Switzerland
Novel:
Heidi by Johanna Spyri (public domain; available on Google Books and free on Kindle)
Summary: An orphaned Swiss girl named Heidi goes to live
with her gruff, but kind-hearted grandfather in a small cabin in the Swiss
Alps. After a few years of living on the mountain and charming everyone she
meets, she is taken to Frankfurt where she becomes a companion for a sick girl
named Clara, who is confined to a wheelchair. Heidi charms the household staff
(except for the formidable and aptly-named Frau Rottenmeier), and brings liveliness and adventure into the
house with her, but she becomes quite ill herself due to homesickness (which is
apparently a real phenomenon. known as “Swiss sickness” because it was so
common in Swiss soldiers serving in foreign countries), so she is sent home.
Clara comes to visit her on the mountain the next summer and, after a month in
the “life-giving mountain air,” gains the ability to walk again.
I had a picture book of this story I was a little
girl, but I’d never read the unabridged version. The cover of that book had a
cute little tow-headed girl on the cover. It looked something like this:
LIES!
As I have now discovered, Heidi has black hair and dark
eyes. All these book covers with little Shirley Temple look-alikes are completely
inaccurate.
Here are two that actually look like what the book
describes:
Heidi running around in her underwear with goats
Heidi collecting flowers in her apron with goats
I once read a funny review of C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe in which the reviewer described the book as “a
giant advertisement for Turkish Delight.” If that book is an ad for Turkish Delight,
then Heidi is an advertisement for goat’s
milk and Swiss mountains. The Swiss characters drink goat milk constantly - sometimes two pails full per day. So. Much. Goat Milk. There are A LOT of descriptions of the mountains, the
mountain air, the mountain flowers, the breezes through the fir trees, etc.,
etc. They are lovely and idyllic, and mountain air is the cure for pretty much
every ailment – physical, emotional, and spiritual – suffered by the characters
in the book.
Despite this rather idealistic view of the curative properties
of alpine living, I was really impressed with how the book handled some pretty
serious subject matter. Even the “villain,” Frau Rottenmeier, is given some sympathetic
character development so that the reader understands that her harsh behavior stems
from her own fears and narrow-mindedness, not from any kind of real malice. The
gossipy village community, who have long rejected Heidi’s grandfather based on their
own ignorance and misunderstanding of him, readily welcome him back into the
community once they see how he loves and cares for Heidi – again, they are not
bad people; they simply did not understand the whole situation.
There is one particularly touching scene in which Clara’s
doctor visits Heidi on the mountain and admits that, even when surrounded by
such natural beauty, he cannot overcome his grief at his daughter’s death: “Can
you understand, Heidi, that a man may sit here with such a shadow over his eyes
that he cannot feel and enjoy the beauty around him, while the heart grows
doubly sad knowing how beautiful it could be?” While it may seem inappropriate
for an adult man to seek spiritual comfort from an eight-year-old child (and I
think that it is!), Heidi responds by quoting a hymn, and the doctor finds some spiritual comfort in the words. In this scene, the mountain is not a cure-all, but it is
a place of beauty and solace, where one may find oneself closer to God by being
close to nature.
All in all, Heidi
is a lovely book with strong spiritual themes and multiple stories of
redemption and healing. It was written in 1880, which no doubt explains some of
its more saccharine elements and its insistence on the health benefits of mountain
air.
That being said, I think Switzerland is the first place I
remember being absolutely stunned by a sunset. I was 6 or 7 years old when I
went for the first time, and even at that young age, I knew it was special. It
really is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. Johanna Spyri was
not wrong.
My mom, brother and me in Switzerland, ca. 1985
Folklore:
Swiss-Alpine
Folk-Tales, re-told by Fritz Müller-Guggenbühl,
translated by Katharine Potts, Oxford UP, 1958.
I actually renewed my library card in order to get this one.
I had a $.30 fine from 2009, which is why my name was still even in the computer
system. “The city never forgets,” the librarian said. Indeed.
The tales in this
volume are particularly pre-occupied with milk products and often revolve
around the making of and/or wasting of cheese. For example, in one tale called "The Alp that Disappeared," a wealthy
man paves the rocky path up the mountain with goat cheese so that his
girlfriend’s fancy shoes will not be ruined. This is considered a sign of
sinful excess and a waste of good cheese, and the man’s own mother (who is
starving at the bottom of the mountain while he is paving roads with cheese)
prays that he will be punished. A giant hailstorm comes and buries the mountain
in ice, which explains how the Blüemlisalp is now covered in glaciers.
In another tale, an old woman named Nidelgret (“Cream-Margaret”) is discovered to be
using witchcraft to produce a full pail of fresh cream every day. When she is
caught by a local cowman, her cabin floods with cream and turns into a
milk-white rock in which they both remain imprisoned to this day.
Food:
I’ve had lots of people ask about my food project and tell
me I should have blogged it. I took photos of all our meals, but I regret now
that I did not blog about it while I was doing it. So, here are my recipes and
recollections:
I did my best to find recipe sources that came from people
who actually came from the country in question. I would read several recipes
and choose the one I liked the best, or combine several of them into something
that looked both appealing and authentic. I would also try to find recipes that my phone’s recipe
app could recognize, then I would make any edits I felt were necessary and
still have the recipe available in my phone when I was trying to cook. So, the
recipes that I post will not always be EXACTLY what I made, but they are decent
approximations.
Zürcher Geschnetzeltes (Pan-Fried Veal with Mushroom Sauce)
This recipe calls for veal kidneys, which I
just omitted from the recipe. We are not big on organ meat in the US, and I
wasn’t even sure where to buy that. I also substituted pork loin for the veal,
which was much less expensive (the recipe recommends pork loin as a
substitution).
Rösti (Potato Fritters)
For the rösti, I used butter instead of goose fat – we are
also not big on eating goose in the US, much less frying things in their fat.
Verdict: Delicious! This was a great dish to start my world
cooking project. It was not something I would normally cook at home,
but it was not totally foreign either. I would definitely make the
geschnetzeltes again, but I would make a simpler side. Just some boiled
fingerling potatoes with butter and parsley would be great, and a lot less
work!
Cocktail:
The legend goes that St. Bernard rescue dogs in the Swiss
Alps would carry tiny barrels of brandy around their necks for the poor, frozen
wanderers they were rescuing to fortify themselves with.
Apparently, some “real historians” have called B.S. on that
story, but they are absolutely no fun. I’m defying those naysayers by suggesting
a brandy cocktail to represent Switzerland in honor of these brave pups.
The classic cocktail uses 2 oz of
Brandy, ½ oz orange Curacao, and 2 dashes each of Angostura and Peychaud’s
bitters. For a really Swiss take on the cocktail, you could replace the bitters
with a few dashes of Alpenbitter, an herbal digestif from Switzerland. My local store did not carry Alpenbitter, so I used French brandy, the Italian orange-based liqueur Aperol (like Campari, but sweeter), and a dash or two of a German herbal liqueur called Aromatique (similar to Fernet Branca) to encompass Switzerland's three languages.
Pröschtli!
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