Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland has just inventoried its food, or at least 404 products that it considers part of its cultural heritage. The joy of eating in Switzerland includes Geneva’s Christmas vegetable, cardon, dried meat from Valais and Rivella and zwieback. Rivella is a commercial brand, but nevertheless a Swiss culinary invention.

If you’re looking for recipes or wine or even Swiss specialties such as roesti, that well-known potato dish considered typically Swiss by many, you won’t find them here. What you will find is food that has a clear identity and which is considered “traditional” because it has passed the test of time: 40 years on the food scene, non-stop. Roesti is a prepared dish with several regional variants, presumably the reason it’s not on the list.

The research that’s gone into this three-year project turns up some interesting details. Cardon, for example, came to Geneva in the baggage of the Hugenots who fled France. And caramels à la crème, which are not to be passed by if they are offered, are generally made in homes, not pastry shops. The best are grainy but soft little bricks and are popular gifts during the Christmas holidays.

A drawback to the site for those of us who did not grow up multilingual, speaking the four Swiss languages,  is that the explanations generally appear only in the language in which they were originally written. If you want to know more about luganighetta, you need to be able to read Italian.

On the other hand, if you want to know which canton has the most culinary treasures, you can click on all the cantonal maps to work it out. And the history of absinthe makes interesting reading, but set aside some time (pour yourself a glass, if you know where to find it), as it is long.