A Cheesy Brunch in the Alps
| Summer is a wonderful time to go hiking in the Swiss mountains. Many farmers are preparing to bring the cows down into the valley again after their summer stay up on the alp. Frau Lotti von Bergen is one of them. |
'CHEESY SATISFACTION IN THE ALPS'
[FT Weekend, 6th September 2003]
Frau Lotti von Bergen understands about job satisfaction. The name (‘Lotti of the Mountains’) couldn’t be more fitting, for during the summer months she lives up on the alp above Meiringen (spiritual home of meringues and Sherlock Holmes) with her husband, two sons, 39 dairy cows, 9 pigs, half a dozen goats and a few chickens. ‘I love it here’, she admits cheerfully ‘but you need to have been brought up to it. My father was a farmer too, and I’ve been coming up on the alp during the summer months for as long as I can remember.’
Transhumance – the moving of animals up to their summer pastures – is very much alive and well in the Swiss Alps. As the steep slopes start to shed their snow and the ski-ing season comes to a halt, the high alpine pastures slowly regain some of their greenery. The cows, stabled down in the valley on winter rations, are readied for their annual (busman’s) holiday. Some time in the middle of June, depending on the weather, they are walked up from their winter quarters, their horns decked gaily with flowers, their burnished bells sounding sonorously as they make their stately way upwards. Here they stay, grazing on the rich grass, clover and countless wild flowers that carpet the impossibly steep hillsides, until September when they go back down into the valley again.
Frau von Bergen’s day begins at 4.30 a.m. when she and her husband Rudolf get up for the milking. Our day, by comparison, got off to a leisurely start: we were detailed to be at the cable car station in Meiringen at 8.20 a.m. The cable car operator had traded his winter sporting gear for a snappy pair of Bermudas. He allowed us a brief blast of Landlermusik [umlaut on a] (Swiss country music) on the radio to get us in the groove. Then we soared up into the heights, and found ourselves on the Mägisalp plateau some 1400 metres above sea level (ca. 4200 feet). ‘Schone [umlaut over o] Wanderung!’ (‘have a good walk!’) he admonished, as the hikers in stout boots, red socks and rucksacks spilled out of the cabin and set off for a day’s rambling.
Our own mission was a bit different: we were after some mountain cheese. We made our way over to the Bergens’ chalet, the classic, stripped pine construction, beautifully carved and decorated, groaning with petunias and geraniums and festooned with burnished cowbells. Through the stable door we could see that the cheese-making process was already underway. The milk from the previous evening’s milking and from the morning is tipped into a huge copper cauldron held by a stout cast-iron arm. In the hearth a lively wood fire crackles and burns, giving out a fearsome heat. The cauldron is swung over the fire, the starter is added and the mixture is stirred.
Once the curds start to separate from the whey, Herr von Bergen grips two corners of a large cheesecloth firmly between his teeth. The other two corners are dunked in the whey to moisten them, and then wrapped around a bendy metal rod to form a sort of huge fishing net. He leans into the cauldron and scoops up a load of curds, lifts them high, relinquishes the metal rod and gives the cheesecloth bag a bit of a squeeze before transferring it to the plastic cheese ‘corsets’ waiting on the other side of the cheese kitchen. He leans heavily on the curds to make sure they are well ensconced, and repeats the process a couple more times. Every cheese is dated and numbered - today the 242nd cheese of the season is coming off the production line.
Except that this is no production line, but a genuinely artisanal, alpine cheese-making operation which has changed little in centuries. It’s a marvellously low-tech and extremely efficient operation. On the wall hang battered but eminently serviceable colanders and plastic ‘dustpans’ for scooping up the whey. In the corner is a faithful old four-burner electric stove. Plastic thermometers hang on ropes. The system of pulleys and ropes to swing the cauldron around and its beautiful wooden cover were all made by Herr von Bergen, as were the weights for pressing the cheese, which consist of a couple of impressive, jagged boulders sitting on huge wooden planks. Switzerland has managed to negotiate some neat bilateral agreements with the EU, but the long arm of the BFP (Brussels food police), with its obsessive health regulations designed to fit the industrial food production model, seems mercifully far away.
Later we breakfasted on Hobelkäse, one-year-old mountain cheese, fresh goats’ cheese, freshly patted sweet butter and rye bread, all washed down with huge beakers of milk straight from the cows. We asked Frau von Bergen what she would do with the rest of her day. Her sunburnt face broke into a broad smile: first she would check on some calves out on the hill, then she would clean out the chalet and prepare lunch, in the evening she would milk again, and tomorrow she would make more cheese. That’s job satisfaction for you.
