Cervelat – the national Swiss sausage
Switzerland is a diverse country; each region has its own culinary peculiarities, but cervelat truly unites the whole country: both young and old consume it in the German-speaking regions, the French-speaking ones, and even in the canton of Ticino. And this despite the fact that literally hundreds of types of sausage, wieners, and small sausages are produced in Switzerland! But, as Swissinfo.ch notes, no sausage product is as well-known and loved as cervelat.
Almost every Swiss resident has some childhood memories connected with cervelat – for example, sitting around the campfire with the whole family with a juicy grilled sausage, and how it sizzled on the fire on August 1. At the same time, frying it any old way is prohibited. There is a whole mandatory ritual, an essential element of which are cross-cuts made on both ends of the sausage.
Then it needs to be threaded onto a special stick or skewer and held over an open flame. Very soon it will start sizzling and crackling, its skin will turn golden, the cut ends will start to open from the heat, like unknown flowers. And the smell! It's incomparable!
At the World's Fair in 1900 in Paris, cervelat was presented as a typically Swiss dish. At that historic moment, it received a kind of certificate of the right to be called an "original national" product. And yet there was a time when it was ridiculed, called a "worker's cutlet" and a "peasant's trout." And even if the stocky-shaped sausage is perhaps not as elegant as one might wish, that does not prevent it from still being the best-selling sausage product in the country.
In a year, a total of 160 million cervelat are sold in all Swiss stores, which amounts to 20 per inhabitant of the country. Therefore, in Switzerland, cervelat is something much more than just a small sausage.
Gaby Ochsenbein.
Translation by Nadezhda Kapone.