Bircher Muesli: A Swiss Family Breakfast

By Heidi Noroozy

As a kid, I never saw any useful purpose to breakfast. Food early in the day had absolutely no appeal to me. My mother, who believed that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, would cajole and bribe me with delectables such as cinnamon toast and fluffy pancakes drenched in butter and real maple syrup from a neighbor’s farm. All to no avail. I refused to eat anything before noon.

Except when we visited my Swiss Aunt Gritli. Born in Boston to Swiss immigrant parents, she traveled to Switzerland only twice in her life but maintained a lively correspondence with Swiss cousins well into her eighties. She also knew how to make the quintessentially Swiss breakfast, a fruity cereal known as Bircher Muesli. Breakfast-challenged as I was, I had no trouble scarfing down a bowlful—even at 8 o’clock in the morning.

Muesli, a Swiss diminutive form of the German Mus or “porridge,” was developed by a Swiss physician named Maximilian Bircher-Benner around the turn of the 20^th century. He believed that sick people could be coaxed back to vibrant health though a wholesome, plant-based diet, especially one that emphasized raw foods, fresh air, and plenty of excercise. He observed that many of his patients, even those near death, improved when put on a regime of uncooked foods. Dr. Bircher-Benner attributed the restorative effect of this diet to the fact that raw foods are direct products of the sun. Bircher Muesli formed an integral part of the Swiss doctor’s medical practice, and he used it to treat all kinds of conditions, from obesity and allergies to digestive disorders and cardiovascular disease.

The original recipe begins with a tablespoon of rolled oats over which you sprinkle water and let the grain soak overnight to soften and become easier to digest. Next come lots of chopped seasonal fruit, and enough milk to hold everything together. You top it all off with a dusting of ground nuts. The result is a complete meal with something from every food group. You could practically live on this dish exclusively and still meet all your daily requirements for protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and fiber.

Today, Bircher Muesli has become something of a national dish in Switzerland, right along with roesti, cheese fondue, and chocolate truffles. You can find it on restaurant menus and home dining tables, and not just for breakfast. Some Swiss families serve it for dinner, a lighter meal than lunch.

Aunt Gritli made her muesli much the same way Dr. Bircher-Benner did, with a few exceptions. She tripled the amount of oats and soaked them only ten or fifteen minutes instead of overnight. She added a squeeze of lemon to the soaked grain and tossed in a tablespoon of raisins. And when it came time to chop the nuts for the final presentation, she got me involved. The job required the use of a marvelous little contraption—an oval glass jar to which was screwed a metal hopper, painted red and decorated with flowers. You poured the nuts into the top and turned a little handle on the side. A series of offset tines much like the ones you’d find on a fork ground the nuts and dropped them into the jar. No child could have wished for a more marvelous toy. And after investing so much time and elbow grease into the job, I wanted nothing more than to taste the fruits of my labor. Which, of course, was Gritli’s devious plan all along.

Bircher Muesli lends itself to endless variations. You can use a variety of rolled grains along with the oats: rye, barley, or wheat. They can be soaked in fruit juice instead of water. Soy milk can stand in for the dairy milk, or you can add a dollop of yogurt. Mix in a bit of honey or maple syrup for a sweeter version. The fruit varies according to the season. Apples, pears, citrus, and kiwi in the winter. Strawberries, peaches, and cherries in the summer. Bananas any time of year. The nuts can range from walnuts and almonds to hazelnuts and pecans.

Bircher Muesli doesn’t need a recipe beyond what your imagination can provide. But if you need a quick tutorial to get you started, check out this short, fun video:

Guten Apetit!

Born Into The Cultural Divide

By Heidi Noroozy

As the child of a German immigrant mother and an American father who grew up in an ethnic Swiss community in Boston, cultural roots have always been a fascinating subject for me. How much does the culture of a person’s childhood shape attitudes later in life? Quite a lot, I think.

Growing up, I always had a keen sense of my German-Swiss heritage, reinforced by trips to visit relatives in Germany and holidays at my Swiss-American aunt’s house in Boston. Her home always felt more European than American, with its small rooms crammed with heavy furniture, lace antimacassars on the backs of chairs, and letters she’d read aloud to me from Swiss cousins, translating as she went along.

