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Imagine having a cheesecake made for your wedding. What would it be like if it were served at your funeral?
If you're lucky, the cheese from the Swiss village of Grimentz will resemble the one in Jean-Jacques Zufferey's cellar. It's shriveled and brown, with streaks from moth and rat bites accumulated over decades, and as hard as rock.
You need an axe to slice it, and you have to drink strong liquor to get rid of the taste. This is one of the rare cheeses you wouldn't want to eat once it's perfectly ripe. A stiff, funeral cheese means its owner lived a long life.
The tradition is considered "heretical".
Mr. Zufferey's house, located in the Swiss Val d'Anniviers mountain range, is one of the last places where you can still find this particular tradition: keeping a cheese wheel to use at one's own funeral.
Jean-Jacques Zufferey holds a 149-year-old cheese wheel.
Val d'Anniviers, with the highest peaks of the Alps on the Swiss side, is a prime example of mountains isolating valleys and villages, giving rise to unique traditions. When anthropologist Yvonne Preiswerk first conducted fieldwork there, she observed burial rituals similar to those of ancient Egypt.
In her 1992 research, she wrote: “We were surprised by the unique mountain Catholicism.” In previous centuries, visitors were astonished by the pagan traditions and called the locals “barbarians,” believing them to be descendants of the Huns.
The ritual, which shocked them, involved the association of death and cheese. It seems like a perplexing pairing, but the land offers an explanation.
Along the winding road that cuts through the valley to the small mountain village of Grimenz, isolated settlements cling to cliffs, in the shadow of ice-covered peaks. The ground is steep and rocky. The growing season is short, and the winters here are long. To survive the freezing days, the villagers must find ways to preserve their nutritious food.
One of Zufferey's wheels is carved from cheese.
That is why the residents of Grimmentz, like other people living in the Alps, breed dairy cows that can adapt to the steep terrain, taking them up to the higher pastures in the summer to graze. From the abundant milk produced in the summer, they make enormous cheeses.
To give the cheeses their firm texture, cheesemakers "cook" the curd until it thickens, then press it to extract as much liquid as possible. Moisture and heat spoil and accelerate the ripening process because, in the cold, dry mountain air, cheese ferments very slowly. While fermentation takes many years, most Alpine cheeses reach their full maturity – still soft and flavorful – a few months later, in the middle of winter, a time when food was often scarce. Sliced and eaten with bread or melted over a fire, cheese is an important source of calories during the winter.
The veneration of cheese has taken on different forms in the isolated valleys of the Alps. "Popular culture based on cows permeates every moment, object, and event of the mountain people," writes Preiswerk. In Grimenz, it is evident in elaborate funerals.
The villages of St Luc and Val d'Anniviers, Valais, Switzerland
After their owner dies, the cows are unbellied so they can also mourn. Relatives place a "dead man's picnic" next to the coffin, consisting of a bottle of wine, bread, and cheese. There are also thick boots, as spirits are rumored to walk on glaciers at night.
Those foods would also be present at the important funeral meal, symbolizing the community's restructuring after the loss. One interviewee in the Preiswerk study said guests were told, "Come eat at the funeral; the deceased left plenty."
Cheese was served at their own funeral.
In the formerly impoverished regions, "leaving enough" required careful planning. "We had 'dead cheese.' Everyone had a slice of cheese to serve at their funeral," Zufferey explained. The shriveled cheese would then be eaten with "vin des glaciers," a local wine.
As the Valais region of the Alps modernized in the 1900s, villages moved away from a subsistence-based economy, and the fear of not having cheese for funeral feasts gradually faded away.
Cemetery in the village of Grimetz
According to anthropologist Claude-Alexandre Fournier, families no longer hold funeral ceremonies at home, and the knowledge of previous generations is no longer passed down. However, in some basements in the valley, you can still find carefully preserved funeral cheeses.
In Grimenz, Zufferey, a tall, gentle man who worked at the local agricultural office, opened the cellar. His family had also forgotten about funeral cheese until his grandmother died in 1944. That's when Zufferey's father found two very old cheeses in her cellar.
The old wheels are stacked on top of each other. Because they are completely solid, they won't lose their shape.
Instead of eating the cheesecakes—which had been made in 1870 based on carvings—his father decided to preserve them. Since then, his family has added new cheesecakes, creating a collection. Not used for funeral preparations, they are kept as evidence of a fading tradition.
Zufferey took a 149-year-old cheesecake off the shelf. Hard as stone and tough as leather, with a glossy brown surface, the cheesecake still had a hint of oil, but no moisture. The microorganisms and mold on the cake had long since died. He took another cake, made in 1967, carved with an edelweiss flower. A third cake, from 1992, depicted a "cow queen".
He worried about what would happen to the collection in the long run. He wanted to donate them to a museum, but couldn't find a nearby place with a similar climate. He said, "There are no cheese museums in Valais. It's strange."
This cheese wheel could have been much larger 149 years ago, but it has shrunk due to loss of moisture.
However, there was no rush. The cool cave carved into the hillside beneath his family's log cabin seemed to preserve the cheeses well. Zufferey slowly placed them on the rack, emerged from the small cellar, and locked the door. He let the darkness envelop the uneaten dead cheeses, where they awaited their fate.
