When I asked Swiss cheese importer Caroline Hostettler whether she ate raclette as a child in Switzerland, she had no trouble resurrecting a memory. “Everyone had raclette machines at home but us,” recalled Hostettler, sounding still a bit aggrieved several decades later. Her mother refused to make it (she preferred fondue), so the annual raclette at an aunt’s house was the highlight of the year. Hostettler still remembers being almost overcome with excitement.
Read morePeak Season
If you enjoy Swiss mountain cheeses, get yourself to a shop in the next few weeks for some of the best cheese we get from Switzerland all year. Retailers across the country are just starting to receive wheels from the Alp they “adopted” several months ago, sight unseen. The eight-year-old Adopt-an-Alp [http://www.adopt-an-alp.com/learn#Abou] program links traditional Swiss cheesemakers—the kind who make cheese only in summer in remote high-elevation huts—with American merchants who want to support these practices. We consumers get to experience phenomenal raw-milk cheeses that hardly ever left their region before. Don’t procrastinate; these gems go fast.
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