Heidi is a book about the healing powers of cheese, and don’t let anyone tell you different. That plucky little girl from the Alps couldn’t have gone very far in saving Clara or her dear Grandpapa without the help of dairy. Raclette is essentially the book’s protagonist.
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Illustration Caption: She Handed Him Also the Whole Slice of Cheese
“On the top shelf Heidi could see a round loaf of bread, some bacon and cheese.”
“When the kettle was boiling, the old man put a large piece of cheese on a long iron fork, and held it over the fire, turning it to and fro, till it was golden-brown on all sides. Heidi had watched him eagerly. Suddenly she ran to the cupboard. When her grandfather brought a pot and the toasted cheese to the table, he found it already nicely set with two plates and two knives and the bread in the middle. Heidi had seen the things in the cupboard and knew that they would be needed for the meal.”
“What a wondrous place this is! I have never seen its like! But what do I see?” she continued. “I think you are actually eating your second piece of cheese, Clara?”
“Oh grandmama, it tastes better than all the things we get in Ragatz,” replied the child, eagerly eating the savory dish.”
“He commanded her to eat the large piece of bread and the slice of golden cheese. He sat down himself on a corner of the table and started his own dinner. Heidi drank without stopping, for she felt exceedingly thirsty after her long journey. Taking a long breath, she put down her little bowl.
“How do you like the milk?” the grandfather asked her.
“I never tasted better,” answered Heidi.
“Then you shall have more,” and with that the grandfather filled the little bowl again.”
“Heidi was running to and fro, for it gave her great joy to be able to wait on her kind protector. Soon the uncle appeared with the steaming milk, the toasted cheese, and the finely-sliced, rosy meat that had been dried in the pure air. The doctor enjoyed his dinner better than any he had ever tasted.”
“A cellar held no terrors for Heidi, for in her grandfather’s cellar fresh milk and the good cheese had been kept, and no rats had lodged there.”
“Sometimes the grandfather would make small round cheeses on those days, and there was no greater pleasure for Heidi than to see him stir the butter with his bare arms.”
“I’ll let him go, if you give me a piece of your cheese again to-morrow,” he said, for he wanted a compensation for his fright.
“You may have it all to-morrow and every day, because I don’t need it,” Heidi assured him. “I shall also give you a big piece of bread, if you promise never to beat any of the goats.”
“The grandfather put into the bag a piece of bread and a slice of cheese, that were easily twice as large as those the boy had in the bag himself.
“The little bowl goes in, too,” said the Uncle, “for the child does not know how to drink straight from the goat, the way you do. She is going to stay with you all day, therefore milk two bowls full for her dinner.”
“The grandfather milked a full bowl from the white goat, cut a piece of bread for the child, and told her to eat. “Afterwards you can go to bed. If you need some shirts and other linen, you will find them in the bottom of the cupboard. Aunt Deta has left a bundle for you. Now good-night, I have to look after the goats and lock them up for the night.”
Bonus Non-Cheese Dairy Product Appearances:
“Heidi, coming down, took her old seat. She seized her bowl and emptied it eagerly, as if it was the most wonderful thing she had ever tasted. “Grandfather, our milk is the best in all the world.”
“Then came a thick warm shawl and a large box with coffee-cake for the grandmother. An enormous sausage for Peter’s mother followed, and a little sack of tobacco for the grandfather. At last a lot of mysterious little parcels and boxes were packed, things that Clara had gathered together for Heidi. When the tidy pack lay ready on the ground, Clara’s heart filled with pleasure at the thought of her little friend’s delight.”
“Brigida had silently watched the proceedings, and could not open her eyes wide enough when she saw the enormous sausage. Never in her life had she seen the like, and now she really possessed it and could cut it herself.”
“Her appetite grew amazingly, and the grandfather had to make larger slices of the bread and butter that, to his delight, disappeared so rapidly. He had to fill bowl after bowl of the foaming milk for the hungry children. In that way they reached the end of the week that was to bring the grandmama.”
I have never read Heidi but it sounds like the dairy board is getting ready for a sponsorship opportunity. “Heidi: brought to you by the Power of Cheese.”
I remember reading Heidi as a child and wanting nothing more than a glass of milk and piece of toast with cheese on it and being severely disappointed (it was American cheese- which is delicious but not what I craved). Now I’d just go buy myself some brie and French Bread and fancy jam and eat like a queen.
