Experiences – Life – Inspiration 🇨🇭🇯🇵

Just yesterday my mother cooked us dinner and chose to make something I hadn’t eaten in a very long time. Sauerkraut with Speck, sausage, and potatoes. In Basel we simply called it Suurkrut und Späck, a name that already carries the feeling of cold evenings and warm kitchens. It was the kind of winter meal I grew up with in Switzerland, the kind of thing that appears on many tables when the cold settles in.

Swiss Sauerkraut dishes usually come with local sausages like Bratwurst or Schüblig and sometimes Saucisson Vaudois in the French-speaking parts. In Alsace in eastern France, Sauerkraut has its own long tradition as well. For me it was simply a normal winter meal throughout childhood, something that never needed explanation.

While we were eating I mentioned to my mother how Sauerkraut isn’t something you easily find in a regular Japanese supermarket. You can sometimes track it down in specialty stores, but not in the everyday shops. Sausages are always available in Japan, though they are usually a different style from the Swiss ones I grew up with. And the Dutch smoked sausage that I later came to love, the rookworst, isn’t something you come across in Japan either. I only discovered rookworst when I moved to the Netherlands at sixteen. It became a familiar part of Dutch winter meals, but it was never part of the Sauerkraut plates of my childhood in Switzerland. In a way there are two separate memories in my mind now: the Swiss winter dish from home and the Dutch comfort food I learned to appreciate later.

One detail that always makes me smile in Japan is how German-style sausages are often labeled as Frankfurt. In Japan these thicker Western-style sausages are commonly called Furankufuruto, which is simply the Japanese phonetic version of Frankfurt. The name originally comes from the German city, in the same way Wiener sausages are linked to Vienna. When this style of sausage arrived in Japan it made sense to name it after its place of origin, and over time the word became a general label for a certain kind of sausage you now see everywhere in supermarkets and convenience stores.

What struck me most about this meal was how different it felt after more than two years of living in Japan. Something so familiar from my Swiss winters suddenly felt exciting again. When I lived in Switzerland I never thought about it. It was always there. It was part of the rhythm of winter. Now, with distance, the smell and taste brought back a part of home I didn’t realize I had missed. And at the same time it made me think of how my life spread across countries through something as simple as a sausage: starting with the Swiss ones from childhood, later discovering rookworst in the Netherlands, and now living in Japan where each of these foods feels like a small reminder of where I have been.

Living abroad reshapes your relationship with the simplest things. You settle into a new life, adapt to another culture, and then one day a dish from your past reconnects you with memories you haven’t touched in a long time. A familiar texture, a certain warmth, the comfort of a winter plate. These small things come back with surprising force.