Swiss Snake
The Swiss, pioneers of expensive chocolate, numbered bank accounts and yodeling are also famed (or defamed, depending on your point of view) for the invention of "Swiss Steak". This is a way to prepare a slab of meat off a cow's rear end, normally tough as leather. The chef (one need not actually be Swiss to do this, incidentally), takes a large heavy mallet and beats the living heck out of the innocent slab of beef. This is also known as "cubing", though nobody actually understands why. Then the pulverized meat is tossed into a skillet with chunks of tomato and sliced bell peppers and whatever else is handy. The usually inedible result is Swiss Steak. But there is apparently a campaign to replace the pounded slab-o-cow with something more tender.
GENEVA (AFP) - Swiss zoologists have more than a few hungry mouths to feed this Christmas after a female giant anaconda gave birth to 40 babies, a tropical gardens institution said.
The snakes were born on December 2 at the Papiliorama tropical gardens in the small town of Kerzers in western Switzerland…..
….The mother weighs around 80 kilograms (176 pounds) and is more than six metres (20 feet) long, while the new arrivals are already 70 centimetres (28 inches) long and "a lot sturdier than the previous ones," Papiliorama said.
Sturdier snakes will take the beating better.
