SeriesIn the land of melting delights (1/3) – In the Valais, raw milk cheese is everywhere, from the smallest supermarkets to the best tables. He is even the star of festivals. A real culinary cult object!
The gondola that rattles closer to the Swiss resort of Verbier flies over a monochrome white landscape. Narrow roads, chalets, pines, larches are covered with a thick blanket of snow, immaculate. Under the cover of clouds, the horizon is cut by massive granite teeth, Mont Fort – 3,328 meters above sea level – surrounded by glaciers. The Matterhorn and Mont Blanc are not far away.
Extracting themselves from the gondolas, fluorescent clusters of skiers, whipped by the cold and the snowflakes, clumsily trot material over their shoulders towards the restaurants. Fortunately, there is a very consensual remedy here to warm up: raclette.
“We have the impression of eating the fields”, says a customer. Even the crusts (called here “religious”) delight the taste buds.
In France, it is often considered that this flowing delight was born in Savoy. It is however here, in Valais, a canton located in the south-west of Switzerland, bordering Italy and France and bordered to the north by Lake Geneva, that it would have first appeared. Documents dating from the XIVand and of the XVand century prove that at the time, in this mountain region, fat cheese was already melted by placing it near a wood fire.
In November 2021, a survey conducted by Sociovision for TF1 among 3,500 people, propelled the cheese specialty “favorite dish” of the French. But, in the Valais, raclette is not a dish: it is a religion, with its rituals, its followers and its evangelizers.
Eddy Baillifard, owner of the restaurant Raclett’House with the communicative joviality, was thus recently named ambassador of the raclette of Valais and regularly gives training in “good scraping”.
As for the chapels of the famous cow’s milk cheese, they are everywhere. It is of course found in almost all restaurants (even incorporated into fondues), but it is also offered with coffee for breakfast, sold in the tiniest village supermarket and even in vending machines in the region. The Swiss melted cheese enthusiasts have even imagined surprising mixes between raclette and music: in August, in various places in Valais, the Rocklette and Electroclette festivals attract music lovers and gourmets at altitude.
But the real highlight of the cheese cult comes a little later, at the end of September, for the event “Bagnes, capital of raclette”. The cows, back down from the mountain pastures, parade. In a concert of bells ringing, the beasts are celebrated like queens, wearing crowns of flowers. And small chalets installed for the occasion allow you to taste the raclettes offered by the local cheese dairies, the sounds of enthusiastic chewing being drowned out by accordion concerts.
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