Swiss Breakfast (Birchermüesli)

Birchermüesli

Swiss Breakfast conquered the world in the last three decades. The irony is that the original wasn’t conceived as breakfast at all: it was designed as a wholesome, light evening meal. What’s more, the original of the original wasn’t designed at all: in the late 19th century, a Swiss physician, Dr. Maximillian Oskar Bircher-Benner, ‘discovered’ it during his hikes in the Swiss mountains. For a hundred years or more, this concoction of raw ingredients had already been part of the staple diet eaten by Alpine dairy farmers.

The good doctor, who gave Birchermüesli its name, was so convinced of the nutritional benefits of this mixture of apples, nuts, oats, lemon juice, evaporated milk and water that, in 1902, he introduced it as an evening meal in his Zurich sanatorium. This meal was called ‘whole food’ not, as we might think, because of the unprocessed oats. For him, the important ingredient was the apple, not pealed and cored but grated whole into the mixture, skin, pips and all.

Here is the original recipe: soak a level tablespoon of oats (the late 19th variety) for 12 hours in 3 tbsp of water. Then add a tbsp of lemon juice, a tbsp of evaporated milk (raw milk was unsafe in those days) and mix the ingredients thoroughly. Grate 2 whole apples into the mixture immediately before serving (the fresh lemon juice prevents oxidation, or the grated apples going an unappetising brown), sprinkle a handful of hazelnuts or almonds on top, and enjoy.

Nowadays, muesli, comes in all shapes and sizes. It doesn’t bear much resemblance to the original: ready made out of a box, ‘fortified’ with sugar and dried fruit, especially raisins, honey coated cereals instead of raw oats, seeds and all manner of other ingredients. Fresh, raw fruit has largely disappeared, and evaporated milk has ceded to fresh milk or yoghurt. Of course, now we also eat it in the morning rather than at night.

For the linguists among us, here is a brief note on correct spelling: In Swiss German, the dish is called “Müesli” and never “Müsli” as the latter denotes a cute little mouse while the former is the mixture of ingredients that has taken the world by storm.