Sometimes I can't kiss my wife. "Wäk pfui! Mummy stop it!" my sons shout at the table when Mummy eats a fish. The ultimate horror is always the moment when she sucks out her eyes. While the rest of us eat the fish fillet, her greatest pleasure is the rest of the fish, from the tail fin to the lips. It gorges itself with relish on these and the other fins, then on the brain, spinal cord, skin and fish spawn. In the end, a few bones remain, but not always even that. They become soft in vinegar and don't get stuck in the throat. They are also healthy and contain building blocks that are useful to our bodies.

The same applies to four-legged friends: the cheapest thing you can get at the butcher's in this country are the bones. From a TCM point of view, however, bone marrow is one of the most valuable things, because it is the most hidden part, in fact the Jing. Other parts are not to be despised either: Sauschwänzli, chicken feet - just everything, from nose to tail.

When I was in China for the first time in the 1980s, the clinic director of Chengdu TCM University invited us Westerners for a snack in his office, which was also the classroom where he usually lectured. We were served duck. In other words, there was actually more skin and bones than meat and everything was chopped into rough pieces. It took me a while to realise that, from a TCM perspective, pure muscle meat is not necessarily the most valuable part of an animal dish, but that tendons, veins, skin, cartilage, bones and practically all other organs and tissues of the animal were considered more useful components for humans than muscle meat. I was also amazed to learn that the bones were then simply spat onto the floor of Mr Professor's office and that it was not appropriate to deposit them on the students' desks. The professor himself showed us how. I was also astonished to learn that it was perfectly acceptable for his assistant Liu Guohui to suddenly burst into the office and park his bike in Professor's classroom, as this was just as natural as the eating manners we had just learnt. This was the safest place to keep his bike from being stolen. You know Liu Guo Hui. We invited him to Switzerland because he was a recognised specialist in Wen Bing Lun. He later emigrated to the USA, where he also wrote his standard work on Wen Bing Lun. I imagine how I would have parked my bike in the office of the great Zurich University Hospital Director Walter Siegenthaler ("Sigi") as a medical student. No, not imaginable!

During my later stays in Guangzhou, chicken feet were a standard part of a yam cha (dim sum), i.e. a breakfast brunch. Chinese families would meet in the large shopping centres, where an entire floor was usually designed as a restaurant. In rooms the size of gymnasiums, there was an unimaginable hustle and bustle of guests and waiters. Round table tops were rolled up and placed on a plinth when another family clan wanted to take a seat. People stood or sat patiently in line at the entrance until a seat was found. As most people at that time lived in very small flats, usually as a three-generation community, family gatherings, which included uncles, aunts, nephews, cousins etc., could only take place in such restaurants. Family matters were discussed in public, people haggled and argued, bullied and judged. Insubordinate people were told off and insulted. The daughter, who had to look after her elderly parents and was therefore not allowed to marry, complained to her siblings and relatives that they paid her too little and the other party accused her of not looking well enough after those in her care. It was always very loud in these halls and there was more than just arguing. There could also be a bit of a rowdy atmosphere. The food was served until the table tops bent. The service staff were almost as numerous as the guests. You ordered something and within minutes, it felt like seconds, the dishes arrived on the table. Everything was always very freshly prepared. Towards the end of the meal, people asked what kind of long soup was available. A long soup is a concentrate of expensive ingredients cooked for hours, containing valuable herbs such as ginseng, goji berries, shiitake, cordyceps or reishi along with vegetables and of course expensive animals (e.g. turtle, abalone, sea cucumber, shark's fin, swallow's nest).

The chicken feet, by the way: not bad at all, marinated. A little too much knuckle, but quite ok. The preparation takes a little time: toenails are removed and the skin is peeled off.

Chi le fan ma? Have you eaten yet? That's "Grüezi" or "Guten Tag" in Chinese. Food is one of the most important things in China, perhaps the most important thing. In China you live to eat, whereas in the West we eat to live. This is even reflected in political life, as Sun Longji writes in his book "The Walled Ego - The Deep Structure of Chinese Mentality": the highest chancellor in ancient China is called Jiazai, which originally meant kitchen master. The lower ranks of his office had titles such as "master of porridge", "master of salt", "master of minced meat".