It also made me want to sleep in a hayloft. In reality, I discovered, hay is scratchy and makes me sneeze my head off.
omg, yes! This book definitely makes a hayloft sound really dang comfy to an extent that has absolutely nothing to do with reality.
So many books lied to me about hay! Why? What did they have to gain?
The romance of a 500 year old farm is really diminished when the centuries of accumulated dust make your five year old son have the most terrifying asthma attack of his life….
I’m glad I’m not the only one who picked up on all the dairy-based subliminal messaging in this book. But then, I was the kid who was excited to eat the free samples of cheese at the grocery store deli.
Honestly, this is the best thing about being an adult: if I want to buy fancy cheese and eat it on toast for dinner, no one can stop me.
Ma’am, if you will, I would like to talk to you about the saving powers of fig jam.
Oh man, I just realized it’s Big Block of Cheese Day and none of us made that connection to this cheese post. Quick, someone find an appropriate West Wing gif!
So you’re my favorite. I’m not sure if you knew that.
Oh man, I just realized it’s Big Block of Cheese Day and none of us made that connection to this cheese post. Quick, someone find an appropriate West Wing gif!
I wanted ALL THINGS HEIDI. Goats, grandfather, goatherd friend, cheese, foamy milk, crusty bread, bed made of straw, fir trees, crippled cousin, mean Fraulein Rottenmeier that I could change into nice Fraulein Rottenmeier.
But now I am confused: is he “the gradfather” or is he “the uncle”? MAKE UP YOUR MIND, JOANNA
Dammit, now I have to acquire a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch.
I tried to read Heidi when I was a kid but when I was partway through a spider crawled onto the page I was reading and I closed the book to kill it. Naturally I could never open it again because there was a spider corpse inside of it, but I did put it back on the bookshelf where it sat untouched for years. Thinking about Heidi still gives me a vague sense of dread.
I cried so hard nearly every time we watched the 1937 movie that I too have a vague sense of dread when I think about Heidi.
Spending almost every summer of my childhood in the Alps, I have a vague sense of rage when thinking about Heidi, because goats are goddamn vicious smelly beasts. Nothing in this book ever appealed to me, it was just too unreal.
All fun and games until you get scurvy.
I have a dim memory of strawberries also featuring prominently. A balanced diet!
It’s time for someone to start a trend diet of strawberries, milk, bread, and cheese. I have been waiting for this my whole life.
There was actually a school holiday where my siblings and I were living off toasted cheese sandwiches and strawberry smoothies for a week because there was an overabundance of strawberries and cheese in the house.
Welp, looks like I’m reading Heidi for the first time tonight. #cheeselife
Brigida had silently watched the proceedings, and could not open her eyes wide enough when she saw the enormous sausage. Never in her life had she seen the like, and now she really possessed it and could cut it herself also works as a description of a misandrist wedding ritual
I giggled like a gd 12-year old at that first line
Thank you, my day was incomplete without a piece of cookie going through my nose.
Brigida/Brigitta for life!
Oh, man. I had an easy-reading picture book version of Heidi, and I made my parents read it to me so much that by age three, I was begging them for goat milk and goat milk cheeses. Their answer was “That’s expensive and you won’t eat anything but peanut butter sandwiches and Cheerios, so no.”
(I had my first taste of both in college, and loved them.)
I think you’ve just explained my enduring love of the Heidi books. Of course the answer is CHEESE. I never understood how you could toast cheese on a fork, because wouldn’t it just run all over the place? The world of multiple types of cheese was a mystery to me as a child.
As a child I became obsessed with toasted cheese. Never tried to make it or actually ask anyone about it, but spent considerable brainpower thinking about this magical cheese that would toast rather than melt.
(The picture above is from the same copy of Heidi I had. Some of the pictures were just printed in black and white, and I was allowed to very carefully color them in, using only colored pencils in the colors my mother deemed appropriate. Since they were almost invariably goats, those were brown, black and white.)
I am glad other people have also spent considerable time wondering how one toasted cheese!
Okay so here is my theory. It seems not unlikely that the cheese being toasted is homemade cheese, that they either made themselves or bought from their neighbors. So let’s go ahead and assume that Heidi is eating farmer cheese, because that seems a pretty likely candidate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer_cheese). Now Wikipedia says usually farmer cheese is soft and made with rennet, BUT, it’s also really easy to make a version with vinegar or a different acid instead that turns out firm, like Indian paneer (like stupid easy; I tried making paneer one weekend and felt like a self-sufficient goddess who created cheese on a whim). Most important? Firm paneer-like farmer cheese doesn’t melt the way most cheese does. It’s firm enough that you could, say, stick it on a fork and make it all nice and toasty over a fire, but still have it crumble into something you could put/spread onto bread afterwards without it melting into goo.
