... not with the sound of music but, after a long and enjoyable winter, they are very slowly growing colourful.





Down in the valley, spring is about a fortnight further advanced than up here, but the wait is still worth it ...

An ex-pat blog about life in Switzerland that I read regularly, posed the question this week 'What is Quark?'.
I was surprised to see that no-one had bothered to answer the question, so I thought perhaps a belated Aprilscherz (April Fools Joke) had been suspected.
Not the case — I wrote a reply explaining exactly what Quark is but my reply was rejected. The reason? "Bad Spam Word"!

I have no idea which word is supposed to be a spam word — perhaps it was 'Tuffet'?

Before moving to Switzerland, I lived in the south of Germany for almost thirty years. There, Quark is regularly served (most especially on a Friday) with potatoes and Schnittlauch — chives.

So what is Quark exactly?
This was, of course, my first question as a plate full of the stuff was placed before me.
The answer was provided by the Schöffler-Weis German and English dictionary — these were pre-www-days!
Curds!

O.K. so what are curds? Well I knew that Miss Muffet ate them together with whey, but although they were apparently everyday ingredients for a staple diet in Britain 200 years ago, no-one had deemed them fit to be served, in our family at least, during the 20th century.

Curds, I eventually found out, sadly without the assistance of Wikipedia 'in those days', are a form of fresh cheese. Lactic acid is added to milk which separates into curds and whey. If you leave it to stand, long enough, the curds will harden and turn into cheese.
The Germans, Austrians, Swiss and the Alsatians stir the whey back into the Quark to prevent it from hardening — presumably, this too is what Miss Muffet was enjoying before her meal was so rudely disturbed.

The fat content is, amazingly, 0.2% so, to make it unhealthier, cream is usually added.
I have to admit, spiced with a little salt and chopped cloves, served with boiled potatoes, it really is delicious.

Some but not all of the whey is stirred into the Quark, so what happens to the rest?
As you can read on the blog mentioned above, it is all shipped off to a factory in Rothrist, Switzerland, where it is turned into fizzy pop!
Fizzy pop, produced from sour milk?!
Sounds terrible — tastes great!
Really.

Now, what's a tuffet ...