Älplermagronen
Macaroni bound with cheese and cream, often with potatoes, topped with golden onions and served with stewed apples. The best known of the country's pasta dishes is named after the herders of the alpine pastures; in Uri, the pasta cooks in milk.
Under the marquee at a village fête, plates are filled by the ladleful: pasta bound with cream and melted cheese, a handful of fried onions on top and, at the side, a spoonful of stewed apples.
Origin
The name brings together the herders of the alpine pastures, the Älpler, and “Magronen”, macaroni. Yet pasta caught on only late in Switzerland. According to Culinary Heritage of Switzerland, there is a record of it in 1731, when the monastery of Disentis bought a macaroni press, and it remained a luxury under the Ancien Régime. Lucerne had its own factory from 1838, and yet, around 1870, barely a quarter of the population knew what it tasted like. Italian immigrants, drawn from that decade onwards by the boom in industry and transport, made it popular, but it only really spread after 1918. Hörnli, the small elbow macaroni often chosen for this dish, appear in a Bernese advertisement in 1872.
Making
Recipes vary. In the one a woman farmer presented on Swiss German television SRF in 2016, diced potatoes and macaroni, or large Hörnli, cook together in salted water. They are layered with grated mountain cheese, hot seasoned cream is poured over them, and they are finished with floured onion rings, fried in butter until crisp. In Uri, according to a recipe published by Swiss Milk Producers, the water is left out: the pasta cooks directly in milk, before the cheese goes in.
At the table
In German-speaking Switzerland, notes Culinary Heritage of Switzerland, the dish comes with stewed apples. The television recipe also allows pears or quinces; the Uri recipe serves cooked apple wedges alongside. In the Gruyère region, a close cousin is called macaronis du chalet: it cooks with onions and is finished with double cream and grated Gruyère.
Today
Of all the country’s pasta dishes, it is the best known, according to Culinary Heritage of Switzerland. It appears on restaurant menus, in family kitchens and at local festivals, above all in German-speaking Switzerland, but also in the French-speaking Prealps, where it becomes “pâtes du chalet”. Hörnli, for their part, are the pasta the Swiss most consider their own.
Sources: Culinary Heritage of Switzerland, entry “Hörnli / Cornettes / Cornetti”; Swiss German television SRF, programme “SRF bi de Lüt – Landfrauenküche”, recipe “Älplermagronen” (2016); Swiss Milk Producers, recipe “Macaroni à la mode d’Uri”.