Yess toasted paneer is simultaneously delicious and a good explanation!
I would actually suspect it’s an aged goat cheese, similar to Manchego. I have tried it (though I don’t remember what cheese I tried it with) and with a firm enough cheese, you can toast the outside until bubbly without losing the cheese entirely.
The only time I made paneer, it smelled like puke.
The Swiss have a special toasted cheese dish called Raclette. You have to have a special iron thing to
cook the cheese on and then you scrape the melted goodness off and eat it. I loved Heidi, too.
Sent this article to my great friend and fellow toast reader Kate and she replied “is this the origin story for ‘betches love cheese’ ” which if you think about it is SPOT ON
Wait, the boy suckles goats directly? And the goats don’t mind?
I … think he milks them and squirts the milk into his mouth? Which is a small but crucial distinction.
You have no idea how hard the word crucial is making me laugh
I think he squeezes the teats and shoots the milk into his mouth from a respectful distance? Although Peter is kind of a weirdo so I wouldn’t put suckling a goat past him.
Peter is in fact kind of a weirdo. A somewhat charming weirdo. But a weirdo.
This was actually fairly standard practice in pre-pasteurization times, especially in orphanages – hence “nanny goats.” (thanks, QI)
You should read Terry Pratchett’s Nation. 21st century kids’ books are a lot more explicit about this sort of thing. (There’s no cheese. But there is beer. And stars. And Pratchett.)
I HAVE A VISION: The world needs a Heidi/Wallace & Gromit crossover. Anyone happen to have Nick Park on speed dial?
But they don’t have Wensleydale in the Swiss Alps!
That could be the plot! Wallace & Gromit must go on a great and important journey to bring Wensleydale to the Swiss Alps.
I distinctly remember the protagonist being FRESH AIR, isn’t memory a fickle thing.
I’m still sure I’m remembering the protagonist of The Secret Garden correctly, though. It was a jump rope, right?
FRESH AIR and ALL THE DAIRY YOU CAN EAT.
The protagonist of The Secret Garden is Knowing & Respecting One’s Place in Society, with a weird little dash of The Secret TM thrown in for the hell of it.
Also England. I’m pretty sure the protagonist of The Secret Garden is at least partly England.
Only Yorkshire. No other parts of England matter in The Secret Garden.
Right right, sorry. The MOOR is the protagonist.
The windswept moor is ALWAYS the protagonist in an English novel.
I thought eggs and potatoes?
Porridge. Lots of porridge.
There’s a sizable contingent of novels about The Terrible City.
And/or rolling chalk downs if one is in a Hardy novel
Although sometimes the moor is the villain, e.g., anything by Ruth Rendell, Wuthering Heights
This is accurate. If there is a Windswept Moor, it is absolutely the protagonist, and without it, the story wouldn’t exist. Nobody falls in love without a moor; the strength of a marriage is dependent entirely upon its proximity to the moor, and possibly also to the pirates roaming the Cornish coast.
“You got tigers an’ elephants in India, but ha’ you not got skippin’ ropes?”
Thank goodness for the Secret Garden movie because when I first read the book as a kid I had NO CLUE what the accents were supposed to sound like and Burnett writing them out just confused me.
Generally, the Victorian/Edwardian fashion for transcribing accents phonetically was needlessly confusing & not remotely enlightening. My first reading of Wuthering Heights was severely hampered by trying to parse Joe.
Don’t read the old “Bobbsey Twins” books where all the dialog of the black maid and her husband is “written out” the way “Negroes” allegedly spoke. As a young reader, I was annoyed by and couldn’t figure out the reason for all the instances of apoatrophes and uses of words like “chile” and “gwine.”
YES. We read both Heidi and the Secret Garden aloud to my daughter before bedtime last year and started to come up with a half-formed thesis about the power of FRESH AIR to cure “invalid” children in literature. I tell you what, Heidi always made me hungry!
Considering the amount of coal smoke in the air in urban areas in those days, they’re not wrong. As for Colin, even though he lived in the country, he literally never went outside. He must have had rickets, cured by sunshine.
