Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Thanks to Google Alerts, I can report that the beat goes on in Zürich, with the electro / ambient / techno music of André Zwicky, notably a single released on 5/31/19, “The Storyteller”:

(#1) Cover artwork by Jasmin Mynt Art for the piece (6:39 long)

You can listen to the composition on YouTube here (#2). Zürcher AZ’s photo from his Facebook page (where you can get some sense of his enthusiasm and his passion for his music):

(#2) Portrait of the artist as an adorable young man

You can see/hear some more of his work through his Facebook page.

There you will learn that he’s worked at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich) since 2013. Lots and lots of postings about electronic equipment for making music. Plus a fair number of jokey postings in Züritüütsch. And some in (standard) German, for instance, the burning question he asked back on November 12th:

Was ist wichtiger für die europäische Küche? Zwiebel oder Kartoffel?

The onion or the potato: the eternal question. Though different cantons of Switzerland have their characteristic fruits and vegetables, I don’t believe that any of them has selected an official cantonal fruit or vegetable. But things are different in the US.

From the Spokane (WA) Spokesman-Review, “Onion named official state vegetable” by Richard Roeser on 4/6/07:

Olympia – After a three-year campaign that included platoons of determined school kids, a political deadlock with miffed potato growers and free onion-flavored sausages handed out at the state Capitol, the Legislature has declared an official state vegetable: the Walla Walla sweet onion.

… Three other states – Georgia, Texas and Utah – have designated sweet onions as their official state vegetables. But in Washington, attempts to do the same thing were opposed by the state’s $3 billion-a-year potato industry, which dispatched a lobbyist last year to remind lawmakers that Washington grows lots more spuds than onions.

In related news, the potato was designated the official state vegetable of Idaho in 2002.

On the other hand, at the regional, and indeed the national, level in Switzerland, potatoes clearly rule. From Wikipedia:

(#3) From the Organic Kitchen site, “traditional Swiss Rosti (potato fritter)”, here as a circular fritter, which will then be cut into wedge-shaped slices (the recipe is absolutely minimal: grated potatoes, cooking oil, spring onions, salt and pepper); cheese roesti is a common variant

Rösti or rööschti is a Swiss dish [really, a family of dishes] consisting mainly of potatoes, in the style of a fritter. It was originally a breakfast dish, commonly eaten by farmers in the canton of Bern, but is now eaten all over Switzerland and around the world. The French name röstis bernois makes direct reference to the origins of the dish.

Many Swiss people consider rösti to be [the] national dish. Rather than considering it a complete breakfast, it is more commonly served to accompany other dishes such as Spinat und Spiegelei (spinach and fried eggs, sunny side up), cervelas or Fleischkäse. It is commonly available in Swiss restaurants as a replacement for the standard side dish of a given meal.

… In Swiss popular cultural ethos, rösti [dishes] are predominantly eaten in German-speaking regions, although they can be found easily elsewhere in the country. Rösti dishes are portrayed as a stereotypical part of the Swiss-Germanic culture, as opposed to Latin culture. The geographic border separating the French- and German-speaking parts of the country is therefore commonly referred to as the Röstigraben: literally the “rösti ditch”.

This entry was posted on January 2, 2020 at 11:30 am and is filed under Art, Language and food, Language and plants, Music, Switzerland and Swiss things, Zwickys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.