Small land, big taste

"Monk's head" cheese is a Swiss favorite, best served fresh, though it's also packaged for supermarkets and even the Swiss airline. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Justly famous for cheese and chocolate, the Swiss table celebrates three neighboring cultures－Germany, France and Italy－while delivering flavors entirely its own, Mike Peters finds in Zurich and Geneva. Mike Peters

The blade sweeps merrily across the top of a big round of cheese, and the resulting shavings pile up like a translucent yellow ribbon. When the carving stops, we reach in eagerly to taste the Tete de Moine, a proudly Swiss cheese that literally translates as "monk's head". The semi-hard cheese was first made more than 800 years ago by French-speaking monks of the abbey of Bellelay, and the careful scraping with a knife's edge, allowing oxygen to reach more of the surface, opens up its nutty aroma and flavor.

Our hungry group nibbles and nods appreciatively, lingering a little longer here to study the girolle, the tool Swiss chefs use to carve pretty rosettes of the cheese we're eating. The 12th-century monks who invented this whole-milk cheese would have been equally intrigued: the girolle was only invented in 1982 for its flowery effect. Before that, centuries of cheese-makers used simple kitchen knives to harvest the savory goodness. Today the top-cutting blade is popular with professional chefs and home cooks alike, and supermarkets have them on offer for tourists seeking a cool souvenir of their visit to Switzerland.