My grandmother lives next to a MOOR and believes in the power of FRESH AIR and often sleeps with her window open (in winter???), and she’s 96, so either she is just a BAMF or there is something to this.
She has also told me that a “nice blow would do you good” which I think technically means “go out for a walk in the FRESH AIR”. However, I think the US meaning is also correct. 😛
(I cannot tell her WHY we laugh whenever she talks about a “good blow” because. My gran.)
FRESH AIR cures the trauma of child abuse too, see Goodnight, Mr Tom.
Fresh air but also love! (Tom is SUCH A GOOD DAD.)
I mean, I spent my semester in Yorkshire walking up and down hills, and also living a block from the sea, and I can report that my asthma was under better control that semester than it was after I got home.
In my memory the protagonist of The Secret Garden was baked potatoes with egg, which is a missed opportunity. I mean, Yorkshire cheeses are popular enough that there’s a cheesemonger in Harrogate that does wedding “cakes” made of wheels of cheese.
I am suddenly 5x more interested in marriage…
Great. Now I need/want more than I usually want cheese, which is a lot.
A Lot, You Guys.
I immediately went to rummage in the refrigerator upon reading this and found…
SMOKED. GOAT. CHEDDAR.
*can die happy*
I loved this book so much when I was little. i read it constantly. It was funny, because it’s basically a book about how Jesus saves all the nice mountain people from poverty somehow, which made me suuuper uncomfortable, but I just could not resist the goats and the cheese and the little bowls of milk. Less Jesus! More cheese! Is how I felt about Heidi.
Wait, jesus is in this book?
I read it SO many times and completely forgot about everything to do with religion. I thought it was about how decadent city life is, and how that is bad. (A bit like Alcott’s The Old-Fashioned Girl, I think?)
I could be wrong, but I remember when she goes to live in the city the lady gives her a book with lots of beautiful pictures of saints, and it’s all about mending her little heathen mountain ways and making her all prayerful and bringing a big Bible to Peter’s grandmother and bringing the grandfather back to God. I could be remembering wrong?
Ah! Now that you mention it, that does seem to be the overall movement of the plot. There’s a clear fetish for wholesome country living, but everyone in the book has to get christanified before they can have a happy ending.
Spoilers for a 135 year old book:
To some extent. There’s a lot of Providence and letting God do things in his own time in this book. Clara’s grandmother introduces Heidi to a fairly gentle (by nineteenth century standards), broad Christianity. Peter’s grandmother was always religious, and loved it when Heidi read the Bible to her after her return to the village. Heidi’s grandfather left the church in a major flounce after catastrophic events in his life and became an atheist hermit, but Heidi brings him back into the fold toward the end of the book.
I think the major points of the book are Fresh Air and Forgiveness but I haven’t read it in forever.
I am enjoying the picture of Heidi’s grandfather flouncing, thank you.
It must have been one hell of an epic flounce, because it was still hot gossip in the village thirty years later, or however long it was.
Holy shit, I COMPLETELY forgot those plot points!
I seem to have forgotten any Jesus in that book. (As I was a particularly religious child who would have found it delightful, that’s kind of odd of me).
I also forgot it and as a very not religious child that was very uncomfortable about Christianity and Jesus messages in my books that is odd of me as well.
I think that what happened there is that the mildness and general Golden Rule-ness of the Christianity in Heidi kept it from standing out as particularly religious. You were ready for meat, not milk. And Heidi gives you nothing but milk (in more than one way, it seems).
(I was also such a child.)
old literature has a way of making very simple food sound very appealing without even trying. I seem to recall this being the case with the Boxcar Children, too.
Blueberries and milk kept cold in a little waterfall!
And The Secret Garden. Potatoes! Eggs! Buns! All delicious-sounding.
And Dickon: “yeah, I normally have two slices of bread and that’s cool, but holy shit, today my bread sandwich has bacon in it!”
Anne of Green Gables and all of Madeleine L’Engle’s books do that for me; I hate tomatoes but every time I read about Charles Wallace making Meg a tomato sandwich or something it makes me question my own tastes (and just start craving sandwiches in general).
Also, Bread and Jam for Frances. Even when my tastes were about the same as Frances’, I still thought her family’s soft boiled eggs and her friend’s lunch sounded amazing and they still linger in my mind. I’ve also now reminded myself now that I’ve been meaning to get my own egg cups and have yet to do that.
oh my goodness yes. do you try to make everything come out even?
I was totally going to mention that one! And Elnora Comstock’s AMAZING lunchbox from Girl of the Limberlost.
