The Big Cheese: Hordes of Swiss GO Into Meltown for Malakoff.
Hordes of enthusiasts make the pilgrimage every weekend. They crowd into a cluster of three restaurants strung along the Route du Vignoble halfway betw’een Geneva and Lausanne, murmuring repeatedly the word Malakoff.
Maia? quoi?
Perhaps the best melted cheese specialty in Switzerland isn’t fondue at all, but something called the Malakoff. It’s a sinful domed fritter, golden crispy on the outside, oozing hot Gruyere on the inside. It comes from the Vaudois wine region, and it has a colorful, albeit debatable, 19th-century history all its own.
Sure, you can find more convenient Malakoffs on a few menus in town, but here the Malakoff package includes fresh air, the Lac Leman landscape, a walk in the vineyards, and the local white wines.
What a number of the enthusiasts also often want to know from the specialists is this: just how do you make these delicious things? It’s supposed to be a secret, but using a combination of persistent questioning and – to be honest – a bit of deviousness, we managed to cobble together a recipe.
Fortunately, the owners of the specialty restaurants in the villages of Vinzel, Bursins and Luins, are willing to . divulge the Malakoff’s ingredients, and a few cooking tips. The proportions – they jealously guard those – we pinched from a German-language Swiss cookbook, whose tarted-up recipe is otherwise not the real thing. (See pieced-together recipe below.)
The number of calories? Well, everyone refuses to discuss that.
Puffed Up Delicacy
Officially, the Malakoff – a.k.a. « la croute de Vinzel » – is a « beignet au fromage ». But that name doesn’t do it justice, because the delicacy is lighter than fritter implies, and puffed up, too. It’s eaten with mustard (or just black pepper), gherkins and the fragrant wine from the « Chasselas » variety of grapes that grow right outside.
Malakoffs, priced at 5. 70 Swiss francs to 6.80 francs (€3.57 to €4.25) each, are served one at a time, and a tally is still, as in the old days, kept by the waitress in pencil on the paper tablecloth. « Customers find that very amusing, » says Philip Wolfsteiner, who runs the Malakoff-erie in the village of Vinzel. What’s fun is that each round of Malakoffs tastes slightly different. This is because the cooking – rather than being an automated process – is done by hand by a specialist, Mr. Wolfsteiner says.
As a main course, diners consume on average three Malakoffs, Mr. Wolfsteiner says. (The record is 15, or 17, depending on whom you ask.) But since men frequently eat more, and faster, than women, the ladies often skip a turn, he says. Clients with truly hearty appetites first share a tradition « assiette Vaudoise which is a platter of cold meats (19.50 francs). Those interested in the seasonal specialties instead, can start with some sauteed mushrooms, for example.
Other customers like to have just one Malakoff as a starter and then move on to, say, game, or regional
sausage.
The recommended dessert is cherries marinated in kirsch (9.50 francs), which are eaten with the fingers, Mr. Wolfsteiner says. You’re supposed to drink the juice afterward, he says, because kirsch is a good digestive. (If you find you are seriously having trouble digesting your Malakoff – or, in fact, any of Switzerland’s melted cheese dishes – hot tea is what you really should drink, he advises.)
Original Tales
Among the differing tales about where the Malakoff originally comes from includes one about a so-named Russian general who once passed through the region. But, as the pragmatic Roland Marguerat – who runs the Luins Malakoff restaurant – says: « You have to choose the most interesting story. »
And so, the mostly agreed-upon if not necessarily historically accurate version – which appears on the Vinzel and Luins menus – is the following tale: Vaudois mercenaries who fought alongside French troops in the Crimean War (1853-1856) fried themselves some cheese in their fires during their long but ultimately successful siege of the heavily fortified Fort Malakoff in Sebastopol. After these mercenaries returned home to the canton of Vaud, they held a reunion and recreated these « croutes » for the occasion. It was then they are said to have christened them « Malakoff. »
But where exactly did that baptismal happen? Vinzel? »I’ll say yes, » Mr. Wolfsteiner says. « You will hear others say the same about themselves. But I will tell you it is here. »
Day Excursion
At the turn of the century, other melted cheese lovers began descending on the region to eat Malakoffs, Mr. Marguerat says. These days, eating Malakoffs is a 40-kilometer roundtrip Sunday car excursion from Geneva that is popular all year round, although enthusiasm does dip a bit in the hottest months. Fans include the singer Phil Collins, Switzerland’s cross-dressing entertainer, Marie-Therese Porchet, and members of the Japanese royal family, the restaurant owners assert.
Currently, the three restaurants that are best known for the specialty say they enjoy a friendly rivalry. Friendly enough to send each other overflow business, but rivaled enough to each claim that their Malakoff is the least greasy. And as for those calories? « It’s a question of abusing or not abusing, » is all Bursins restaurant owner Jean-Claude Daglia is willing to say about that.
By Cotten Timberlake