Scent of Gruyère

I’ve started a new game.  It’s called Say This Isn’t a Food Blog and Then Quick! Turn Around and Write About Food.  I really can’t help it.  I start thinking about dinner sometime around breakfast.  When I was a child, the prospect of having brunch caused me great anxiety because —no matter how much good food we ate—it meant that we were skipping a meal.  Living in Budapest, the only things I miss most more than the Food Network are my friends and family.

I also blame Europe itself for the food obsession.  You can hardly turn around without running into a place with a food designation: Grappa, Bologna, Valencia, Dijon, Asiago.  (The German word for a type of spicy sausage, Debreziner, is even inspired by a town in Hungary, if we want to get complicated.)  Such was the case a few weeks ago, when I found myself on a day trip to Gruyère, Switzerland.  Again my apologies, but when in a sleepy village called Gruyères, I think you really have no choice but to visit a cheese factory, eat embarrassing amounts of cheese, and then write about it.

The first stop was La Maison du Gruyère dairy.  I found the inner workings to be fascinating (new technology meets age-old tradition, etc.), but my favorite part was the museum tour.  It was all about the senses—especially smell.  According to the tour phone (narrated, mind you, by a cow named Cherry), the mountain cows graze on clover, orchids, thyme, cumin, and more.  You could sample these and other scents; as many as 75 have been identified in the famous milk that eventually turns into even more famous cheese. The emphasis on smell cracked me up endlessly.  Let’s be honest, the scent of 3-year-old Gruyère, in any other non-cheese setting, is totally offensive.  The message was essentially:  look at all these lovely flowers and grasses that go in, and ignore the fact that the end result smells sort of, well… unwashed.

After the tour, I walked around the charming city of Gruyères and took a quick tour of the 13^th century Château de Gruyères.  In contrast to the gloomy Medieval living areas, the loft was particularly inviting, bright, and tastfully paradoxical—with contemporary artwork on the stone walls and a view of the ancient French-style gardens and pre-Alps from the window.  Then I headed to Restaurant Le Chalet de Gruyères, where they serve primarily cheese and seem to have been doing so for, I don’t know, five million years.  The smell almost knocked me over when I walked in, but the wood cabin restaurant epitomized Swiss tourism coziness. 

At lunch I broke bread with my new friend, Julia, over a pot of fondue.  Toward the end I tried the steamed baby potatoes, which were fantastic dipped in the creamy, wine-spiked Gruyère.   I will say one thing: people in and around the Alps know how to steam their potatoes and melt their cheese to perfection.  Our tablemates used the raclette, which is a device that heats a block of cheese until the top layer is soft enough to be scraped off and spread on bread.  We were all from different places, but by virtue of being just being there, we had enough in common to enjoy the cheese and each other’s company.  Food and travel can do that.  It was long, simple, interactive meal, and afterwards we all felt ooey gooey happy. 

There was just one tiny problem.  Back at the hotel, there was an event in twenty minutes, where I would be in close proximity to some important people.  And the smell?  Hair, clothes, jacket:  all offensively Gruyère.  I could either—gasp!—skip the dinner, or go there smelling like cheese.  Parfum de fromage.  Of course, I made the obvious decision.

Tagged as: Alps, Castle, Food, Gruyere, Travel, Vacation