I’ll have a bite of The Alps, please
I can’t remember how I got to hear about Alpine Cooking initially. Neither do I recall why it came back to my mind while I was looking for inspiration on things to write about here. I do know one thing though: that day, I got very lucky. And equally hungry.
Not often does one find them self completely absorbed by a cookbook, especially when you only flip through it digitally, which means the sound is somewhat metallic, far from the original page turning sound. This book did it for me, as it weaves together terroir and territoire, food, portraits, recipes and memories in the best possible way. Over the course of six years, the author Meredith Erickson travelled to the Alps several times, road-tripping with her friend and photographer Christina Holmes, in search of all the best the Alps had to offer when it came to people, places and food. This search took them from Austria to Italy, from the ski slopes of Zermatt in Switzerland to France, where they got all the way to Alpe d’Huez. Car, train, walking, skiing… from the restaurant kitchens to refugios all the way up in the mountains, with countless, delicious stops on the way.
The result is a book that knows no boundaries. It’s somewhere between a cookbook, a beautifully written travel memoir and a covetable coffee table book. I think that’s why it deserves a place in your place. Flipping through the pages, you might find yourself all the way up in an old, charming désuet hotel, then eating a rösti at a very simple, no-frills restaurant in the mountains of Switzerland, or a very delicate dish in a Michelin-starred restaurant, from vineyards in Austria to a typical tartiflette in a refugio, perched on a mountain in France. The author and journalist Meredith Erickson has been named “the Julia Child of the Alps” by the acclaimed US food publication Taste Magazine. In all fairness, she deserves it. Get a glimpse of the book below, fall in love with it and get hungry, too. In the most joyous, happy, Alpine way.