We don't have a sea and we don't have as diverse a climate as China, so the choice of food is not as wide as in a country like China. But we would have chickens if we could prepare chicken feet. Instead, we often just make do with chicken breasts. It is said that the big slaughterhouses export chicken feet to Asia by the shipload.

In our small town (with a population of 16,000) there is no longer a butcher's shop worthy of the name. There is one left in the neighbouring cantonal capital of Aarau, and it's a good one. Only organic meat is sold there. However, butchery is no longer carried out on site there either.

And there is another speciality in Aarau: Beat Kohli and his team from Bio Fidelio fidelio || Fidelio-Biofreiland AG & Fidelio Produkte AG Rohrerstrasse 118 5001 Aarau have rented premises in the former abattoir.

Organic meat, i.e. freshly butchered animals, is supplied by organic farms. You can call them and order whatever you like, for example groin meat. This is the muscle meat to which the diaphragm is attached, and in its raw state it doesn't look too flabby. Dried, it is a delicacy! Recipe by Susanne Vögeli

Every Saturday, Samuel Herzog, the NZZ's food scout, reports on a food in the "Weekend" supplement. It started with A and ended with Z for diaphragm. The new series is themed. The recipes in the NZZ weekend supplement come from Susanne Vögeli Raum Acht | Forschen und Kochen (raum-acht.li). She prepared the diaphragm. Her guests were full of praise.

Susanne Vögeli has republished the Fülscher cookery book.

It was in almost every household back then. Even my grandmother and my mother had it. It contains 1500 recipes. Including some amazing ones! You could be forgiven for thinking that parts of it had been taken directly from a Chinese cookery book. Finely chop liver and heart, fry briefly... I read terms like sukiyaki, shirataki, shoyu, ajinomoto, bamboo shoots, glass noodles. I wonder where Mrs Fülscher got that from? The first edition of the recipe collection dates from 1923, published under her teacher, the last from 1966. The 2013 reprint is based on the 1966 edition. The book can be ordered directly from Susanne Vögeli.

However, Elisabeth Fülscher was not very squeamish, she incorporated all kinds of trends into her book: appetisers with tinned pineapple chunks and mayonnaise from a tube or prawn cocktail, spaghetti salad, pizza, sachet soups from Maggi and Knorr can be found in the book, as well as elaborate offal menus that we would expect to find in Asia. I wonder what the cornet glasses for making the biscuits called Plaisir des Dames are? I can't find any reference to this in the book or on the Internet. Or the Prince Pückler ice-cream bomb? I can find a detailed description of the Prince on Wikipedia. Not uninteresting!

Vegetarian menus are also listed separately, even differentiating between small, richer and those for raw foodists! Mrs Fülscher does it all right.

The following pictures show above all that the gifted chef was a multi-talented woman and obviously had almost inexhaustible access to food that was denied to the average Swiss of the time. However, she was able to cater for all classes, the upper classes with the gourmet delicacies depicted, the others with simple but nevertheless tasty recipes. If a TCM specialist had assessed the dishes for their quality in terms of a healthy TCM diet, the cookery book would probably not have been quite so extensive, but it would still have contained all sorts of things that fulfilled the requirements for a diet in line with TCM ideas. Oxtail soup, for example, as well as many other soups, simple vegetable dishes, but also some menus with fish or meat.

Mrs Fülscher served high society and knew fruits and vegetables that the common people didn't know. In my youth, there were practically only oranges and bananas among the exotic fruits. I only knew pineapple from a tin. As a child in the post-war period, you had to let your parents tell you that we could be glad that the days of food vouchers were over. The Second World War was still omnipresent in my parents' minds.

My grandmother still ran a shop in the village, which was advertised as a "colonial goods shop" on the sign. I don't remember there being any fresh fruit from faraway countries. Instead, you could buy trouser buttons, hair clips, mending thread, black mourning buttons, and even flour or rice open from the drawer. It smelled of mothballs to keep the bugs and maggots away. It was all pretty modest.