Although English, not German, was the language spoken in our home, learning German came easily to me when I studied it in high school and college. That’s what “mother tongue” really means, I thought. The language was in my blood.

It wasn’t until years later when I moved to Germany for a while that I realized just how American I really am. The way people thought and interacted with each other did not come as naturally to me as the language had. The formality of social interactions and the obsession with rules and Ordnung (order) irritated me at times—not to mention those little old ladies with sharp umbrellas who liked to butt in line at the grocery store. To this day, I’m still never sure at what point in a relationship one moves from the formal you (Sie) of an acquaintance to the informal one (Du) of a friend.

Some years ago, a conversation with an Iranian friend confirmed my belief that we are shaped by the culture we grow up in. My friend was born in Tehran but moved to California with her family when she was just a year old. On a trip to Iran as a teenager, she discovered just how American she was. “Everyone expected me to know exactly how to behave,” she complained. “But I was clueless.” She found the experience quite disconcerting.

But then, on my most recent trip to Iran, a new acquaintance poked a big hole in my theory. At a dinner party in Tehran, I met a woman who’d been born in Iran and moved to the States at the age of 17. When I met her, she was back in her home town visiting relatives and confessed to feeling disconcerted when people treated her like a foreigner. “Everyone can tell I’m not from here,” she said. “Taxi drivers, shop keepers, bank tellers—they all ask me where I’m from, and they don’t mean what part of Iran.” Okay, maybe this issue is more complicated than it seems.

As a writer, the question of cultural identity fascinates me so much that I’ve been exploring it in the fictional life of a bicultural woman who was born in Tehran and grew up in California. I constantly ask myself how she’d feel in one situation or another. Is she more Iranian or more American? How does she juggle the expectations imposed by one culture with her need to make a life for herself in another? And what will happen if I send her back to the country of her birth after spending half her life in another culture?

While I still believe that our original culture has the biggest influence in shaping who we are, I think that every new culture we experience more than just in passing also leaves its mark. So what does that make me? An American with German, Swiss, and Iranian layers.

What about you? Did you grow up in more than one culture, or have you lived in another country? If so, how has it changed the way you view your own identity?

Lost and Happy

By Supriya Savkoor

I’m not supposed to be blogging today because of asundry reasons happening in my non-virtual life, but I just couldn’t resist this topic! So I’ll keep it short…

With young children and so little vacation time on our hands these days, we tend not to go meandering around a new place, relying on chance to find a good restaurant or adventure. Of course, I haven’t traveled to any place new since Yelp and all such fancy apps have come out (not counting Disney), so we’ll see how that plays out the next time I’m wandering around a new country.

But I know I’m not the only one who’s discovered new interesting and sometimes favorite places after getting lost.

On a trip to Switzerland over a decade ago, bad weather in the Alps forced hubby and me to meander around Interlaken, the town where we were staying but which all of our travel guides said was forgettable, kitschy, touristy, and just not worth exploring. As a result, we hadn’t mapped out our every move. When we had no choice but to spend a day there, we started exploring anyway and discovered the guide books had got it all wrong. There was nothing forgettable about Interlaken. We loved it and found it adorable. It’s just a tiny little village nestled in the Alps – yes, one catering to tourists, with boutiques full of Swiss army knives and cuckoo clocks, but even back then, it seemed far less commercial to us than the local sprawling shopping mall near our suburban home outside Washington, D.C.

In Interlaken, we walked and walked, admiring the wildflowers in the green hills around, always hearing the sweet sound of cowbells tinkling in the distance. We finally stopped at a local pharmacy to ask for a restaurant recommendation, and the friendly woman there suggested her very favorite restaurant in town, one that I would now rate as my favorite restaurant anywhere. It was a small hike, a lovely one at that, but we were skeptical when we were seated in the rustic lodge next to an open window that had a gorgeous view but the smell of, you know, cow dung drifting in. (So much for steak!) 

