Gimme a Swiss on rye

Not to be too morbid about it, but...have you given much thought to your funeral? Specifically, what sort of cheese will be served at the wake?

I bring this up because you would be quite secure in your cheese choice as your friends and family send you off, if only you lived in Grimentz, an Alpine town high in the Swiss mountains of Val d’Anniviers. There are not many places where they still do this, but Grimentzians keep a wheel of cheese to be rolled out for funeral guests.

Way up there in the Alps, you have to cross mountains and valleys to get to the next town, so most people don't go to the next town, preferring to stay home, yodel, and do what they've done for centuries in the Alps. Which is not a whole lot. But it was a Swiss anthropologist, Yvonne Preiswerk, who first noted that the people in the Alpine villages had strange funeral rituals like those of ancient Egypt.

“We are struck by a special kind of mountain Catholicism,” she wrote in her 1992 paper “Death, the Priest, the Woman and the Cow: Chronicle of Research in the Village.” In the past, she explained, visitors had considered these funeral customs  “barbaric.”

The "shocking" rituals they objected to mainly involved this whole death-and-cheese thing. It seems to be the nature of the land that can help explain it. The ground is rocky and steep along the one road in and out of Grimentz, with little tiny villages somehow clinging to the edges of the cliffs beneath the mountain peaks that shadow them. 

Fall, spring, and summer are short. Winter is long, and to get through that cold season, one needs nutrient-dense food.

So, the Grimentzites have bred a special cow that can handle the steep rocky land. They yield a lot of summer milk, and the locals make giant wheels of cheese  - full of proteins and nutrients.

Swiss cheesemakers want a sturdy hunk o' cheese, so they squeeze as much whey out of the curds as they can, and age the cheese slowly.  If it's made in summer when milk is abundant, there is plenty of cheese in winter for grilled cheese sandwiches and fondue and cheese and crackers and cheese soup and and mac and cheese and cheese and potato pie and frittatas and muffins and soufflés.

When the roll is called up yonder in the Alps, they are all in for the funeral rituals. They take the bells off the cows of the departed so the bovines can mourn him, although the article I read was not clear about how wearing a bell could diminish a cow's ability to miss her milker. 

Also, grieving families have a “picnic of the dead” placed inside the coffin, sending the deceased off with a bottle of wine, bread, and cheese, and a nice pair of boots, because local legend has it that ghosts to wander the glaciers after dark.

They put out the same spread for the wake, the burial meal. The symbolism is that the nourishment is to help reconstitute the community after a death.

So, putting aside one's own wheel of cheese makes sure there is enough to fulfill these functions around the funeral. The cheese is served with the local wine, vin des glaciers.

Now I know I have another decision to make sometime in the next 40 or 50 years!