“Might be a couple of books, or drawing tools or most anything that’s neat and genteel. You see, it opens this way.”
It did open, and inside was a space for sandwiches, a little porcelain box for cold meat or fried chicken, another for salad, a glass with a lid which screwed on, held by a ring in a corner, for custard or jelly, a flask for tea or milk, a beautiful little knife, fork, and spoon fastened in holders, and a place for a napkin.
She scarcely could believe her senses. Half the bread compartment was filled with dainty sandwiches of bread and butter sprinkled with the yolk of egg and the remainder with three large slices of the most fragrant spice cake imaginable. The meat dish contained shaved cold ham, of which she knew the quality, the salad was tomatoes and celery, and the cup held preserved pear, clear as amber. There was milk in the bottle, two tissue-wrapped cucumber pickles in the folding drinking-cup, and a fresh napkin in the ring. No lunch was ever daintier or more palatable; of that Elnora was perfectly sure. And her mother had prepared it for her!
And treating her rich city friends to “popcorn balls with maple sugar and beechnuts, a “basket of warm pumpkin pies,” sugar cakes and spiced pears, and countless little birchbark baskets lined with fall leaves and containing wild fruits and nuts.”
I don’t have words for how much this description is doing it for me right now, and I’m not even that keen on pickles or ham. Maybe it’s the vaguely upper-crusty fastidiousness of the prose — ham of which one knows the quality! — or maybe it’s because her mother preparing it for her is presented like the cherry on top.
Or maybe it’s because someone has recognized that three large slices of spice cake (or half an apparently large sandwich compartment) is the correct amount of spice cake.
Yes to all the amazing food in Girl of the Limberlost! And I have always coveted that lunchbox. That description of the first lunch her mother makes her for the lunchbox both makes your mouth water and brings a tear to the eye. Splendid plucky Elnora! We need a Toast article dedicated to her.
ebay and etsy. I own six FOR THE SAME REASONS.
I don’t really want any of the specific sandwiches they eat at the beginning of A Wrinkle In Time, but I want to make sandwiches with the same creativity and effortless midnight panache.
I was obsessed as a child (still am tbh) with the food that Enid Blyton’s Famous Five ate:
“A large ham sat on the table, and there were crusty loaves of new bread. Crisp lettuces, dewy and cool, and red radishes were side by side in a big glass dish, great slabs of butter and jugs of creamy milk”
And how she describes a salad!
“The high tea that awaited them was truly magnificent. A huge ham gleaming as pink as Timmy’s tongue; a salad fit for a king. In fact, as Dick said, fit for several kings, it was so enormous. It had in it everything that anyone could possibly want. “Lettuce, tomatoes, onions, radishes, mustard and cress, carrot grated up – that is carrot, isn’t it, Mrs. Penruthlan?” said Dick. “And lashings of hard-boiled eggs.” There was an enormous tureen of new potatoes, all gleaming with melted butter, scattered with parsley. There was a big bottle of home-made salad cream. “Look at that cream cheese, too,” marveled Dick, quite overcome. “And that fruit cake. And are those drop-scones, or what? Are we supposed to have something of everything, Mrs Penruthlan?”
Oh man, Enid Blyton. My mother went to a convent school in Singapore and handed down all her Enid Blyton books to me. As a result I desperately wanted to go to boarding school because the food at Malory Towers sounded so good.
All-of-a-Kind Family had great food descriptions too–the half-penny candy and the “sweet potato” man and the chick pea vendor. And Katie’s bread pudding topped with a penny apple and rock candy in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
The broken crackers … the chocolate babies … hamen taschen ..,
My grandmother actually grew up in a boxcar, and I can tell you from family stories that it’s really not what it’s cracked up to be.
Laura Ingalls Wilder also had the remarkable ability of making incredibly simple food sound DIVINE. When she talks about making maple syrup candy…ohmigod. Or her mother making butter! Or cheese! Or BACON. Sweet Jesus.
Breadfruit!
replying half a year later because I managed to stumble across this site on the exact day it closed down, so now I get to experience it all at once! The Boxcar Children had a club you could join, and I was maybe six or seven so I don’t recall how often the deliveries occurred, but they each came with a couple of books from the series and a recipe for one of the dishes or foods described in them. Books + Food Forever!
I acquired one of these mini tea light raclettes in a Swiss airport for my little sister:
And let me tell you . . . having your own personal melted tray of cheese is the way to live your best life.