Not so long ago: in 1850, the famine led to mass emigration of Swiss people to America. In 1770, Ueli Bräker wrote in his work "Der arme Mann im Tockenburg (Toggenburg)" (The poor man in Tockenburg (Toggenburg)) that due to crop failures, boiled weeds were served on the table, which he still found better than what the neighbour did, who chopped off a whole sack of meat from a dead horse, which dogs and birds had been gorging on for several days, as Daniel Di Falco (see below) reports. The fact that today we only like the fillet pieces is therefore a fairly recent trend.

Susanne Vögeli has now cooked 70 recipes from the Fülscher, some of them slightly modernised.

The 14 chapters, each with 5 recipes, are introduced by well-known personalities, each with a multi-page text. Historians, cultural scientists, sociologists and journalists have their say: Elisabeth Bronfen, Nadine Brügger, Daniel Di Falco, Olivia Kühni, Denise Schmid, Walter Leimgruber, Daniela Müller and Samuel Herzog.

In keeping with the "from nose to tail" tradition, "Das Kochbuch der Kittin von 1699" has just been published.

An example: braised beef or sheep tripe with the ingredients onions, sultanas, imper, lemon juice. I didn't even know until then that sheep also produce tripe. Imper is ginger, obviously a foreign import as early as 1699. Cows have four stomachs: the rumen, the reticulum, the pouch stomach and the abomasum. All are edible, but the rumen is most commonly eaten. The Chinese criticise the fact that we in the West roast, bake and deep-fry too much, which makes food more difficult to digest, accumulating toxins ("slags") and leading to countermeasures in the form of detoxifying soups, teas and medicinal formulas. A visit to the pizza restaurant is always followed by a heat-clearing soup at home the next day.

Mrs Kitt, born Anna Margaretha Gessner, was born in 1652 on Marktgasse in Zurich as one of 19 children in a distinguished merchant's family and married into the no less distinguished Gessner family. She was then simply called the Kittin. And she can do more than just deep-fry and grill: Lightly season trout fillets with lemon juice and salt, then prepare a stock of white wine, vinegar, water, bay leaf, nutmeg, salt and ginger and add the fish fillets when the stock is boiling and leave to infuse for 4-5 minutes. You can literally see how easy fish is to digest compared to trout fried in butter, Müllerin style.

My wife doesn't order fish menus based on roasting or grilling in restaurants because she suspects that fish prepared in this way must be old, as you can't tell by looking at it. Steamed fish, on the other hand, must be fresh. Where this type of preparation is not available, fish is not used.

Mrs Kitt is also adept at preserving vegetables and fruit: Sweet and sour pickled vegetable mix of carrots, beetroot, radish, plums in vinegar water with pepper, bay leaf, salt and sugar, garlic and chilli. Goes well with cold meat, but also cheese.

Or rose sugar for a narrow chest, preserving nuts with sugar, preserving peas with sugar, making mulberry syrup is good for the throat...

And what do you think of pigs' heads cooked in coal?

Our youngest recently travelled to China, where he attended a Chinese language course for a few weeks. On the first evening, they served him liver, kidney, heart and sheep's penis. Guests in China are often spoilt with lots of expensive meat and seafood, turtle, abalone, exotic fish. It rarely suits my taste, I would be more interested in vegetables, but it would be rude not to eat what is on offer, and it's not always a question of savouring it. I therefore avoid such gatherings as much as possible. The obligatory boozing to establish good business relations is also anathema to me. I don't like bai jiu (millet liquor, rice liquor) at all. Its musty flavour never, ever comes close to a fine cherry distillate or any other fine water from our latitudes. And the fact that the meeting only ends when the sinfully expensive bottles are empty is often quite degrading. Fraternisation scenes with valued business partners during the day... oh, let's not go there! We were talking about food.

Perhaps one day someone will write a history book about the rise of China as a world power in the 21st century from the perspective of the cooker. Could it be that the diversity of cuisine enables nations such as China, India and others in Asia to achieve the kind of feats that favour economic supremacy? Could Asia only be stopped in this endeavour if the nations there could be put on the track of simple-minded Donald-Burger-Cola-KFC-Zero Sugar-Food? Is this the reason for the decline of the USA as a world power?

