Treason on 1st of August

Today, Switzerland is celebrating the 1^st of August, i.e. our National Holiday. We are commemorating the signing of a treaty on this date in 1291 on a meadow at the banks of the scenic Lake Lucerne, as the legend says. Nowadays, we call this treaty the Federal Charter. It was signed by the representatives of the three forest cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden after the death of King Rudolph I. He was also well known as Rudolph of Habsburg. The ancestral castle of the Habsburg is on Swiss soil, but they are better known as the rulers of Austria. It was then six years later that the members of the treaty had to defend their pact for the first time against Habsburg's army. The fight was fierce. The Swiss applied various techniques of asymmetrical warfare and did not care to obey any rule of knightly fight. Of course, they won as they almost every time did, when someone tried it again. The rest is history.

But how dit it come to today's treason? First, we have to say that we made some patriotic bread rolls for today's celebration:



We also prepared a cold soup in the colours of our flag (capsicum pepper and cucumber with yogurt). It's the main course, which is the corpus delicti, i.e. our (unintentional) act of treason.

We have been asked by the editor of Marmite, the posh magazine for the culture of wine and dine, to test a recipe for the next edition. It was only today, when we discovered that it's an Austrian recipe. We've already bought a kilogram of the finest and most tender entrecôte from nicely treated Swiss cattle. By all odds, we have to eat it, despite the origin of the recipe. Bloody Austrians, they always have to spoil the party. They can't give it a rest, even after 715 years.