During the years I lived in Seelisberg on Lake Lucerne (aka Lac des Quatre Cantons / Fierwaldstattersee) we often joined in the feast after a long afternoon watching the Swiss farmers (usually a mom and pop) harvesting. Curiously, the Swiss eschew tomato sauce (“gravy” as it is called in New Jersey) in favor of a thin glaze of sour cream. On the mountain-sides around Lucerne, and concentrating mostly near sunny Zug, the spaghetti trees produce a much broader fruit, which is rolled to remove the pith. The pith is sun dried and packaged as vermicelli, loved the world over for its delicate al dente texture; the left-over hollow portion of the fruit is then wound around long wooden dowels and sliced down the length of the dowel, producing the curved macaroni we all know so well. In Basel, of course, during Fussnacht when the fern blows up from the deserts of North Africa, those wacky Baselers are known to do much less gentille things with the long fruit of the spaghetti tree, where the fatter, firmer Lucerne variety knows a special popularity. Occasionally, Italian workers from Torino will join in the fun, shouting out their plaintive lament, “E pericoloso sporgersi!“
-
Recent Posts
Tags
- amazon
- announcement
- audio
- audiobook
- beckett
- blog
- Brain Frieze
- business
- commentary
- cosmology
- culture
- dada
- design
- fractals
- free will
- grammar
- history
- Illustrator
- irony
- life
- literature
- malaprop
- Mary
- mathematics
- memoir
- philosophy
- publishing
- reading
- review
- sensorium
- short story
- society
- software
- sound
- story
- technology
- TED
- telemarketing
- theater
- The Rules
- training
- UX
- video
- windows
- writing
Archives
- January 2021
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- August 2019
- May 2019
- March 2019
- December 2018
- December 2016
- March 2016
- January 2016
- December 2015
- September 2015
- August 2015
- July 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- April 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- December 2014
- November 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
Meta