Eating breakfast like an emperor, lunch like a king and dinner like a beggar - this formula was not imported from China, it originated here. But it is hardly ever practised here.

Back to the present, or rather to the end of the 20th century: every autumn, the butcher, who goes from farm to farm to recycle the compost collected by the farmers, would visit us, the medical student flat-share who lived in the countryside and earned their degree by working in agriculture and forestry. The compost in the form of a magnificent sow. We kept her to utilise the waste from the farm, leftovers from the vegetable garden, worm-eaten fruit, the milk from cows that had just calved, because you can give some of the milk from the first few days to the calf, but it doesn't like to drink it all. The milk from the first few days is really rancid, almost rancid. I don't really know how to describe the flavour. Kind of like Schabziger. You're not allowed to take it to the milk collection centre (hut). Colostrum is the technical term. The composition is completely different to the milk that is produced afterwards. The sow doesn't care, she eats everything. In the hut, I sometimes stood in for the farmer Eugster, who took the milk from the farmers, centrifuged it, separated the cream and fed the rest to the sows. So I had to cook it and thicken it with potato flakes. Eugster had built an oven for this himself. I had to heat it with cut-up car tyres. They gave off a lot of heat! Smoke and a stench too. Back to our own sows and the butcher Siegrist. In the morning the bolt shot and then immediately opened the artery and let the blood out and collected it in a bucket. It had to be stirred by hand. Siegrist did not allow any other equipment. The fibrin threads then formed like a net around the fingers, which had to be removed. The rest of the blood was then processed into blood sausages in the washed intestines. The special delicacy was the bloodhound, the blood sausage that was stuffed into the rectum. Immediately after the sow had breathed her last, she was thrown into a tub of hot water, then the clean bristles had to be scraped off with bell-shaped knives. The skin and fat layer were then removed. We made a big fire outside and drained the fat. What remained were the greaves, the connective tissue of the fat layer. Rösti with fresh greaves: Mmmmhhhh, marvellous! It took strong people, the sow was hung on hooks at the gate of the barn. There were always a lot of people on site, because there was a lot of work for everyone. The sow was cut off and there were people who favoured it: Sauschnörrli, Öhrli, Zunge found their lovers, the Sauschwänzli of course, as well as Saufüessli, Wädli. Almost everything was utilised. In the end, Möppeli, the Boxer and Marius, the half-Bergamasker, the neighbour's Bläss, the Appenzeller and of course all the cats were also happy. By the time everything was nicely disassembled and tidied up, the evening was already quite advanced. To round off the day, we had fresh black pudding.

The scene above is probably not much different around the world, if it hasn't been replaced by industrial slaughterhouses. I later earned my degree in a mechanical workshop with turning, milling, drilling, soldering and welding. We designed prototypes for large butchers. One machine cut through old cow meat with dozens of fine knives and turned the tough piece into tender beef. The next machine had a number of long cannulas through which water and preservatives were pumped into the pieces of meat. This kept the product nice and pink. Can this still be done today or have even more sophisticated tricks been invented?

But back to China:

Chinese cooking goes like this:

No, I didn't zoom in on the wrong picture! What is it trying to say? Anyone who doesn't produce a bowl of green waste every day as a result of vegetable culling is considered a lazy housewife. Or a lazy househusband. And lots of vegetables are part of the daily diet, even though increasing prosperity in China has created hundreds of millions of middle-class people who also love lots of meat and seafood in their diet. Men in China also like to cook often and well. The division of labour in the household is commonplace where there are still shared households, as single life in the cities is also increasing rapidly in China. Fresh produce and lots of vegetables are the key to health and longevity. Although meat and fish are a must in many places in China, the excesses of the Chinese cadre elite and the upmarket hotel industry are not obligatory. Not everyone in China can afford it anyway. The vast majority in China still live modestly today (2023). If you believe the figures, there are around 300 million migrant workers in China who earn around CHF 300 a month. They have probably become migrant workers out of necessity, which could mean that hundreds of millions of Chinese earn even less. It can be assumed that many of them still work on family farms on an almost subsistence basis. In some places, this is a good way to live. Does this give a false picture of China's prosperity statistics? Income is virtually zero, but the quality of life is good with hard work in the fields and on the farm. My wife comes from the south of China. People there have harvest time all year round and the range of different vegetables is huge. There is no need to save or make provisions, there is always enough of everything. In our climate, we have to make provisions for the winter and have had to develop methods of preserving vegetables. In some parts of China, especially in large parts of the southern provinces, this is unnecessary. But of course other parts of China are familiar with preservation methods. When it comes to fermentation, Asia has produced masterpieces.