You love you sister more than anything in this life.
Truly, there is no better way to show one’s love than to give the means to melting one’s own cheese.
Oooh, this IS a way to live your best life! What a neat wee kitchen contraption! OH, just figured out the Swiss cross cut outs! I’m using way too many exclamation marks BUT I CAN’T HELP IT, this mini rac is the bomb.
So Beautiful!
Does it work??? Looks like it has the potential to provide Easy-Bake Oven levels of disappointment.
Amazingly, IT DOES. I have seen it with mine own eyes, and more importantly, have eaten it with mine own mouth.
That’s the best confirmation I could hope for!!
This was my grandmother’s favorite book. Once when playing Heidi, she tried to melt cheese in the oven like grandfather, and it melted all. over. creation. Her mother was NOT pleased (a 1920s stove….6 kids…no, she would not be). The power of Heidi Cheese has long been recognized!
One of my favourite parts of Heidi is the Dread Alphabet of Vague Threats (interspersed with inane comments from Peter, who’s only in it for the cheese). I present it to you here condensed from this version of the book.
A B C must be learnt to-day
Or the judge will call you up to pay.
D E F G must run with ease
Or something will follow that does not please.
Should H I J K be now forgot
Disgrace is yours upon the spot.
And then L M must follow at once
Or punished you’ll be for a sorry dunce.
If you knew what next awaited you
You’d haste to learn N O P Q.
Now R S T be quick about
Or worse will follow there’s little doubt.
And if you put the U for V,
You’ll go where you would not like to be.
If you falter at W, worst of all,
Look at the stick against the wall.
Then comes the X for you to say
Or be sure you’ll get no food to-day.
And should you make a stop at Y,
They’ll point at you and cry, Fie, fie.
Make haste with Z, if you’re too slow
Off to the Hottentots you’ll go.
Always loved that part. Peter is such a whiny little git and takes it all so literally. “But I won’t paaaaaay!”
I like when he gets to W and goes “Well there IS no stick on the wall so fuck your fancy book-learning” and Heidi’s all “You think Grandfather doesn’t have plenty of sticks around to beat your wheelchair-destroying ass with?”
Heidi has the weirdest idea of what “learning” the alphabet means. I got the impression that Peter just stared at the letters until he was deemed to have “learned” them, without any reference in the text to concepts like “this is the sound this letter makes.”
I hated that alphabet and was team Peter on that and basically nothing else.
I’m Team Heidi. The only way to get Peter to do anything was to either threaten him or bribe him with cheese, and the Grandfather’s cheese was too good for the likes of him. Speaking of that scene I have always longed for that stove with the painted tiles, it’s my favorite piece of furniture in fiction.
I was scared to death of whatever Horrentots were, especially after they made a guest appearance in The Wizard of Oz movie.
I grew up in Hottentot country, so was very excited to get a local reference. However, as a threat, ‘to the wine lands of South Africa you shall go’ is pretty ropey.
In the translation I had, the final couplet was something like “If you are slow in learning Z, then to the Hottentots you’ll be led!”
As an American child who’d only ever heard of “zee,” I was always terribly confused about why this one didn’t rhyme.
I read this book like 10 times when I was a kid, because my mom had an awesome old cloth-bound copy from the turn of the century and I loved how it smelled and the old fashioned language; it made me feel like I was living in Little Women. As soon as I saw the title of this article I instantly remembered the part about toasting the cheese over the fire and my own failed attempt to toast cheddar in our toaster oven which, as you can probably imagine, did not end well for me. Ah memories.
True story: I once forgot about a cheese sandwich in the toaster oven (not my usual method) and, when I went to check on it, the sandwich had erupted in flame.
THIS IS HEARTBREAKING.
And hilarious.
I just spat crumbs all over my desk when I burst into laughter at this post A+ would read again
Heidi is such a weird book in my memory because when I think back on it I remember it almost entirely being about a girl, her grandfather, and their dairy products and I usually forget the whole part with Clara until my brain goes “didn’t they push a wheelchair off a cliff?” and I have to go turn to the internet to remember why there was a wheelchair in the story at all.
I remember the part with Clara only because I was so disturbed by all the bread going stale when Heidi tried to hoard it in her closet. A book can’t get small children that emotionally invested in food and then just ruin a whole bread hoard like that.
