Swiss Fondue with Salade Niçoise--- Sacre Bleu!

Swiss fondue with all the accoutrements

While hitchhiking through Switzerland one summer after college in the '60s, my friend Susan and I found a perfect spot for dinner in a classic Swiss chalet, and we ordered my favorite, Swiss fondue. I probably ordered beer since this was before my wine drinking days. Then to complete the meal and add a bit of green, we ordered salade Niçoise from the menu. We thought that sounded like a perfect meal...

The fondue arrived first and we dunked chunks of bread into the delicious molten mass of emmenthaler and gruyere cheese with our fondue forks. We were having a fine time until the salad arrived. A few patrons stared at our table and snickered and soon the whole restaurant was pointing and laughing at us. We were embarrassed, to say the least and we couldn't figure out what the problem was. Is there a taboo on eating cheese fondue with the classic french composed salad?  We could no longer enjoy our meal and we soon left the restaurant confused and humiliated.

In the intervening years I've tried to solve the mystery of the salade niçoise-swiss fondue faux-pas. I've asked around and studied up on the subject but have always come away empty handed. If there are any of you out there who could shed light on this, I would love to hear an explanation. In the meantime, I have never again ordered this combo, which still sounds perfectly matched to me. Who wants to get laughed at during dinner?

Hitchhiking Through Switzerland

A lovely day in the Swiss countryside, photographed by Susan Berkowitz

More nostalgia---This time I'm hitchhiking through Switzerland and Germany with my friend Susan Berkowitz during my 1969 summer in Europe. She was living in Amsterdam and when I met up with her we decided to hitchhike for a few weeks. I had taken the notorious Icelandic Airline Charter from New York(?) to Luxembourg, with a short stop in Reykjavik. My flight left in June and returned to the US in August. After a bit of research I found an article about the company, founded in 1944 by three Icelandic Pilots trained in Canada. Here's the pertinent section:

"During the '60s and the '70s Loftleidir Icelandic  pioneered as a low fare service airline across the North-Atlantic flying into Luxembourg, 'the heart of Europe.' The airline became very popular among college students traveling abroad and soon became known as 'The Hippie Airline' ..."

After arriving in Luxembourg, I traveled to England, Scotland and Brussels. Then I took the train to Amsterdam to see Susan, who was renting a room in an apartment.

Susan was constantly taking photographs with a fancy Nikon, while I waited for her

Hitchhiking in Germany, with destination sign in hand

The two of us had planned on driving to Spain in Susan's Volkswagen bug, but when her car was totaled by a tram in Amsterdam the day before we were leaving, we spontaneously decided to hitchhike through Switzerland and Germany, as far as Berlin. She then returned to Amsterdam and I continued traveling by train to Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. The hitchhiking experience was priceless and we had great fun. We even got a ride to East Berlin when the Berlin Wall still divided West from East Berlin. I remember waiting in long, nerve-wracking lines while entering the Communist sector.

Here's the 1969 passport I used on the three month European trip. The photo (gulp) was taken by a Milwaukee Journal photographer. My father was music critic for that venerable newspaper, so he rounded up a photographer to take my passport photo. And yes, my given name is Sara. I thought this was my first passport, but I must have had a previous document, since I traveled to Greece in 1964 and the one pictured above is clearly a renewal. Strangely, I have no memory of that 1964 passport or the photo I used. Apparently, passports expired in 5 years then.

At a certain point I decided to use "Taya" on my passports, but I never changed my name officially or encountered any red tape when I switched from Sara. How times have changed!

Using Alice's 1960s passport photo on her book's front cover is brilliant

I loved Alice Water's recent biography Coming to My Senses mostly because her early European experiences mirror my own in so many respects. And then our lives have intertwined in Berkeley since I moved here in 1971. It's strange that she fell in love with food on her first journeys abroad and I remained indifferent until about ten years later. My postcards home brim with excitement about museums, train travel and social interactions, but meals are never mentioned. I remember living on wiener schnitzel in Germany, pastries mit schlag  in Vienna, cheese fondue in Switzerland, raw herring in Amsterdam and a tasting of Scottish cheeses at the Edinburgh International Music Festival. I ate so few vegetables that my health started to suffer by the end of the summer. I can trace my travels and relive the whole European adventure  because my mother saved  the postcards and letters I sent home that summer.  Here's a postcard from Traunkirchen, Austria, where I went to visit friends. I can see she would forward my postcards to my sister in New York.

Greece 1964- An Innocent Abroad

Delphi 1964- I'm on the left in a smocked dress my mother made and a pair of sandals I loved

Here I am in Greece on my first trip to Europe, sitting on an ancient stone wall in Delphi with three school friends, laughing at who knows what. A group of us were traveling on a short jaunt in Greece, lead by Sarah Lawrence College. For two weeks we traveled around the Peloponnese by bus and to Mykonos and Crete by boat. A young Greek woman was our guide. After this prelude we headed for a summer course in Paris where we lived in dorms near Porte d'Orleans. In the mornings we studied French, art history and existential literature with Professors from Sarah Lawrence and in the afternoons we had the free run of Paris. This was the Paris of the early 60's, the Paris of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in "Breathless" and I couldn't catch my breath. We ate in bistros, visited museums and mastered the metro. On weekends the program arranged for us to visit Mont San Michel and the Loire Valley to see a Sound and Light performance at Chambord ( if I remember correctly.) Though Greece seemed terribly foreign, Paris was perfect. Candace, the girl on the right in the Liberty print dress, was my mentor. She spoke excellent French, knew just how to order poulet rôti and pommes frites in the neighborhood bistro, and introduced me to the fragrance "Chant d'Aromes" at Guerlain on the Champs- Élysée. I wore it until it was discontinued many years later.

Belmondo and Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 breakthrough film " À Bout de Souffle  ("Breathless")

New Year's Eve Memories of Tuscany

The medieval Duomo in Siena, photographed by Carey Moore in Views from a Tuscan Vineyard

Because it's New Year's Eve, I'm reminiscing about times that have had the most profound influence on my (long) life. I would have to rank my 1965 college semester in Florence # 1. The sensory memories of that trip are still so vivid that I can pull them up with just a momentary sight, smell or taste. Today I was paging through one of my books titled Views From A Tuscan Vineyard and I came across this picture of Siena. Suddenly, I was flooded with memories of  Italy in 1965. I think the experience was so intense because I was young and impressionable and homesick and because Italy was much more foreign than it is today, and also because each of us was placed in an Italian family where we were forced to speak Italian on whatever level we could. We had what is now called total immersion in the culture. In some ways, I have never emerged from that experience, so a random photo, a whiff of diesel or the scent of sage can transport me back to the cobblestone streets of Florence, Siena or Pisa.

The Florentine Duomo also photographed by Carey More

By today's standards, it's pretty amazing that I don't have one photograph from that Junior year abroad. Of course we didn't have cell phones, but I guess we also didn't carry cameras. It seems that because we weren't distracted by the need to capture our experiences, they became all the more vivid.

       
                                                           Buon Anno