Fermentation is currently experiencing a boom here.

What do "long soups" and fermentation have in common? Long soups are soups that have been cooked for hours. They are prepared in the morning and are then ready for lunch. It is important that they are cooked in one go, i.e. that the cooking process is not interrupted by starting the day before and only continuing the next day. This releases building blocks that can hardly be obtained any other way. Yin, Xue, Jing and Jie are nourished, heat is transferred, Qi and Yang can unfold. An all-round healthy thing. The raw materials for a long soup are everyday vegetables, fruit (e.g. jujubes, longans, figs), mushrooms, fish or meat, often what we would call "ghäder", bones and TCM medicinal herbs. Long soups are usually served after a rich meal.

Fermentation is also a process that is carried out in one go and the conditions (temperature, pH, brine, low oxygen) must be right for the desired end product to emerge, otherwise the wrong bacteria will develop and the whole thing will spoil.

Are you interested in fermentation? Ok, Susanne Vögeli would give us a course. I will inform you about it from time to time.

Are you vegetarian or vegan in China? It's a tradition. Some Chinese people say somewhat disparagingly that it's for the monks. They would have time for such jokes and the monastic contemplative life would be disturbed anyway by hot food, i.e. meat and seafood of many kinds. Otherwise the blood would boil. It is clear what is meant by this. But eating vegetarian food in a Taoist monastery restaurant is hip, sometimes hyped with a dash of absurdity: Fish that looks like fish, tastes like fish but only has plant-based ingredients, a chicken, modelled in the same way visually and in terms of taste. But there are also more and more mundane establishments offering vegan food. It's not just American fast food chains that are popular in China.

Back in the 1980s, during my visits to Chinese restaurants, the trend was taken to the extreme, with a doctor sitting at the entrance, taking your pulse and looking at your tongue and prescribing a personalised menu for each guest based on the findings, which they were then served.

Sinologist Thomas O. Höllmann has written a book on the cultural history of Chinese cuisine that is well worth reading.

And there they are again, the tripe: "tripe cooked in beer". Mentioned as early as 1148 in the Dongjing meng Hua lu, which also states: "People in the metropolis are extravagant and inconsiderate; every guest wants something different. Guests report even the smallest mistakes to the landlord, who then reprimands the waiter or withholds part of their wages; in the worst case, they may even be thrown out." Inhumane? Nothing compared to Emperor Gaozu, the first emperor of the Han dynasty (206-195 BC), who is said to have had the corpse of the opposing King of Liang cut up and salted so that he could then feed the carcass to his feudal subjects.

What else is missing from the view around the edge of the plate? If you linger a little too long on a food, plant or herb garden reel on the usual social media portals, the algorithm will almost exclusively show you posts on these topics. Real and self-proclaimed experts show us what we can eat and how, and how and why something is healthy. We learn a lot of new things and sometimes a bit of weird, even half-knowledge, sometimes something that is not necessarily worth imitating. There is a lot of cribbing from one another and it is a good idea not to take everything at face value. Even people known as luminaries are not always to be trusted. They, too, sometimes regurgitate what others have already (wrongly) reported.

But I really enjoy these media and am pleased that so many young people are involved. I have even revised my reservations about today's young people, who are covered in tattoos and riddled with piercings, because they also roam the woods, know more mushrooms than I do, are interested in everything edible fresh from nature and are passionate about working in the kitchen.

Isn't that encouraging?

Severin Bühlmann

Winter 2023