One of the great tragedies of my life is that I loved heidi and reread it so many times, but am lactose intolerant, so I could never experience anything like the heaven that is cheese in this book. (Trust me, I tried, and I hadn’t grown up eating cheese, so it was super disgusting when I did get a piece of fancy cheese. I think it was brie or goat cheese or something. The texture was one of the worst things ever.)
Yes. Cheese is like the better organ meats- if you don’t grow up with it chances are it’s just not going to work for you. If I have children I want to do my best to make them love liver and tripe the way my dad does because they’re so healthy. But I personally can’t stand them. (well, I can do menudo, but c’mon, menudo is like mostly not-tripe.)
I have never eaten tripe because I cant get over the fact that it’s stomach lining and therefore not food (my mum loves it however), but liver sauteed in cream and onions is fantastic and you should feed it to your children all the time.
My mother (and sister and I) makes a velvety liver pate that is pretty much that all prettied up. That’s what I’d use if I got the chance.
But… Mallory, that last cheese meal doesn’t contain cheese at all, just milk and bread.
Also I’m gluten and lactose intolerant and I’d basically starve there. If I didn’t die of cold first I guess.
Though I LOVED the book as a kid and recently made my husband read it for the first time.
ok
But goat cheese is much, much lower in lactose…
Oh wait, this reminds me I was reading a rant about processed foods once and at one point it was like “You can tell the shredded cheese in grocery stores is FAKE because it BURNS and real cheese doesn’t EVER burn it always MELTS” with, like, conspiracy theorist levels of enthusiasm, and it confused me because I’d read at least a half dozen books featuring toasting a lump of cheese over a fire, but I never looked into it. Does anybody know what the real story is?
There are quite a few cheeses, like halloumi, which go brown rather than melting!
I read something a little bit ago about that bagged shredded cheese being held together with stabilizers so it won’t get all clumpy, and that the stabilizers keep it from melting in a fully cheesy satisfying way.
That’s unrelated to the question of toasting vs melting, but it seems they could also play a part in burning? Maybe.
Also “queso blanco,” in the Latin section of your local mart.
I had most of the Heidi books, as well as The Bobbsey Twins, and a large-ish Noddy collection. I loved Heidi the best because she got to live on a goat farm in the mountains and which, 42 years later, I still want to do. But adult Heidi is probably making millions with her organic line of goat products, lifestyle blog/Instagram/social media whatever, and twee watercolour goat portraits that she churns out on the reg. F***, now I’m jealous of fictional adult Heidi.
Heidi: Lifestyle Guru should totally be a thing.
The first time I ever encountered toasted halloumi, my first thought was of Heidi. Also, when I bought my cow-dairy-sensitive self powdered goat’s milk and made hot chocolate out of it on the stovetop.
Pretty sure I’d forgotten the entire existence of anything in the story except Heidi, the grandfather, goats, and goat dairy until just now.
The cheese on a fork is what stuck with me out of Heidi–that and the ‘piece of stuff’ that the grandfather used to make a mattress for her.
Does anyone else remember that? Does anyone know what the heck that IS?
Just stuff, you know.
It’s any fabric not made out of silk, according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuff_(cloth)
The term “stuff and nonsense” makes so much more sense to me now!
Did anyone else just obsessively watch the Shirley Temple version instead? Just me?
Yes, that version will always be THE Heidi to me, more so than other adaptations or even the book.
Wikipedia says “stuff” was a non-silk woven fabric:
“One type of stuff was a type of coarse thickly woven cloth manufactured in various places, formerly including Kidderminster. Originally it was probably entirely of wool, but later a ‘woolsey-linsey’ cloth, made with a warp of linen, yarn and a worsted weft.
The gowns of most English lawyers are still described as ‘stuff gowns’ (though probably now made of other fibres). This is in contrast with those of Queen’s Counsel, which are made of silk, whence they are termed ‘silks’. Thus, ‘stuff’ in this context refers to fabric not made of silk or silk substitutes. The word was still in English upper-class usage in this sense in the 1960s.
In Victorian dressmaking terminology, stuff was used as a generic term for woven fabrics, with cloth generally reserved for woollens (as opposed to worsteds)”
Honestly, this post is EXACTLY the plot as I remember _Heidi_. Heidi is sick, she goes to live with her grandfather, and she eats cheese and gets better. The moment when she takes her first steps is vivid in my mind. I wish I knew how to embed photos–I would show you all every single gift I purchased for my family for Christmas–17 different blocks of cheese. They were happy.
