The case of the Lausanne cake

By Ellen Wallace

Swiss cheese, Swiss rolls and today I discover gateau Lausanne: foods that don’t seem to be part of the panoply of what we eat in Switzerland, but the world knows them as Swiss foods. This happens elsewhere, of course, with the classic example of Belgium’s fried stick potatoes known as french fries. And Swiss cheese is a spinoff of Emmentaler, the famously holey stuff from canton Bern.

But Switzerland seems to have more than its fair share of foods blessed with Swiss names, and it’s unclear why.

To add to the confusion, if you live in Switzerland the language and cultural divide between regions is very marked, so that a torte in German-speaking Zurich is a foreign object in French-speaking Geneva, and German-speaking Basel’s leckerli is alien food to the Italian-speaking population in Ticino.

Benedikt, a German PhD student in the US who writes a blog that records his efforts to work his way through Bo Friberg’s tome, The Professional Pastry Chef, posted a beautiful series of photos and details of a “Gâteau Lausanne”. I was intrigued, read it through to the end and was charmed by the final product. Benedikt can definitely bake! It looks vaguely familiar to me, but I’ll have to make a visit to a bakery in Lausanne to see what they would call this, if they even bake it.

Maybe it is a bit like giving a name to your child that recalls a place you remember and admire or love, or a virtue, or something else positive with which to bless your offspring. My favourite in that line is the first name of Nigeria’s President Jonathan: Goodluck Jonathan.