both sides. A few metres before this panorama appears from behind the trees, beside the track there’s a little sign with a picture of a camera, all so you don’t miss the photo opportunity. So thoughtful. It is but the first of many great views, so that by the time you reach the halfway point of Kleine Scheidegg, you might need to insert a second memory card.

The Eiger is the first and most famous of a mountainous trio; its neighbour is Mönch, and then comes the tallest of the three, Jungfrau. Together they dominate the Bernese Oberland skyline, clearly visible even from Bern city centre. In English – Ogre, Monk and Virgin –

They are proof that you have crossed a linguistic Grand Canyon, known locally as the Röstigraben, literally the ‘fried-potato trench’ (see the map of Romandie here). The odd name refers to the fact that the German-speaking Swiss love their Rösti (grated fried potato eaten with anything) and the French speakers don’t.

Two wartime army leaders, as befits a militaristic nation obsessed with self-defence: Henri Guisan (Second World War) and Jürg Jenatsch (Thirty Years’ War). Two who were born abroad, mirroring the 25 per cent of the population who are not Swiss: Albert Einstein and Jean Calvin. Two men of words, just as Switzerland itself is a grand talking shop: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henry Dunant, though he at least acted on his words.6 Two pioneers, fitting for a nation of innovators: Albert Hoffman (the LSD man7) and Alfred Escher, who founded Credit Suisse and funded the early railways. And the last two? They are perhaps the most intriguing of all. No sign of William Tell, or General Dufour, or even such Swiss notables as Le Corbusier, Carl Jung or Max Frisch. No, the last two are both women. And both fictional. I’m not quite sure what it says about the role of women in Swiss history that the two most famous examples never actually existed, but Heidi and Helvetia both make the list.

to use her if she’d kept to her real name and not shortened it to Heidi; somehow Adelheid lacks that romantic ring, sounding far too Teutonic to be cute.

A German studies scholar found a story about a little girl who lives with her grandfather, gets sent away to a foreign land, suffers terrible homesickness, but lives happily ever after once she is back in the mountains. And her name was … Adelaide (which can also be written as Adelheid, often shortened to Heidi). This version was written by a German author, Hermann Adam von Kamp, in 1830, half a century before Johanna Spyri wrote her Heidi, the one we know and love. Did Johanna plagiarise a forgotten work? It was an outrage comparable with suggesting that Shakespeare copied Marlowe, and the penknives came out immediately. The scholar behind the discovery was cast as Switzerland’s public enemy number one, but remained adamant that Heidi was a second-hand version of a German original. She might have had a Swiss mother, but her father was clearly Herr von Kamp. This is possibly an argument that will never end as,