But Café du Nord was an amazing experience. They brought out complimentary cocktails, a sweet concoction of something or other with wide, sugar-rimmed glasses, more like bowls than cups. I discovered the glorious dish of raclette, a type of Swiss cheese simply grilled as a starter. Absolute heaven. I can’t even remember the specifics of what other dishes we savored, only that the food, the service, and the presentation were all so wonderful, we canceled another event on our trip just so to make another visit. Our sweetest dining experience ever…

On another Europe adventure, we got lost at night in a part of Florence that locals had warned us was not a good part of town. It looked dodgy too, with no street lights at all and young gang-like teens wandering around in the shadows. So how surprised were we when we ran right into a small dive of an Indian restaurant, bright and noisy, in an otherwise empty back alley? Loud bhangra music blared from its open doors, the day’s specials written in Italian (pollo tandoori) on a chalkboard hanging in the scratched window, framed by a string of colorful lights. 

Made us laugh and reminded us to keep our minds open, keep walking, and find out what other unexpected discoveries we could make. As all of life's journey's should be, right?

Lost and Fondue

One summer a number of years ago, I packed up and moved to Switzerland for three months. I rented a room in a 17th-century villa on a steep, cobblestone street in Boudry, the canton of Neuchâtel. By day, I worked as a machine translation analyst in Cortaillod, the next village over and an easy ten-minute walk from my room in Boudry. Evenings found me exploring my new temporary home, sipping hot chocolate and eating French pastries in the local cafes, exploring the winding streets and picture-perfect squares, and practicing my rudimentary French on anyone willing to listen. Weekends, I’d take the local train into the city of Neuchâtel, a pleasant half-hour ride through a landscape of rolling green meadows and vineyards. And always, I was on the trail of the perfect cheese fondue.

The search was a cinch because wherever I went, people were always asking, “have you ever eaten real Swiss fondue?”

The only possible response to that was, “no, but I’d love to try it.” Each time, I hoped no one could read my mind and discover all the previous occasions in recent weeks that I’d “tried” a real Swiss fondue for the "first" time.

I can’t say whether I ever found the perfect fondue, since each one I sampled was equally memorable. But one particular meal turned out to be unforgettable.

One weekend, some friends from Boudry invited me to go hiking in the nearby Jura Mountains. The trek took us up a narrow trail through leafy forests and clearings that offered stunning vistas of the undulating, green landscape: forested hills and meadows where grazing cows looked like the figurines you see in Swiss tourist shops. After a couple of hours, we stopped at a one-room shack that offered overnight shelter for long-distance hikers. It had wooden bunks at one end, a stove at the other, and a wooden picnic table out front.

While one friend went off to chill bottles of white wine in the mountain spring and another hooked up a propane bottle to the cabin stove (you had to bring your own), I sat down at the table and started grating cheese. Now I knew why my Swiss pals had been toting such heavy backpacks for a one-day’s jaunt into the wilderness.

Maybe it was the long, hot hike that made the food so appealing. Or the fresh mountain air and the relaxing sight of green hills framed against a clear blue sky. Or maybe it was just the jokes, laughter, and stories that accompanied the meal (including one preposterous tale about the time someone poured vast amounts of absinthe into Boudry’s Fontaine de la Justice on the patron saint's day and got the revelers’ roaring drunk). But I can still taste that fondue: the salty, molten cheese, the slight tang from the wine, the chewiness of the crusty bread.

Photo by Cedric Trachsel

There is no clear agreement on where and when fondue originated. Some accounts say it began with goat herders in Neuchâtel, others claim it originated in nearby Valais, while still others say it’s not originally Swiss at all but was invented in Savoy, a historical region between Switzerland and France. One of the earliest recipes comes from a 17th-century Zurich cookbook, which describes it as “cheese cooked with wine.”

In the 1930s the Swiss Cheese Union promoted fondue as Switzerland’s national dish in an attempt to boost cheese sales. Every region has its own version, using different mixes of local cheeses that give the regional varieties different flavors and textures. In Neuchâtel, the cheeses are Gruyere and Emmenthaler. This, my Boudry friends insist, is the authentic version because, like everyone else, they claim their canton to be the true birthplace of fondue.

