Swiss cookbooks, a love story

I keep my cookbooks in my kitchen, but also next to the bed.

I read them and dream about food.

When I started my blog in 2015, my goal was to post recipes—my versions of Swiss standards. To do that, I consulted lots of old cookbooks—first Betty Bossi and TipTopf, then educators like Marianne Kaltenbach, Elisabeth Fülscher and Susannah Müller.

I cooked different versions of classic Swiss dishes— Wähe, Züri Gschnätzlets, Basler Mehlsuppe, Zuger Kirschtorte— testing out each recipe and finding what version I liked best. From there I compiled my own version.

Along the way I collected lots of Swiss cookbooks (and even wrote some of my own). I found them secondhand at Brockis (mostly this one), received some as gifts and inherited many from family.

Nearly ten years later, I have lots of recipes on my blog.

And lots of Swiss cookbooks.

Now I want to look at these cookbooks closer. I want to see how Swiss cuisine developed, how trends come and go, and why old Betty Bossi cookbooks keep telling me to use Planta Margarine. I want to look at the differences between earlier versions of TipTopf and the Berner Kochbuch and their updated forms. I want to know why the Getränkte Zitronencake was one of the most popular cakes in Betty Bossi’s original 1973 Backbuch and if the Mississippi cake from 1982’s Kuchen, Cakes & Torten actually has some sort of US connection.

So join me for a deep dive into some of Switzerland’s best known:

blue-led:

martial:

obscure:

meat-heavy:

grandmotherly:

cheesy:

cheerful:

chocolatey:

classic:

cookbooks.

I’m calling it Helvetic Cookbooks, and you can find this continuing series here on the blog.

Our first port of call is a classic first published in the 1970s: Das Butter Buch.