Switzerland In Focus - Discover Switzerland: Experience the Best of Switzerland - page 605

For true blue-blooded meat lovers there is no better season to let tastebuds rip in this
heavily forested country than autumn, when restaurants up and down the country cook up
Wildspezialitäten/specialités de gibier, or chasse/cacciagione (fresh game). Venison and
wild boar are also popular.
Pork
With its fresh game, abundance of wild mushrooms, chestnuts and grape harvests, autumn
is exquisitely gourmet in Switzerland and as the days shorten this season only gets better.
Fattened over summer, the family pig - traditionally slaughtered on the feast of St Martin
(11 November) marking the end of agricultural work in the fields and the start of winter -
is ready for the butcher. On farms and in villages for centuries, the slaughter would be fol-
lowed by the salting of meat and sausage-making. Work done, folk would then pass over
to feasting to celebrate the day's toil. The main dish for the feast: pork.
In the French-speaking Jura, in particular, the feasting tradition around Fête de la St-
Martin lives on with particular energy and enthusiasm in Porrentruy. Local bars and res-
taurants organise feasts for several weekends on the trot in October and November. A typ-
ical pork feast consists of gorging on seven copious courses.
Pork dishes to look out for year-round include Rippli (a bubbling pot of pork rib meat
cooked up with bacon, potatoes and beans) in and around Bern, and in the canton of Vaud,
papet vaudois (a potato, leek, cabbage and sausage stew) and taillé aux greubons (a crispy
savoury pastry, soft and dotted inside with pork-lard cubes). In the Engadine, sausage is
baked with onions and potato to make pian di pigna.
Fish
Fish is the speciality in lakeside towns. Perch ( perche, in French) and whitefish fillets
(féra) are common, but don't be fooled into thinking the filets de perche chalked on the
blackboard in practically every Lake Geneva restaurant are from the lake; much comes
frozen from Eastern Europe.
Fruit, Sweets & Chocolate
Plump Valais apricots, plums, pears and sweet black cherries fill orchards with a profusion
of pretty white blossoms in April and May. For year-round pleasure, the Swiss dry, pre-