Here is the recipe for the fondue I enjoyed during my hike into the Jura Mountains (proportions are approximate, since we didn’t measure anything and I wrote down the recipe only after returning to town):

1 clove garlic, halved

225 grams (½ lb.) Gruyere cheese, grated

225 grams (½ lb.) Emmenthaler cheese, grated

¼ liter (about 1 cup) dry white wine

2 tablespoons kirsch

1 tablespoon potato starch or cornstarch

day-old baguettes, cut into cubes with a piece of crust left on each one (helps them stay on the fork)

Freshly grated pepper

Rub the inside of a heavy-bottomed pot with the garlic clove and discard. Heat the wine over medium heat without boiling. Add the grated cheese and stir constantly in a figure-eight pattern until the cheese melts. Dissolve the starch in the kirsch and add to the pot. When everything is bubbling remove from the heat and season with pepper. Dip the bread into the fondue and enjoy. Pair with wine or hot herbal tea, but avoid cold beverages, which can give you a nasty bellyache.

Bon appétit!

Off the Beaten Track: Bookbinding—A Family Tradition

Our guest today is Marianna Holzer, a third-generation bookbinder, who also happens to be Heidi’s sister. She owns the Holzer Book Bindery in Hinesburg, Vermont, and specializes in book restoration and preservation. She was recently featured on WCAX TV's Made in Vermont series. To learn more about Marianna and the Holzer Bindery, visit her website. And be sure to check out the WCAX video of Marianna at work.

I grew up in a bookbinding family. It all started with my grandfather, Ulrich Holzer, who emigrated to Boston from a Swiss village on Lake Constance, after learning his craft in Italy. His two sons and three daughters all worked in the business. Everyone loved to read and the story went, “you have to wait for your books to be read by each member of the family before you get them back.”

Our house was filled with books, most of which were beautifully bound in leather with colorful marble paper and gold lettering. Every evening, my father, Albert, would read stories to us from those precious volumes: Mother Goose, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Han Christian Anderson, or Mark Twain. Then I discovered Gone With the Wind, Jane Eyre, and the works of Louisa May Alcott. All these stories stood on our shelves and I wouldn’t go anywhere without a book in hand. We even had a complete set of Dickens, crafted with a blue leather cover and matching marble paper that a long-ago customer had commissioned then failed to retrieve.

Years later I became a bookbinder myself. My father had died when I was still young, but my mother, who’d learned the craft in her native Germany, set up a small bindery in our new home in southern Vermont. There she taught my sister and me some of the basics skills needed to bind books. We made simple blank journals and repaired a few literary treasures for family friends. After college, I discovered a small bindery in northern Vermont and went to work for them. This bindery mended and repaired municipal records for cities and towns all across the United States. What a gift it was to get paid to do what I loved: take care of books. I deepened my skills in creating those leather covers, stamping gold letters and designs on the spine as well as restoring and rebinding books that were falling apart.

In addition to working on the municipal records, I took on smaller jobs—the cookbook that was falling apart, the treasured family bible, the much loved and worn children’s books. Sometimes we would get a request to create a special book for someone’s birthday, wedding, or another special occasion. These were the projects I really loved to work on.

The company that had employed me for nearly 30 years was sold to new owners out of state when the original proprietors decided to retire. This brought many changes, culminating in extensive layoffs. I had collected a lot of tools over the years, which augmented those I already owned, left over from the family’s Boston bindery. Some of them are big heavy cast iron tools like a guillotine to trim the pages, a backer to hold a book while you round the spine with a special, fat-headed hammer, and a big press to press the books in the final stages of the work. Other essential tools are small, like the bone folder, the glue brush, a ruler and good quality, sharp scissors.

I was collecting all these tools with the intention that “some day,” “after I retire,” I would open a small bindery of my own.  Well, that day came a lot sooner than I had planned. After the initial shock of losing a steady paycheck and company health insurance, I am finding renewed joy in having my own family business, working with my husband, Rik Palieri, to repair that abused cookbook, imprint a name on a bible, or make a beautiful cover for someone’s first book.

Our current project is rebinding a book called The People’s Home Library, published in 1917. This copy was in terrible shape with the front and back pages torn and crumpled, many of them falling right out of the book. It is exciting to take something in such poor shape, mend the torn pages, re-sew the book and put it all back together, using the original cover material and making it readable once again. This particular book is so interesting that the customer may find herself waiting for us to read it before she gets it back! Together, Rik and I are continuing the Holzer family tradition of turning old books into new and creating finely crafted heirlooms for future generations to enjoy.