Who invented it is absolutely indisputable: Herbal candy, sugar cubes, milk chocolate, vegetable bouillon, Bircher muesli, tube mustard, powder coffee, garlic press, peeler, hand blender, cellophane film, pocket knife, Velcro - these are all Swiss innovations.
But of all things, with their national dish, the cheese fondue, doubts about the authorship are justified.
Was it really the stroke of genius of clever mountain farmers who melted old hard cheese on their lonely alpine pastures in order to dunk old hard bread in it and use it to prepare a tasty meal out of necessity and practically nothing?
Jakob Strobel y Serra
Deputy head of the features section.
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Or is this other Swiss legend true, according to which the fondue has its actual origin in the Kappel milk soup and was born on that historical day in 1529 when Catholics and Protestants stood around a large pot of milk soup at the peace treaty after the First Kappel War and the Scoop out Catholic soup with pieces of Protestant bread?
Most people in Germany, who will be sitting around their fondue pot on this Friday evening a million times as harmoniously as the first warring and then reconciled religious parties of the Kappel War, will be firmly convinced that they will dive their fork into the deepest interior of the Swiss soul.
But the matter is not that clear, because in Savoy, in Piedmont and in the Aosta Valley, the custom of melting cheese and putting bread or potatoes in it together has been around for centuries.
"The fondue comes from Switzerland"
The tradition of cooking food in a pot with hot liquid at the table is much older and more global anyway and extends far beyond the western Alpine region. Since the time of Confucius, the Chinese have been throwing everything edible into their hot pot, the Koreans huddled around their Sinseollo, the Japanese like to cook finely chopped beef in a spicy broth over a Shabu-Shabu on festive occasions, and nothing goes over for a French a fondue bourguignonne with hot vegetable oil.
Even the forefather of European poetry competes with the brave Swiss. In the eleventh cant of his "Iliad", Homer writes: "Here the woman mixed, similar in shape to the goddesses / them of Pramnian wine, and rubbed it with brazen grated / goat cheese, sprinkled it with white flour / then needed to drink the well-prepared wine pulp" - if that is not an archetype of the cheese fondue, Achilles has never been to Troy.
But the Swiss are not so easily defeated and open up heavy artillery: They bring up the oldest fondue recipe, which comes from the cookbook by Zurich-based Anna Maria Gessner-Kitt from 1699 and explains how to grind or scrape old cheese with white wine boiled over, allowed to melt and then dipped with pieces of bread.
They call Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the stand, who in 1768 wrote a letter to a friend who exuberantly praised the fondue with Gruyère cheese from Mont Salève, Geneva's local mountain.
And they quote the great restaurateur Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who apodictically defined himself in his "Physiology of Taste" in 1826: "The fondue comes from Switzerland."