Buttenmost
A thick, coral-coloured purée of rose hips, sieved until not one hair is left. Hochwald, a Solothurn village on Basel's doorstep, made it its speciality in the 19th century.
In Hochwald, the villagers are still called “Buttenklopfer”, the hip-beaters. The nickname dates from a time when the fruit was spread on a wooden board and crushed with a mallet, hands protected by leather gloves: the hairs inside scratch the skin.
Origin
Culinary Heritage of Switzerland relates an oral tradition: around the middle of the 19th century, a woman of the village, Maria-Josepha Vögtli, came back from Zurich, where she had learned housekeeping, bringing the recipe with her. Farming families followed her lead, and in 1852 a woman from Hochwald drove by carriage to Basel to sell the purée there. A villager born in 1930 recalls her father still beating the fruit that way in 1914–1918; the farm women then carried the purée to town on foot, a small wooden cask on their heads, and sold it door to door. Around 1910, thirty to forty families made it. In the fifties there were eleven, and today two farms, which, according to one of them, still make as much as ever.
Making
The season begins in September and ends in November. The rose hips are frozen first: the cold softens the flesh, which then comes away more easily. Once thawed, they go through a mincer, then wait a day or two in crates; the warmer it is, the shorter the wait must be, or they ferment. A mechanical strainer from the sixties, built like a food mill, then holds back skin and seeds and lets through only pulp and hairs. Water is added according to the fruit, and a last, very fine sieve catches the remaining hairs. Ten kilos of rose hips give seven to nine kilos of purée.
At the table
It is eaten mostly in autumn. With roughly 800 grams of sugar per kilo it becomes jam, its commonest use; it is also served with yoghurt, quark or cream, stirred into tea, and some restaurants pair it with game. A Solothurn recipe book of 1982 mentions the “Buttehöckli” of the Dorneck, Christmas biscuits of egg white, sugar and almonds, flavoured with Buttenmost. It keeps eight days in the fridge and a year in the freezer.
Today
The fruit travels far. Until after 1945, some was also brought in from the Jura and the Valais, later from Alsace, from where two suppliers still deliver about a hundred kilos each week of the season. Until the 1990s most of it came from Yugoslavia; today it comes mainly from France, Hungary, Romania and Czechia. The producer interviewed by Culinary Heritage of Switzerland made five to six tonnes a year from it, sold mostly at the farm, and it can be found all around Basel.
Sources: Culinary Heritage of Switzerland, entry “Buttenmost”.