Food and drink form a critical part of any culture and heritage. When people share their food with you, they share their culture and a piece of their heart.

Western Cape, South Africa

When I moved to the Western Cape, my Stellenbosch friends introduced me to wine. Wine knowledge forms an essential part of any student’s informal training. The various wine estates in the Western Cape offer many wine-tasting opportunities. The Western Cape added seafood and Cape Malay cuisine to my favourite food list. We inherited Cape Malay cooking from the slaves from Malaysia, Indonesia, and East Africa brought to Cape Town during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Swiss cheese

We are expanding our Swiss cheese knowledge. There are numerous Swiss cheese varieties and different regional specialities. Just like wine, cheese-making is an art form. The Swiss take pride in their cheese made with local milk and excellent craftsmanship.

There are more than 450 different cheese varieties in Switzerland. Cheese-making consumes almost half of the milk produced in Switzerland. The top-produced Swiss cheese is Le Gruyère. Emmentaler cheese, with its distinctive holes, is the variety of cheese most exported.

Both Gruyère and Emmentaller cheeses are marked as fromage d’alpage / Alpkäse. This badge means that the cheesemakers produce the cheeses during the summer when the cows graze in the mountains. Many Swiss farmers take their cows to the pastures in the spring and bring them back in the autumn. The herbs and flowers the cows eat where they graze give the cheese a specific character and flavour.

Gruyère

We recently had the privilege of visiting a cheese factory, La Maison du Gruyère, in the medieval town of Gruyère in the Alps, close to the French border. The farmers in the village have been making this cheese since the 12th century to survive the winter months. They later started exporting some of the cheese to France and Italy, but the world only officially recognized the name during the 17th century.

We have seen them heat the unpasteurized cow’s milk in copper pots and add enzymes to thicken it. The ageing of Gruyère cheese lasts between 3 and 10 months. Like wine, the cheese gets better with time. We grew up with Heidi and Peter’s stories. I now realize that they ate Fondue cheese every night with Grandpa in the winter, just like the people still do.

In Gruyère, we visited the old castle built on a hill in the 13th century. The white landscape, caused by the previous night’s snowfall, took us back in imagination to those times. The walls are thick, the windows few, and the giant fireplace in each room had to keep the people warm and cosy. They socialized around long tables while drinking wine and eating their melted Gruyère cheese and bread. In the dark winter evenings, they enjoyed music together in the music room.

ICS International Festival

The families at Zander’s international school are from all over the world. Every year the International Community School (ICS Zurich) Parent Association organises an international festival during which everyone can see and taste each other’s traditional food of their country of origin. As social contact is still limited, they will release an ICS international cookbook this year. I submitted our Cape Malay curry and rice recipe as a South African contribution to the Cookbook. 

Kind regards

Emsia