Haha, but it wasn’t even Heidi who was sick, it was Clara. Heidi gets dropped on her unwilling grandfather when her mother dies, eats cheese, then her aunt comes back and says “wait no I found a better place for her” and snaffles her off to live in the city with Clara, who is Sickly. This makes Heidi very sad and she sleepwalks and hordes bread until they take her back. Then Clara comes to visit them, wheelchair over the cliff, eat cheese, Clara starts walking again, everyone is happy. I think.
A++ summary.
Oh good!
Did you know you can recreate Swiss hermit grandfather cuisine at many public events through the strategic employment of catered cheese plates and decorative tea lights?
Now you know.
I have strong memories of all the bread plot lines like the bringing the Grandmother soft white bread instead of the coarse black bread she usually ate which always confused me as a child since white wonderbread was our normal bread and pumpernickel was the special bread.
Yes. Saving all of her soft white rolls in the closet!
I loved how Georgia Nicholson in the eponymous series was always ragging on Heidi for her cheese obsession when her little sister would make her read the book to her.
There’s a great essay in Anne Fadiman’s “Ex Libris” where she talks about being pregnant and getting a line from Treasure Island stuck in her head–“Many’s the night I’ve dreamed of cheese. Toasted, mostly.”–until she got up in the middle of the night and artlessly mashed a block of cheese around in a skillet and ate it all. Later she gave birth to a son; he loves books but hates cheese.
Yes, I love that essay! (I love most of the essays in that book.)
It’s all true. I’m only *half* Swiss and own a raclette grill and real Swiss fondue plates with pictures of cows on them. All see regular use.
Quite fittingly I am eating cheese as I read this (though not toasted, alas)
mmmm cheese…I love cheese.
This Julia Wertz cheese comic seems most fitting: http://www.juliawertz.com/2011/03/24/i-heart-chee…
I just realized that I’m not sure I’ve ever read Heidi. I’m confusing it with another book that I read as a kid that also featured a young girl and goats, but she somehow gets trapped in a cave with one of the goats and survives for a long time by drinking goat milk and then I think makes a bow and arrow out of the one tree in the cave and shoots the arrow with a message through a tiny hole at the top of the cave and gets rescued?
I might need to track down this book, it doesn’t seem real somehow.
That cheese-toasting scene was formative for me as a child.
I don’t actively remember reading or watching Heidi as a child, but I do remember taking boxes of milk and string cheese and vegetarian sausage to empty rooms in my house and pretending to BE Heidi out cavorting in a goat field, so I must have encountered the story somehow.
There is something about reading about food that makes me want to live in that book—the coziness of it all. Please tell me all about the warm, crusty loaf of bread and the cheese with the rind and the ripe fruit … Yes!
The descriptions of food in Heidi are great, but nothing beats Wilder’s Farmer Boy for loving detail:
‘There was oatmeal with plenty of thick cream and maple sugar. There were fried potatoes, and the golden buckwheat cakes, as many as Almanzo wanted to eat, with sausages and gravy or with butter and maple syrup. There were preserves and jams and jellies and doughnuts. But best of all Almanzo liked the spicy apple pie, with its thick, rich juice and its crumbly crust. He ate two big wedges of the pie.’
Oh man, I was JUST bubbling about Wilder’s food descriptions. You’re absolutely right, Farmer Boy is basically pioneer food porn.
I always remember the part where they dip fresh popcorn in milk. It sounds weird, but if you do it just a smidgen, it’s REALLY good.
The whole series is food porn, but Wilder has so much more to work with in Farmer Boy. Almanzo grew up on a prosperous farm, and he was really hungry at dinner because he was a growing boy and lunch was 6 hours ago. But lunch and dinner were both big meals. Laura’s family was *poor*. She was hungry because there just plain wasn’t enough to eat.
Damn it, now I want a night cheese and I’ve already brushed my teeth.
…we might have some goat cheese though and that is worth investigating, no?
Yes! And also wild strawberries. Remember the strawberry picking? Cheese, bread, milk, and wild strawberries (covered with a strawberry leaf – I personally tried this and wasn’t able to make it work)…
I ate slabs of Velveeta on Wonder Bread while reading Heidi. Because it’s impossible NOT to crave cheese while reading it, and I thought at the time that Velveeta was cheese.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten hungry af reading Heidi.
I remember being given this book as a child and my grandmother (born in 1897) stating how her favorite part of the book was the part about the cheese. Heidi and cheese always go together for me.